Schaumburg Space Needle?
The famed Seattle Space Needle was built for the 1962 World's Fair, everyone knows. But what is lesser-known: a similar building was planned for suburban Chicago a decade later.
The Schaumburg Space Needle would have been three times the height of the original and, at 2,000 ft, the world's tallest building--nearly 60 stories taller than the Sears Tower and 300 feet taller than the current giant, Taiwan's Taipei 101 Tower.
A hotel, restaurant, residential units and observation decks were planned for the Schaumburg Space Needle. The tower would have been the anchor of a planned mini-city of residential towers, office buildings, plazas and
that staple of all visionary urban plans: a monorail, which can be seen streaking into the illustration from the left. The Arlington Heights, IL developer who proposed this mega-project in 1973 never got beyond the drawing board. But give him props for seeing American suburbia as something more significant than office parks and culs de sac.
