Ohio Bell Building

Art by: Chris Hytha

**Story by: ** Mark Houser

Baseball fans who come to see the Guardians, the local team recently renamed after Art Deco statues on a nearby Cuyahoga River bridge, have a clear view of the city's other important structure in the signature style of the era: this skyscraper looming over the left field bleachers.

The new headquarters for Ohio Bell and parent company American Telephone & Telegraph was a heavyweight. Besides offices, it was engineered to support multiple floors of heavy automatic telephone switching equipment, which replaced the human operators who had connected calls by hand until then. Ohio Bell reassured the public that its "girls" would all be offered new jobs. Their former workplace, a Victorian era office block with a crenelated castle tower, was torn down to make room for the huge Terminal Tower complex.

That highrise would soon dominate the Cleveland skyline. But for a few fleeting months, the city's first Art Deco skyscraper — or as one of the local architects responsible dubbed it, "American Perpendicular Gothic" — was the tallest building in town. Although the company built a new headquarters closer to the lakefront in 1983, this skyscraper continues to house telephone equipment.