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Cass Gilbert's Woolworth Building

21st Century Photo of the 1910 Exchange Building

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Designing the Columbian Mutual Tower The Columbian Mutual Tower was designed as a visually arresting symbol for the company it housed. Its architect was Isaac Albert Baum of the architectural and engineering firm Boyer and Baum, based in St. Louis, Missouri. Little is known about Baum, and the Columbian Mutual Tower is the only building commonly attributed to him. The Columbian Mutual Assurance Society’s National Secretary, George W. Clayton, was also credited as an influential part of the building’s design process, as he studied architecture before becoming an insurance executive.[1] The Columbian Mutual Tower is located on the east side of Main Street immediately north of Court Square and stands at 288 feet with twenty-two stories. The building has a U-shaped base, 75 feet long by 77 feet wide and fourteen stories tall. From its front side rises an eight-story tower, approximately 35 feet square, with a slight step-back at the twentieth floor. This overall massing recalls that of the Woolworth Building, although the proportions are not an exact scale replica of the larger building’s measurements. Its similarities to the Woolworth Building are furthered by its color scheme; covered in cream-colored enamel terra-cotta, the wings and tower are topped with green tile roofs. Additionally, both the Woolworth Building and the Columbian Mutual Tower are located on their city’s main thoroughfares, immediately adjacent to a public park—on Broadway across from City Hall Park in Manhattan and on Main Street next to Court Square in Memphis, respectively—giving them high visibility and unbroken sightlines. Its headquarters’ formal resemblance to the Woolworth Building aligns the Columbian Mutual Society with the larger building’s associations with economic prosperity.
            The Columbian Mutual Tower promoted its company using many of the same techniques employed by the Woolworth Company and its global competitors. An article published in the October 1922 edition of The Fraternal Monitor reveals the Columbian Mutual Life Assurance Society’s ambition for their new headquarters “to be an impressive edifice commanding the sky line of Memphis.”[2] This would be achieved, first and foremost, through the building’s height; as the highest structure in the city, its tower would be “a conspicuous point in the skyline of the future.”[3] Skyscrapers represented modernity by virtue of their height, and achieving the greatest verticality in the region would assure the Columbian Mutual Society of a place in the future of the city. This emphasis on modernity was furthered in the installation of technological amenities like air conditioning, circulating ice water, and four separate elevators. The building was also illuminated at night, with a lighting system “similar to that of the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor, and the towers of the Woolworth Building in New York and the new Wrigley building on Michigan Avenue, Chicago.”[4] The illumination of monumental structures was a popular phenomenon in this period—ten years earlier at a reception celebrating the completion of the Woolworth Building, President Woodrow Wilson pressed a button to turn on the tower’s 80,000 light bulbs at once. By aligning themselves with nationally known landmarks like the Woolworth Building, the designers of the Columbian Mutual Tower signified their intent to construct a building that would be a regional landmark as well as a signature tower.
The designers of the Columbian Mutual Tower hoped that it would be an invaluable asset “as an investment, as ideal headquarters of the Columbian Mutual Life, and as an advertisement.”[5] The reaction in the local press suggests that it largely succeeded. The Commercial Appeal proclaimed that the million-dollar skyscraper would “dominate the skyline of Memphis when completed…towering above all other office buildings in the city.”[6] Described as “one of Memphis’ most modern office structures,” whose owners were “besieged with requests” for office space, the building was completely filled soon after completion and remained so well into the Great Depression.[7] The tower was the first office building in Memphis and one of the first in the South to use a secretarial floor plan, in which several private office rooms were arranged around a central reception room, thus solving the “problem of business and professional men.”[8] Its first renters moved in before the tower was completely constructed, and tenants wanted to “go up as high as possible” for their office space.[9] The tower’s observation platform was open for tours, and a carillon on the rooftop chimed every quarter hour.[10] The building’s varied elements signified modern innovation to its contemporary audience, thereby increasing its notoriety in the city of Memphis.
            Stylistically, the Columbian Mutual Tower is an aggregate of seemingly contradictory architectural traditions. Its “treatment throughout is Gothic, with renaissance ornamentation. Simplicity of design will contribute much to the beauty of the structure, a motif greatly enhanced by [its coloring.]”[11] Its overall massing and its use of unbroken piers are its only “Gothic” elements, and even these represent a version of the Gothic heavily mediated by the Woolworth Building and not directly inspired by medieval Gothic examples. The building’s detailing is classicizing. Rather than the pointed arches and tracery of the Woolworth Building, the Columbian Mutual Tower’s entryway is topped with a clock flanked by four Greco-Roman figures—modelled on the children of the company’s president, Binford, and its secretary, Clayton—and two wreaths emblazoned with “security” and “protection.” Its tower is surrounded by balustrades and carved vases, not Gothic tourelles, and its wings are capped with mansard roofs. Since “Memphis is a city dominated by classical architecture,” the combination of a Gothic-inspired massing with classical detailing may have been an attempt by the building’s designers to combine the prosperity connoted by the tallest building in the world with a local architectural tradition.[12] Regardless of its underlying philosophy, the combination of Gothic massing with classical ornamentation reflects a synthesis of architectural ideas rather than merely copying the design of the Woolworth Building.
            As a city in the American South, Memphis represented a more complex urban context than that of New York. The southeastern states were comparatively underdeveloped and predominately agrarian, meaning that “the skyscraper took on particular significance in a region that could boast only a few cities large enough to attract national recognition.”[13] Ambitious businessmen like Binford had few Southern examples of skyscrapers to emulate, and New York represented “the ideal progressive modern city” in the cultural imagination.[14] Drawing from northern models—although not usually as directly as the Columbian Mutual Tower does—was a common practice. Throughout its history, Southern architecture “has been synthetic more than pure, combining ideas from a variety of times, places and cultures rather than constituting a uniquely regional form of building.”[15] This is evidenced in the skyscrapers which proceeded and followed the Columbian Mutual Tower as the tallest structures in Memphis. The 1910 Exchange Building strongly resembles the 1907 Singer Building, as both have Second Empire style detailing and brick shafts accented with cream-colored stone. The 1930 Sterick Building reflects the influence of Eliel Saarinen’s highly publicized but unbuilt design for the Chicago Tribune Tower, with several step-backs in its tower and unbroken vertical piers culminating in pointed finials.[16] Like many other Southern skyscrapers, the Columbian Mutual Tower capitalized on the associations of nationally known architectural forms by adapting them to a regional context.

[1] “New Home Office Building of the Columbian Mutual Assurance Society to be an Impressive Edifice Commanding the Sky Line of Memphis,” The Fraternal Monitor 33, no. 3 (October 1922), 9.
[2] “New Home Office Building,” Fraternal Monitor, 9.
[3] “New Home Office Building,” Fraternal Monitor, 9.
[4] “New Home Office Building,” Fraternal Monitor, 9.
[5] “New Home Office Building,” Fraternal Monitor, 9.
[6] “Columbian Mutual Headquarters Announced,” The Commercial Appeal (Memphis), August 19, 1922.
[7] “Columbian Tower Offers Added Office Facilities,” The Commercial Appeal (Memphis), August 17, 1931.
[8] “Secretarial Offices Finding Wide Favor, Started Innovation,” The Commercial Appeal (Memphis), August 26, 1932.
[9] “Their Office is an Old Home to Them—Law Firm in Columbian Tower Was First In, Now Highest Up,” The Press Scimitar (Memphis), November 16, 1940.
[10] “Galbreath in Charge of Tower Building,” The Commercial Appeal (Memphis), October 14, 1934.
[11] “New Home Office Building,” Fraternal Monitor, 9.
[12] Eugene Johnson, Memphis, an Architectural Guide, xviii.
[13] Carrie Albee, “Forward Atlanta: G. Lloyd Preacher and the Atlanta City Hall,” in Skyscraper Gothic, ed. by Kevin D. Murphy and Lisa Reilly (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017), 143.
[14] Ibid, 144.
[15] Dell Upton, “Social History of Architecture,” 16.
[16] The competition for the Chicago Tribune Tower was won by Howells and Hood, whose design was constructed in 1925. Since the competition was roughly contemporaneous with the planning of the Columbian Mutual Tower, it is unlikely that the Tribune Competition had any effect on the design of the Memphis building.

Ellen Dement
Memphis in the 1920s Memphis in the 1920s
            When the Columbian Mutual Assurance Society chose to move their headquarters to Memphis, the city was in the midst of an unprecedented economic boom. The city of Memphis was founded in 1819, with an urban grid surveyed by William Lawrence. By the 1850s, Memphis was a thriving trade center and the world’s largest inland cotton market.[1] The city’s economic growth dramatically slowed during the Civil War and Reconstruction, but its population rose, largely due to an influx of Confederate veterans and their families. The increased population, coupled with inadequate drainage and sewage infrastructure, led to a devastating yellow fever epidemic in 1878. Of the city’s roughly 40,000 residents, about 25,000 fled the city in the epidemic’s first two weeks, and of those remaining, over 5,000 died. The city went bankrupt, and in 1879 the state legislature revoked the Memphis charter. Compelled by a desire to avoid such catastrophe in the future, a special commission appointed by the National Board of Health implemented a new sewer system, and the city’s population had largely recovered by 1890. The city’s charter was restored in 1893. In 1895 the city’s first steel-frame building, the ten-story National Bank Building (Edward Culliatt Jones, now known as the D.T. Porter Building), was completed, and it is widely recognized as the first skyscraper in Memphis.[2] The city’s economic and physical growth continued in the early years of the twentieth century. New buildings used steel-frame technology developed in New York and Chicago. Among them was the 1910 Exchange Building, the tallest building in Memphis until the construction of the Columbian Mutual Tower. At nineteen stories, the 264-foot skyscraper was designed by Neander Montgomery Woods and built by the city’s primary economic engine, the Cotton and Merchants Exchange. The first century of Memphis’s history witnessed dramatically uneven economic fortunes, but by the start of World War I the burgeoning city was a regional leader in business.
            In 1919, Memphis celebrated its centennial anniversary, and the year ushered in a decade of prosperity that also featured the city’s first efforts at urban planning. The 1920s were “undoubtedly [a] golden era of business prosperity and flamboyance” for downtown Memphis.[3] Like the country as a whole, the city of Memphis benefited from pent-up demand during World War and increased use of consumer credit, and downtown property values skyrocketed. Between 1923 and 1929, one million square feet of office space came on the market, with the city’s peak construction year coming in 1924.[4] In response to this rapid development, Harland Bartholomew was hired to create a comprehensive city plan, and as a result the city’s first zoning ordinance was passed in 1922. This zoning ordinance included building height districts, and the downtown district was limited to 150 feet or 12 stories because Bartholomew felt that “tall buildings in congested downtown areas were injurious to the city by compounding congestion and by shutting off air and light to pedestrians.”[5] However, the city plan was not printed or distributed until 1924, when the Columbian Mutual Tower and several other buildings exceeding the height limit were well underway. Thus the height restrictions were compromised even before the plan was enacted, and they did not prevent the construction of Wyatt Hendrick’s Sterick Building in 1930, which, at a height of 365 feet and 29 stories, surpassed the Columbian Mutual Tower as the city’s tallest building. However, the Bartholomew plan did restrain overall verticality in Memphis in favor of horizontal expansion, thereby increasing the visual impact of the Columbian Mutual Tower for decades to come.
            Despite its economic prosperity in the 1920s, the city of Memphis was still significantly smaller than the leading economic centers in the United States. In the 1920 census, Memphis had a population of 162,351, making it the fortieth largest city in America. In comparison, New York City had the largest urban population with 5.6 million residents; however, only two other cities—Chicago and Philadelphia—had more than one million residents.[6] Memphis was not a national economic center, but its leaders aspired to be an economic leader on a regional scale. In 1920 Memphis was the fifth largest city in the southeastern United States, behind New Orleans, Louisiana, at seventeen; Atlanta, Georgia, at thirty-third; Birmingham, Alabama, at thirty-sixth; and Richmond, Virginia, at thirty-eighth. Memphis’s size was thus comparable to its regional peers, and by the 1930 census its population had increased to 253,143, making it the thirty-fourth largest city in the United States.[7] Because of Memphis’s size, the Columbian Mutual Tower did not need to be on the same scale as New York and Chicago skyscrapers—it could have a strong visual impact even at a much smaller size. Similarly, the scope of its business was significantly smaller than that of global businesses based in New York and Chicago, but it used the same promotion and expansion techniques on a regional scale.

[1] Eugene J. Johnson and Robert D. Russell, Jr. Memphis: An Architectural Guide (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1990), xvi.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Robert Alan Sigafoos, Cotton Row to Beale Street: A Business History of Memphis (Memphis: Memphis State University Press, 1979), 155.
[4] Sigafroos, Business History, 152.
[5] Sigafroos, Business History, 150.
[6] Population of the 100 Largest Urban Places: 1920, U.S. Bureau of the Census (Washington, DC, 1920; published online June 15, 1998).
[7] Population of the 100 Largest Urban Places: 1930, U.S. Bureau of the Census (Washington, DC, 1930; published online June 15, 1998).