[Images: Tower detail, 1906, The Montgomery Ward & Company Tower Building, 6 N. Michigan Avenue, 1903, 1928, 
Chicago Daily News, memory.loc.gov; 6 N. Michigan, 2009, yochicago.com /Artwork: designslinger]

Today's post actually started out as a comment to Chicago Architecture Info's blog, but
for some reason, I couldn't get my comment to publish. I don't know why exactly, I've commented before, but for some reason I couldn't get the stupid thing to work.

CAI posted on Friday about the top of the rehabbed 6 N. Michigan Avenue Building
finally reaching completion. I was trying to comment on the following statement:

     ...it would have been fantastic if the building could have been restored to its pre-1947 condition. 
        In that year the ten-story tower was taken off the top of the building along with a three-story pyramid
        roof, similar to the one that used to cap the tower at the Dearborn Street Station.

I just wanted to let the editor know that the tower wasn't exactly "taken off the top,"
but was simply swallowed up when the Ward Company decided to add 4 additional floors to the building. I included links to the old photos above, but I couldn't get the pesky comment to publish.

So, if you look at the 10-story tower at the far left from 1903, and compare it to the next
image from 1928, you can see that the old tower merged into the extra floors which were built on top of the original main building. When you look at the image of the building today, you can still make out the original line of the old cornice line, and notice the change in the color of the brick of the added floors.

Unfortunately, the developer who turned the former commercial building into residential,
didn't rebuild the magnificent pyramid cap to top it off. I'm sure it was prohibitively expensive, but as they say in the CAI blog post, it would have been "fantastic" if the developer had the wherewithal to replicate the original cupola.

Here's a little tid bit of trivia. The statue at the very tippy-top, actually made its way to
the Montgomery Ward warehouse building on Chicago Avenue. Since I no longer live in Chicago, I'm not sure that the statue is still there because I read that the warehouse has become residential condos. If anyone knows, send a comment. Hopefully, you will have better luck than I did!