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Oak Tower

Downtown Kansas CityOffice buildings completed in 1920Skyscraper office buildings in Kansas City, Missouri
OakTower Kansas City Missouri
OakTower Kansas City Missouri

Oak Tower, also called the Bell Telephone Building, is a 28-story skyscraper in Downtown Kansas City, Missouri. Hoit, Price & Barnes, a local firm that conceived many of Kansas City's landmark structures, designed the building in association with I.R. Timlin as the headquarters of the Bell Telephone Co.'s newly consolidated Southwestern System. The ground was broken at Eleventh and Oak Streets in 1917, but due to shortages of manpower and materials during the First World War, construction was delayed and was not completed until 1920. The new building served as Southwestern Bell's general headquarters for only a year before the company moved its main office to St. Louis. Thereafter the tower served as the headquarters of Southwestern Bell's operations in Missouri. The tower was originally 14 stories (185 feet), without any setbacks, but the fast-growing telephone company soon required more space. An addition completed in 1929 doubled the tower's height and made it the tallest building in Missouri until the Kansas City Power & Light Building surpassed it in 1931.Oak Tower's top half was built with Haydite, the first modern structural lightweight concrete, which had recently been invented and patented in Kansas City by Stephen J. Hayde. The tower's 1929 expansion was the first major project to use the new building material, and it allowed the addition of fourteen new stories, six more than would have been possible using conventional concrete.The building's contractor, Swenson Construction Co., also built several other landmark Kansas City buildings including the Kansas City Power & Light Building, 909 Walnut, Jackson County Courthouse, Kansas City City Hall, Kansas City Live Stock Exchange and the Western Auto Building.On January 11, 1965, during a snowstorm, a single-engine airplane crashed into the 28th story of the building at the corner facing Oak Street and 11th Street, killing all four people on board.Oak Tower's original terra-cotta facade was covered in white stucco when it was sold in 1974. In 2021 Oak Tower was sold.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article Oak Tower (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors, Images).

Oak Tower
East 11th Street, Downtown Kansas City

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N 39.1012 ° E -94.5789 °
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Oak Tower

East 11th Street 324
64106 Downtown Kansas City
Missouri, United States
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OakTower Kansas City Missouri
OakTower Kansas City Missouri
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Kansas City, Missouri
Kansas City, Missouri

Kansas City, Missouri (KC or KCMO) is the largest city in Missouri by population and area. As of the 2020 census, the city had a population of 508,090 in 2020, making it the 36th most-populous city in the United States. It is the central city of the Kansas City metropolitan area, which straddles the Missouri–Kansas state line and has a population of 2,392,035. Most of the city lies within Jackson County, with portions spilling into Clay, Cass, and Platte counties. Kansas City was founded in the 1830s as a port on the Missouri River at its confluence with the Kansas River from the west. On June 1, 1850, the town of Kansas was incorporated; shortly after came the establishment of the Kansas Territory. Confusion between the two ensued, and the name Kansas City was assigned to distinguish them soon after. Sitting on Missouri's western boundary with Kansas, with Downtown near the confluence of the Kansas and Missouri Rivers, the city encompasses about 319.03 square miles (826.3 km2), making it the 23rd largest city by total area in the United States. It serves as one of the two county seats of Jackson County, along with the major satellite city of Independence. Other major suburbs include the Missouri cities of Blue Springs and Lee's Summit and the Kansas cities of Overland Park, Olathe, Lenexa, and Kansas City, Kansas. The city is composed of several neighborhoods, including the River Market District in the north, the 18th and Vine District in the east, and the Country Club Plaza in the south. Celebrated cultural traditions include Kansas City jazz; theater, as a center of the Vaudevillian Orpheum circuit in the 1920s; the Chiefs and Royals sports franchises; and famous cuisine based on Kansas City-style barbecue, Kansas City strip steak, and craft breweries.

Bryant Building (Kansas City, Missouri)
Bryant Building (Kansas City, Missouri)

The Bryant Building is a 26-story office building located at the corner of 11th and Grand Avenue in Kansas City, Missouri. Completed in 1931, it is considered a distinctive example of Art Deco architecture in Kansas City. It was placed on the Kansas City Register of Historic Places listed on September 27, 1979 and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1989.The Bryant Building was designed by the Chicago firm of Graham, Anderson, Probst & White. The design is an adaptation of Eliel Saarinen's second-place design in the 1922 Chicago Tribune Tower design competition. Along with the former Federal Reserve Bank building, it is one of only two buildings designed by Graham, Anderson, Probst, and White in Kansas City.The cornerstone of the building contains family records placed there by the heirs of Dr. John Bryant. Bryant and his wife, Henrietta, received the land the building sits on as a wedding gift from her father in 1866. The original Bryant Building was built in 1891 at the corner of Petticoat Lane and Grand Boulevard, before being razed in 1931 and rebuilt as the current building. The original building, designed by Van Brunt and Howe of Kansas City, was highlighted in Architectural Review as "one of the best lighted and ventilated office buildings in" the city.Today the building is used as a "carrier hotel", housing multiple web servers to help power the fiber-optic internet in the city. The building underwent a $7 million renovation to improve power and cooling systems in order to fulfill its new role.

925 Grand
925 Grand

925 Grand is the former headquarters of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City and was the oldest building in active use of any Federal Reserve Bank. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2007.In 1913 Kansas City and St. Louis had a fierce rivalry over which city was to get a headquarters, but in the end, both cities received one. (Missouri is the only state to have multiple headquarters. Among the reasons noted for the award is that former Kansas City mayor James A. Reed, who was on the Senate Banking Committee, broke the deadlock to permit passage of the Federal Reserve Act.The first bank building was in the R.A. Long Building at 928 Grand, which opened on November 16, 1914, until a new $4.3 million building could be built across the street at 925 Grand, which formally opened in November 1921 in Downtown Kansas City. Shortly after it was established the bank rented space to outside tenants.The building, designed by Chicago Wrigley Building architect Graham, Anderson, Probst & White was Missouri's tallest building from 1921 to 1926 and Kansas City's tallest building from 1921 to 1929. President Harry S. Truman had his office in Room 1107 of the building from when he left the Presidency in 1953 until the Truman Library was completed in 1957.In 2008, the Federal Reserve moved to a new building off of Main Street by the Liberty Memorial designed by architect Henry N. Cobb. Townsend, Inc. of Overland Park, Kansas, bought the building for $10.8 million in 2005 and the Federal Reserve continued as a tenant until its new quarters opened in 2008. In 2013, Townsend lost the building when its lender, Great Western Bank of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, took back the property at courthouse auction. A Boston lender is providing funding to a new developer who plans to convert the building into a hotel.