This was a large Telephone Exchange until 1970

Bell Telephone Company Building, Philadelphia Pennsylvania

Date added: December 30, 2023 Categories: Pennsylvania Commercial Communications Facility

The Bell Telephone Company Building at Nineteenth and Arch Streets was constructed in 1925 on the western edge of the new downtown. Telephone exchanges had been built in the old city, but with the move of Philadelphia's City Hall to Broad and Market Streets at the end of the nineteenth century, later exchanges were built west of Broad Street. The Bell Telephone Building at 1827-35 Arch Street is part of that sequence, being built to handle the significant increase in business stimulated by the completion of the long-distance lines to the West Coast. Constructed in 1925, it housed the company's central switching facilities and offices. With the construction of a new central switching facility at 24^th and Lombard Streets in 1970 the old switchboards were removed from the 19^th and Arch Street building which was then adapted to back office space for the telephone company. In the 1990s, with the construction of the Bell-Atlantic skyscraper on Cherry Street, the 19^th and Arch Building was sold and adapted to a self-storage facility.

The Bell Telephone Building is the work of Eugene A. Stopper (1885 - ?), a German-born and trained architect who began his career with Philip Merz, a former draftsman for McKim, Mead and White. While Merz's typical work was for banks, when Stopper went out on his own, he turned toward larger-scale industrial structures, in the process learning the methods of reinforced concrete construction.' In Stopper's career, this was certainly his most prestigious commission, but other projects including the facade for Jacques Ferber Furs (1708 Walnut Street, 1928) demonstrate skill in designing commercial fronts of the sort that revived the commercial district in the Roaring Twenties. Among his earlier works were several reinforced concrete factories including the Concordia Silk Mills at 4^th and Allegheny (1923, demolished). His later fireproof, Film Exchange building at Vine and 13^th Street (1936, demolished) followed the moderne styling of the Bell Building. Much of his work was for real estate developer Charles Kahn who constructed several buildings for the Bell Company including 1827-35 Arch Street. For Kahn, Stopper also designed gas stations, automobile service and sales buildings, including the now badly altered car showroom at 5630 Chestnut Street.

Much of Stopper's work relied on the use of reinforced concrete. Concrete had been extensively studied at the University of Pennsylvania's Towne School beginning at the turn of the century under Professor Edgar Marburg who led the American Society for Testing Materials section on concrete. This research made Philadelphia a center of the use of that material, in part because it had particular utility in industrial applications for its vibration-free and load-bearing capacity as well as for its economy of construction. The Bell Telephone Building has particular interest as an early example of a reinforced concrete skyscraper.

The centennial history of the Bell Company neatly breaks the technological history of the firm into two phases, one that begins in 1876 and ends in 1925 with the modern era beginning in 1926. That date, one year after the construction date of the Bell Building marked the arrival of nationwide long-distance service obtained through the construction of "trunk lines" that linked the principal cities of the nation, making coast-to-coast calls possible. The years after World War I saw major advances in transmission and switching technology, with increasingly refined instruments resulting in lower costs and increased convenience. By the 1920s, the telephone company relied on local exchange substations that were scattered around the city, each in the familiar one or two-story red or yellow brick and limestone trimmed Georgian-revival buildings by John T. Windrim. These spanned the region from Bridgeton, N.J. to Wilkes Barre, PA., and as far west as Blair County, PA.

The more complicated switching facilities for long-distance calls and the need to concentrate operators resulted in the requirement for a new type of building, which because of the cost of downtown land, argued for high-rise construction. Bell Telephone's central offices had originally been located at 406-08 Market Street in a late Victorian building by Addison Hutton (1889, demolished). In 1914, the recent removal of City Hall to its new location at Broad and Market Streets caused Bell to move its offices west to the new site of 17^th and Arch Streets, abutting the Philadelphia Parkway and shortening the telephone lines to the rapidly growing downtown. That small skyscraper by John T. Windrim adapted the brick and limestone of their local exchanges to the classicism of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway on which one corner fronts. It still remains a part of the telephone empire. With the move west to 17^th and Arch Street, future telephone buildings would be built there, including the 1925 building at 19^th and Arch Streets, the 1950s stainless steel-clad skyscraper at 16^th and Cherry Streets, and the most recent Bell Atlantic building at 18^th and Arch Streets (1991). The presence of the earlier buildings determined the placement of the ensuing buildings, each of which needed to be near the main trunk lines of the telephone system.

Building Description

The Bell Telephone building stands at the northeast corner of 19^th and Arch Streets on the edge of Philadelphia's developing twentieth-century business district. In form, it is a simplified version of the modern set-back skyscraper whose tan brick piers, limestone base and limestone-toned terra cotta ornament crowning the parapets at the setbacks reflects the contemporary style of the roaring twenties. Within, its marble-clad entrance vestibules and lobby represent the rising corporate culture of the Bell Telephone Company. As a workplace devoted to electric switchboards, the upper stories are almost without detail, with the sole exception of the fourteenth-floor elevator lobby which returns to the vocabulary of the first floor.

The Bell Building is located on the industrial edge of the city's business district. To the east are the skyscrapers of the twentieth-century downtown that were constructed in the new business district that followed the westward move of City Hall at the end of the nineteenth century. To the north is the mixed civic and commercial zone of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway that largely developed in the first third of the twentieth century. Across Arch Street, to the south, is the now largely cleared site of the elevated tracks of the Broad Street Station and nearby are small factories and mills that located near the railroad. The open site and low mills make the Bell Building an important part of the skyline.

Like its immediate neighbors, the Bell building is a mid-rise tower rising seventeen stories from the street. Though intended as an industrial building, as evidenced by the massive mushroom-slab reinforced concrete frame of the structure, its exterior takes the conventional form of the columnar skyscraper of the post World War I era. The principal facades facing Arch Street and Nineteenth Street are ornamented at the street level and again at the top stories. On these facades, a two-story base is set off by limestone facing that frames large commercial windows on the first floor; above which rises a shaft of brick piers between sets of windows. At the top, the building is crowned with a decorative terra cotta band and cast terra cotta ornament forming an urban-scale parapet. Above. two additional stories are set back and again crowned with terra cotta ornament; above this is a final mechanical story.

The rear and east facades are simpler in detail, reflecting their secondary status and the likelihood that they would be largely screened by adjacent structures. As a result, the limestone base was replaced by the multi-tone, wire-cut tan tapestry brickwork of the upper piers on the rear. Cornices and decorative bands are simplified, and in some instances, grills infill window locations. Many of these grills appear to have been retrofitted at the time that the building was air-conditioned in the 1970s. A three-story wing was added in 1939 on the east side. At the rear, it housed a loading dock and service elevator that was connected to a second vault that served the trucks that dropped off coins from the new coin-operated telephones.

Fenestration denotes the larger functions of the building. Oversized windows at the street level represented public spaces that were originally protected by massive iron grills. These have been removed, but traces remain in the small metal bosses that cap the removed grills. Above the base, windows are typically constructed of hollow metal frames in groups of three between brick piers up the center of the facade while the corner bays are given greater solidity by containing only two, more widely spaced windows set in a broader brick field. Windows are largely original, but many openings on the rear facade were altered when the building was air-conditioned.

The principal public entrance is through a handsome stone-clad vestibule off Arch Street while the work force entered from 19^th Street. The Arch Street doors have been replaced (c. 1970) with modern bronze-finished doors, one of which serves as ADA access. The doors open into a marble-clad vestibule that leads into the main lobby through a pair of bronze doors and a centered revolving door. The rear entrance off 19^th Street contains its original bronze doors and opens via a marble stair into a handsome stone-lined vestibule that connects to the level of the main lobby. An original cylindrical bronze lamp hangs above the stairs, providing evidence of the design of the original fixtures of the building. Small bells, the Bell Telephone Company's trademark insignia, ornament the radiator grills of the Arch Street and Nineteenth Street lobbies.

The public zones of the building are denoted by more elaborate finishes of contemporary commercial design. Pink-grey Tennessee marble sheaths the vestibules on the Arch Street and Nineteenth Street fronts, the L-shaped lobby which links both entrances to the main elevator lobby, the small front offices that flank the main Arch Street entrance, and piers in the public service room along 19^th Street. Subtly differentiated tones of the marble distinguish between the base, wall and door surrounds. At the far end of the lobby is a dark purple-toned marble-framed plaque to those members of the Bell Telephone Company who died in World War I. A second pair of plaques on either side of the corridor to the elevators commemorated the war dead from World War II. With the simple marble paneling, these give an imposing and civic character that reflected the quasi-public nature of the great public utilities. The bronze lettering was removed by the Bell Company at the time when they sold the building, but traces of the inscriptions can still be determined.

The secondary materials of the public spaces are typical of the long-term time frame of public utility designs. Floors are of terrazzo in the brown and grey tones of the marble. Doors and door frames are bronze, bringing the architectural character of the exterior detail into the interior and increasing the monumentality of the lobby and other public spaces. Completing the finish of the public spaces is a decorative molded plaster band that surrounds the edges of the flat ceilings of the lobby and contrasts with the coved ceilings of the front and rear vestibules. On the west wall of the elevator lobby, a bronze Cutler mail chute with its robust American eagle was another typical feature of office buildings of the day and complemented the architectural character of the building.

On either side of the lobby are two large public rooms. To the east, in a 1939 addition is a cafeteria for the workers of the building. It is of the simplest possible character, with round columns regularly spaced down the center of the room, and at the rear the remains of the stainless steel hot table and servery. The room was altered in the major c. 1970 renovation, with sheetrock walls and linoleum floors. On the west, across the lobby, was a large, well-lighted room trimmed with the marble of the lobby and entered through two large doorways from the lobby. These doorways were closed off in the c. 1970 renovation and were partially infilled with marble (evident because the blocks are of a different size from the original work). Air conditioning ducts and vents were incorporated in the door openings as a part of the retrofitting of the building. The western room was set up like a bank with tellers' positions behind grills that extended north from the Arch Street front and provided space where customers could pay bills. These were removed when the room was converted into offices. A large steel safe remains from that original use, though it was covered with sheet rock when the building was shifted from customer service. Presumably, it was this financial use that originally prompted the use of exterior grills (removed, c. 1970) on the first-floor windows.

On most levels, elevator lobbies are of the simplest character, with only the terrazzo of the floor linking the space to the public character of the first floor. Door frames are of simple painted steel, ceilings are flat plaster interrupted by the beams of the column and slab system and toilet rooms intrude into the volume of the corridor. On the 14^th floor, the elevator lobby returns the character of the first floor with marble walls, a coved plaster ceiling and hanging brass chandeliers of the sort used in the 19^th Street lobby. This change of character indicates that this floor was the location the offices of corporate executives.

Above the first floor, which was devoted to public services, the workspaces were industrial in character with reinforced concrete columns and beam and mushroom columns. in evidence. These floors were occupied with the giant switchboards and with the offices of the enlarging management of the telephone company. Around 1970, following the removal of the switchboards to another building, the entire building was renovated as offices. In a single campaign, the main customer service space was adapted to offices and its monumental doors to the main lobby were closed off; the windows to the customer service room and the front doors were modernized; the cafeteria was updated with modern sheetrock walls and the building was updated with modern air conditioning. On all of the upper stories, dropped ceilings and sheetrock partitions clad the concrete structure that had been left exposed on the industrial floors of the building giving it a more conventional office building appearance. As a result of that renovation, the upper floors typically contained a ring of offices surrounding the central elevator lobby core with corner offices reserved on a few floors. The small elevator lobby floors were partially carpeted and toilet rooms were updated. In the 1990s, after the sale of the building, the lower office floors were infilled with self-storage cubicles with rows of metal cages leaving a small corridor ring between the cages. As a result of the c. 1970 renovation, nothing of the original layout of the upper levels survives with the exception of the elevator lobbies and fire stairs.