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The original owner and publisher of the Chicago Tribune, Robert ‘Colonel’ McCormick, had been a war correspondent and he went to Europe early in the First World War to interview Tsar Nicholas II, Prime Minister Herbert Asquith and First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill. While travelling around Europe, he collected chunks of historic buildings, including a lump of stone that had been blown off Ypres Cathedral by the German artillery. Initially, he just kept these as souvenirs, but then he instructed the Tribune’s correspondents, wherever they were in the world, to start collecting pieces of other famous buildings ‘by well-mannered means’. When the correspondents arrived back in Chicago with their booty, the pieces of masonry were implanted in the outer walls of the lower storeys of the Chicago Tribune Building.

Now, walking around the tower, I kept spotting them, and it was difficult not to exclaim whenever I saw a chunk: ‘Ooh, look, a wee bit of Edinburgh Castle!’ or ‘Wow, a chunk of the Parthenon!’ Quite how the correspondents managed to collect all of this stuff ‘by well-mannered means’ was a mystery to me. Did they sneak up Edinburgh’s High Street in the middle of the night with a sledgehammer and smash a chunk off the castle walls? I didn’t know, so I suppose it was better not to question their methods and just enjoy the result.

There were lumps of masonry from Tibet, the Great Wall of China, the Taj Mahal, the Palace of Westminster, the Great Pyramid, the Alamo, Notre-Dame Cathedral, Abraham Lincoln’s Tomb, the Berlin Wall, Angkor Wat – the list went on and on. In all, there are 136 fragments of other buildings implanted into the walls of the Chicago Tribune Building. As I walked around the perimeter, I took a wee look at each piece of Colonel McCormick’s grand haul: the Royal Castle, Stockholm; the Ancient Temple, Hunan Province; Fort Santiago; St David’s Tower, Jerusalem; a piece from the Holy Door of St Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican; a wee bit of Pompeii; the Badlands, South Dakota – that was a nice one; the Monastery of St Michael of Ukraine; the Old Post Office in O’Connell Street, Dublin, where the Irish rebellion started; the Temple of the Forbidden City, Beijing; a roof tile from some Roman ruins; a tiny shard of stone from the Cave of the Nativity in Bethlehem; a rock from Flodden Field in Northumberland, where the English gave the Scots one hell of a doing; then, next to it, a piece from the Tower of Tears in Amsterdam.

But my favourite is a fragment of Injun Joe’s Cave, a show cave in Missouri on which Mark Twain based the cave he described in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. I’m a Twain fanatic, so I was really disappointed when it wasn’t where I thought it would be. But then, at the very last second, I came around a corner and there it was, my old pal sticking straight out of the wall. Just seeing it made my day. The smallest things can make me happy. I gave it a little rub, just to check I hadn’t imagined it. Phew. I wasn’t senile like I thought I might be.

From my favourite building I walked a few blocks south down Michigan Avenue, one of my favourite streets, past more magnificent architecture to Millennium Park, which adjoins Grant Park, where Barack Obama held his victory speech after winning the 2008 presidential election. Still marvelling at the fabulous buildings, I reflected that Chicago was a very beautiful place – a stunningly good-looking city – and Chicagoans generally seemed intent on keeping it that way, making it more gorgeous as they went along. It wasn’t like Edinburgh, where the city authorities were in the process of plonking a big bloody tram system down the middle of Princes Street, the jewel in the city’s crown.

It seemed to me that most of the world’s beautiful cities – Venice, Rome, Paris, even Glasgow, which was a gorgeous Victorian city – were constantly under pressure from cretins who wanted to build awful eyesores, or demolish the beauty and replace it with car parks. I could only assume that the people who found themselves in positions of authority,