EDIFICE COMPLEX

By CALVIN TRILLIN

I read in the business section of the Washington Post that Chicago, despite its best efforts, no longer has the tallest building in the world. I don't mean that the building in question, the Sears Tower, upped and moved to the suburbs while desperate city officials trotted alongside it, waving their final tax-abatement offers in a last-ditch effort to keep it where it was. That would have been on the front page of the Washington Post.

What I mean is that a taller building was built in another city. That city is Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, not the first place that comes to mind when the conversation turns to the subject of imposing skylines. Chicago fought tooth and nail to avoid being dropped to the second slot. Apparently, its boosters do not look forward to driving an out-of-town visitor past the Sears Tower and saying, "To find a building taller than that, my friend, you'd have to go to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia."

Chicago's case was heard by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, which really does exist and is considered the final arbiter on the subject of which building is the tallest. Chicago argued that a tall building ought to be measured to its highest occupied floor rather than to its structural top. That would make the Sears Towers taller than the Kuala Lumpur building, which gets its final 242 ft. of height from some decorative spires that I believe are referred to in the local dialect as tchotchkes.

The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat rejected this argument. Since Chicago is one of my favorite cities, I'm pleased to be able to reassure its residents that the rejection will have little impact on their lives. After all, the Sears Tower has been the tallest building in the world for the past 25 years, and practically nobody outside Chicago was aware of that.

As it turns out, public impressions of what is the tallest or the largest or the oldest are not decided by precise measurements. Once the twin towers of the World Trade Center and the Sears Tower were built, for instance, I thought that those of us who pride ourselves on our accuracy should begin referring to the Empire State Building as "the third tallest building in the Greater New York area." Nobody else seemed to think that.

In fact, I suspect that most Americans still think that the tallest building in the world is the Empire State Building. That's partly because of its name. It sounds like the tallest building in the world. On the other hand, as Sears must have discovered, a reputation for bringing affordable work pants to a broad customer base, however worthy that may be in other respects, does not conjure up a tower that dominates the skyline.

Also, civic reputations have a long half-life. Chicago has had wondrous architecture for years, but it is still identified with Mob wars and the sort of political machine that urges its followers to vote early and often. If Dan Rostenkowski happened to be from Cleveland, would commentators on his fall have said that he couldn't shake the Cleveland way of doing things?

If a visiting American mentions to a shopkeeper in France or Italy that he is from Chicago, the shopkeeper is likely to approximate a pistol with an extended index finger and say, "Bang, bang."

"Well, at the present time our murder rate is not high compared with some American cities," the Chicagoan may say. "Also, we happen to have the tallest building in the world, or did until recently."