What you talkin' about Willis?

All of us here in the Windy City had a scare as One World Trade Center rose to ever dizzying heights in Lower Manhattan, approaching the height of our beloved Sears, ahem, Willis Tower, still America's tallest building. The S.O.M. behemoth lost its title as the world's tallest building years ago and now ranks around 350. OK that's an exaggeration.  It's number ten, depending on whether you count each Petronas Tower in Malaysia as an individual building or not.

Anyway, One World Trade was to have a spire, actually an antenna dressed up as a spire, the top of which would have put the tip of the building at 1776 feet, (where have I heard that number before?), 326 feet taller than the Chicago building. But according to a "news flash" in today's Red Eye, the paper I read on the L tucked behind a copy of Playboy so people can't see me reading it, maintenance issues have caused the builders to re-access the design, and the structure atop the building may turn out to be merely an antenna after all. While spires count toward the height of a building, antennas apparently don't, meaning that Chicago's claim to being the home of the tallest building in the States is safe for the time being.

What a relief.