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By Root 845 0

the city centre after the devastating fire, they had the opportunity to build bigger, better and especially higher. Land was expensive and scarce, so developers went upwards not outwards. The Home Insurance Company Building, a ten-storey office block completed in Chicago in 1885, was regarded as the first true modern skyscraper. It was the first to use steel girders, which were stronger than iron, and the first to hang an outer masonry curtain wall on the load-bearing steel skeleton. Sadly, it doesn’t exist any more, but there is a wee plaque commemorating it on Route 66. Of course, at only ten storeys high, it would be considered a dwarf in comparison with today’s skyscrapers, but after it was built it was clear that the only way the city could go was up. In Chicago, the sky was the limit.

Standing in the Sears Tower, there was a real sense of where Mr Otis’s invention had taken us, particularly when I stepped into the wee glass cubicle that jutted out of the side of the building, more than a thousand feet above the ground. It was like a high version of the Pope-mobile, and stepping into it was a real nerve-tickler, the creepiest feeling I’d ever experienced. Looking between my feet straight down to the street, something inside me insisted I shouldn’t be standing there. I felt my heart pumping, my nerves tingling and my body shouting, ‘Don’t do this. Please don’t do this. This is wrong. This does not compute. Go back. Go back.’ I didn’t know what anyone hoped to achieve by offering visitors the chance to walk into that glass box, except for a celebration that they weren’t dead.

Like anyone who had ever stepped into that wee glass box, I really had to fight the urge not to do it. And that fitted with something that had always amused and amazed me about human beings. If you go up to a baby and roar at it, the baby will show signs of being frightened and will close its eyes. But then it’ll open its eyes and want you to do it again. Well, it was the same thing with the glass box. The floor was going ‘roar’ and I was going, ‘Again, again!’ for the same reason that people freefall parachute. So, even though something kept nagging at me to get out of the wee glass box right away, I stuck at it, not least because the view was so remarkable.

Far beneath me, I spotted a line of yellow taxis turning into Adams Street. Although it was just a regular Chicago street, it was also the start of Route 66, from where I’d soon be heading out west. But before I turned my trike towards California, I had to visit a few places in the Windy City. Incidentally, the Windy City nickname is believed to have come either from the propensity of Chicago’s politicians to make long-winded speeches or from a New York newspaper editor’s accusation that Chicagoans tended to boast about their hometown. It was apparently not a comment on the notoriously nippy winds that blasted from the plains and Lake Michigan through Chicago’s concrete canyons. Chicago was not significantly windier than any other American city, such as New York or Boston, although when the Arctic wind came off the lake and blew down Michigan Avenue, it could cut you in half.

Before leaving the Sears Tower, I made it up the final five floors from the glass bubble to the roof. Standing on the very top of the building, I stood like a dooley while a helicopter swooped from a great distance and filmed me pointing to the west. Easy enough, but the highlight of the roof visit was the story I was told of a guy who was painting the antenna and was microwaved. It’s said that he cooked himself, losing the use of his legs because of the sheer power of the transmitter. It had the ring of an urban legend about it, but it still amused me.

One of the best things about the Sears Tower was that whenever I saw the building again, I’d know I’d been on top of it. Having already stood on top of lots of things, it added to the collection, which included Sydney’s Opera House and Harbour Bridge. Both of them reminded me of my daughter, who once said the nicest thing. She was on the back of my Harley trike as we