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In early 1962, the world was eagerly watching Marina City take shape – and speculating on what it would look like and who would live there.
On July 13, Marina City makes the society page of the Chicago Daily Tribune when Eleanor Page Voysey (1914-2002) writes about John T. Beatty and his wife, Mrs. John T. Beatty. A bridal dinner on September 7 would be the last big party at their spacious home in Winnetka because they would soon move to an apartment at Marina City with “a southeast view from one of the top floors.”
Life magazine features a pictorial in its February 23, 1962 issue on nine new skyscrapers in Chicago, including a young Marina City.
“Soaring up like giant beanstalks only two blocks from the Loop, the twin 60-story towers of Marina City apartments are the most daring of all the additions to Chicago’s skyline,” begins Chicago: City of Exciting New Skyscrapers.
Photographers Andreas Feininger (1906-1999) and Robert Kelley (1920-1991) captured daytime and nighttime images of Marina City under construction, then consisting mostly of just two concrete cores.
Bertrand Goldberg is mentioned, with the article noting the Marina City architect “has broken with the stark simplicity of Mies [Van Der Rohe] to lead what one observer calls a ‘movement against right-angle thinking.’”
(Left) Life’s caption: “High Flying Crane. Far above Sheraton Chicago Hotel, Tribune Tower and Wrigley Building, crane hoists materials to workmen who are adding circular floors to Marina City’s cores.”
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A 27-year-old actress, Shirley MacLaine, nudges Marina City off the cover of the issue but Marina City does make the cover of Weekly Reader. Then called My Weekly Reader, the weekly educational magazine designed for pre-Kindergarten children reports on the construction of Marina City in its 19th issue.
“The world’s tallest apartment house is being built in Chicago,” read the cover story in February 1962. “It will be called Marina City. About 900 families will live there.”
(Click on images to view larger versions.)
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This image appeared in Time magazine in 1962 in a pictorial photographed in part by Time’s Chicago-based photographer, Art Shay.
Seen from south on Dearborn Street in the fall of 1962, it shows the west tower almost completed. Dearborn is closed because the bridge is being rebuilt. On the corner of Dearborn & Wacker is E. G. Men’s Shop. To the right is an entrance to a parking ramp and car rental business.
The caption reads: “Chicago’s newest apartment house is Bertrand Goldberg’s Marina City, 65-story cylinders scalloped round with balconies. Lower floors serve as ramp garage. Structure has been called Chicago’s most amazing since the 1893 Ferris wheel.”
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However, no news outlet captured Marina City’s fantastic whimsy more than every newspaper in the country that published this illustration by George Charney, a Chicago artist and architect.
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The story behind the sketch may have died with Charney in 1997. In July 1962, when he was art director of Chicago Daily News, an afternoon newspaper published from 1876 to 1978, the Associated Press as a wire photo distributed the sketch to newspapers across the country.
Most likely, the sketch is a fantastical interpretation of Marina City but unfortunately it was presented as fact to newspapers, many of which reprinted the AP caption...
“Sketch by Chicago Daily News art director George Charney shows three circular 60-story towers planned to be erected by the developers of the now-building twin-towered Marina City. Site is on a 16-acre tract just north of Chicago’s downtown area and close to the present Marina towers. One of the striking features of the development is a great elevated roadway, winding around the towers in a gradually ascending spiral. Parking garages will be incorporated within the towers.”
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Editors from Spokane to Daytona Beach apparently did not question a 16-acre Marina City being built before the three-acre version was completed.
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