One good dome deserves another

This morning I saw Tonya's fabulous photos of the dome at the Galeries Lafayette in Paris, so I couldn't resist posting photos of the vaulted mosaic ceiling at Marshall Field's in Chicago. It's not so obviously spectacular as the Galeries Lafayette, but it was still pretty cool to see. I tried to photograph it without the Christmas decorations getting in the way, as they were big but not very creative.
The ceiling is made of over 1.5 million pieces of Tiffany glass, and Tiffany himself took charge of the work. Those two lamps hanging down are original Tiffany globes; there used to be four of them, but they were taken down to be part of a display at the store and some furniture fell over on them, irretrievably shattering two. I can see where one of them would have hung, but where would the fourth have been?
Another section of the store has a huge atrium with a skylight at the top -- at one point it was the highest enclosed atrium in the world, but that hasn't been true for many years.

Last year, Marshall Field's pulled out of the space it had occupied for over a century, and Macy's moved in. Many Chicagoans took it hard, and apparently quite a few have refused to patronize the store as Macy's is a symbol of -- gasp! -- New York. It would be a shame to see the store fail, for what would replace it? There is joking now that Chicago, the famous "Second City," is becoming the "First City" since it's the home of Barack Obama and he's handling his transition from there. Maybe this will ease the pain for those Chicagoans who don't like being #2 to New York.