Is Tribune Towers sale America's farewell to Fleet Street?

Sam Zell has put The Chicago Tribune's building on Michigan Ave on the auction block.

I visited the Windy City about five years ago and was blown away by what struck me as a real American city. Deep-pan pizza, buffalo burgers, hot wings like nothing I've tasted since. Blues and the el-train. The Hancock building, the lake. And right on one end of the wonderful Michigan Ave, Tribune Tower overlooks the Chicago river. A great site. A city site. It's part of its surroundings -- it says Chicago, much like the paper does.

While I agree with Sam Zell on a lot (I'm sure that is great comfort to him) is it possible that he has got his property developer's hat on a bit tight here?

If Zell owned the Chicago Cubs would he remove them from Wrigley Field and hawk the land for another boring Trump tower? Even if it made the best business sense, something almost indefinably valuable would be lost, and so it is with Tribune Tower. Ask a London hack of a certain age to walk you down the old Fleet Street and you will see the interesting times you have missed out on. Not necessarily better journalism, but more interesting times and definitely better pubs.

Why is it that businessmen can understand and financially account for non-physical assets such as brand, identity and goodwill but miss the financial worth embedded in shared values, the voice of a paper, even the nostalgia of a street associated with a paper (Most English papers on Fleet St, the Irish Times on Dublin's D'Olier St, the Tribune on Michigan Ave) and what it means to a city and its newspaper readership. These buildings become landmarks for a reason -- they signify the link between paper and populace.

Have we finally entered the phase where a reporter's interaction with the world he or she reports on is experienced only through a computer screen? If so we have lost something valuable.

Around the base of the Tribune Tower there are pieces of rock embedded in the walls -- all of them stolen from world famous landmarks including St Peter's in Rome, Cologne Cathedral and the Pyramids at Giza -- all brought back by the paper's foreign correspondents, so the story goes, to adorn the winning design in an architecture competition to house a modern newspaper.
(There is a fantastic flickr set here).

During my visit to the Chicago Tribune tower, they even had a window display showing a piece of moon rock. Think about that -- rock brought back by Apollo astronauts and displayed in a newspaper office window -- truly time when newspapers literally (if wrongly) brought a piece of the world to their hometown audience.

Maybe if we recapture that spirit, that imagination, that willingness to give readers a window on the world, people will start buying papers again.

Don't sell, Zell.