Northwestern Bell Telephone Building
This one's a beauty:
Yep, it's a classic. I don't know what's inside this building, but I'm sure there's tons of copper in there. I think the design of this building is one of the more pleasing to the eye here in downtown. It's unobtrusive to the point that few people realize just how big and how futuristic this building is. Bell Telephone (then Northwestern Bell, then USWest, now Qwest as of the summer of Y2K) really did this building a service when they needed to put an antenna array somewhere on it. Instead of making an ugly antenna farm, they designed the "crown" of this building and really added something aesthetically. Old pictures without the crown look truncated. Whoever designed the crown really did an nice job.
The Bell Building shortly after it was built.
Notice the conspicuous absence of the antenna farm at the top of the building. Notice as well the big space between this building and the one on the left edge of the picture. That space between these buildings was filled with building in the early 1940s.
The rest of the building has many pleasures as well. The doorway on 5th has this object lurking above the entrant. One of the motifs of this building is electricity. There are lightning bolt details in the recessed columns that gird the building, and this doorway is filled with jagged edges that gives one the impression of spikey lightning. It's quite a sharp (pun intended, hahaha...) design. Another one of the eye catching details is the eagle above the 5th St. doorway. This bird has jagged angles which match nicely with the lightning motif, but it also has a sort of rising detail that makes it look as if it's about to take off. There's more to this building than there seems at first. This building was built in phases. The original building, which sits on the corner of the block was built during 1931. The narrow section in the middle of the block was built afterwards. If you look closely, you can see the different color sandstones just to the right of the shadow on this picture.
