Marina City

Marina City was financed in 1959 by the Building Service Employees'' union, whose leader William McFetridge wanted to prove that middle-class workers would live downtown at a time when Chicago''s Loop emptied after dark. Bertrand Goldberg designed two 65-story concrete cylinders with no interior right angles: parking spirals up the first nineteen floors, wedge-shaped apartments above, a marina below. When finished in 1964 they were the tallest concrete structures in the world. Steve McQueen drove a car off the parking ramp in a 1980 film, and the towers have been the face of Chicago on album covers ever since.