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A Spectacular Monument to Commerce
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Business New Haven
12/4/1995
By: Michael C. Bingham
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At the time it was completed, in 1938, it was the largest office building in New Haven, with 140,000 square feet housing 800 employees. Its size was unrivaled until SNET itself bettered that with the 300,000-square-foot “blue box” at 300 George Street in 1959 (today thought of as an architectural monstrosity, but at the time regarded as an “early spectacular of the redevelopment program”). It was never the tallest, though: At 221 feet, the 15-story structure topped out just one foot shy of the then-Union & New Haven Trust Co. “colonial skyscraper” at the Church and Elm Street corner of the same block.
For its time - in the grip of a crushing Depression that would not begin to ease in earnest until Lend-Lease in 1940 and Pearl Harbor the following year put American industry into overdrive - 227 Church was spectacular monument to commerce. It cost $2.5 million to build - a fortune then - and was nearly identical to the first structures erected at New York's Rockefeller Center during the same decade.
Virtually no expense was spared architects Douglas Orr and R.W. Foote in constructing the phone company palace. According to contemporary accounts, 6,700 cubic yards of concrete were used under and in the building, enough to build a highway 16 feet wide, nine inches thick and three miles long. The outside walls consist of 12,500 pieces of Indiana limestone.
Some architectural and design elements simply could not duplicated at today's costs. The main lobby walls are of polished Spanish marble, and the doors of Benedict nickel (an alloy of nickel and bronze). Rare woods line the walls of many rooms, and upper-story lobbies have walls of rose tan marble. Deceptively plain from a distance, it rewards the close observer with such details as sculptured stone reliefs depicting man's mastery over electricity.
While making New Haven history, the new building also replaced a few treasured relics of the city's past. Razed to make room for the new structure was the one-time home of Simeon E. Baldwin, former governor and chief justice of the State Supreme Court of Errors, at 233 Church. Later it was the home of Thomas Hooker, president and chairman of the First National Bank of New Haven (whose building at 42 Church Street still stands as a Centerbank branch). After Hooker's death in 1924, its final residents were the family of Dr. Raynham Townshend. Its final incarnation was as the Church-Wall Tea Room.
At 227 Church itself was the home of someone whose name was synonymous with much New Haven history, Prof. William Dwight Whitney of Yale, whose survivors sold the house to SNET for demolition.
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