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One World Trade Center and the four other tallest buildings in America

The new One World Trade Center tower is taking over as New York City’s tallest from the Empire State Building. But it’s not the country’s tallest. Here are the five tallest buildings in the country.

2. Trump International Hotel & Tower, Chicago

M. Spencer Green/AP/File
Prior to the construction of Chicago's Trump International Hotel & Tower, construction crews remove debris from the site of the former Chicago Sun Times building site in this March 2005 file photo. The building is the second tallest structure in North America.

As the second tallest building in North America, the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Chicago stands at 1,389 feet.

Named after real estate mogul Donald Trump, construction of the concrete hotel was completed in 2009. When designs for the building were initially proposed in 2001, Trump announced that the skyscraper would become the tallest building in the world, but after the Sept. 11 attacks, plans for the building were scaled back, and the design underwent several revisions.

The 92-story building has 2,600,000 square feet and houses 486 luxury residential condominiums, which include studio apartments and a mixture of suites with one to four bedrooms and five-bedroom penthouses. By the time of its completion, the building surpassed the record for containing the world’s highest residence above ground-level, which had since 1969 been held by the nearby John Hancock Center. 

Before it’s completion, the construction site for the tower served as the locale for the final confrontation scene between Batman and The Joker in the 2008 film, "The Dark Knight."

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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