Southern New England Telephone Company Administration Building

Southern New England Telephone Company Administration Building
  1. About the Southern New England Telephone Company Administration Building in New Haven
    1. Building Catalogations
  2. Architect and team
  3. Architectural style
  4. Spaces and uses
  5. Structure and materials

The Southern New England Telephone Company Administration Building is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Roy W. Foote, and built between 1937 and 1938 in New Haven, CT.

Southern New England Telephone Company Administration Building is not the only name you might know this building by though. It is common for companies to want to attach their names to iconic buildings when they move in, or for the general public to come up with nicknames, and this one is no exception. The building has changed names several times over the years, and is also known as:

  • Southern New England Telephone Company Administration Building between 1938 and 2004.
  • The Eli from 2004 until this day.

Its precise street address is 227 Church Street, New Haven, CT. You can also find it on the map here.

The Southern New England Telephone Company Administration Building is a structure of significant importance both for the city of New Haven and the United States as a nation. The building embodies the distinctive characteristic features of the time in which it was built and the Art Deco style. Because of that, the Southern New England Telephone Company Administration Building was officially included in the National Register of Historic Places on October 24th 1997.

The building has been restored 3 times over the years to ensure its conservation and adaptation to the pass of time. The main restoration works happened in 1955, 1984 and 2004.

Building's timeline

Construction begins
1937
87
Southern New England Telephone Company Administration Building
1938
86
a
Restoration
1955
69
b
Restoration
1984
40
Added to the NRHP
1997
27
c
Restoration
2004
20
years ago
2024
  1. 1955 - The working areas were renovated to accommodate the building's first air-conditioning system.
  2. 1984 - The fifteenth-floor lobby and executive reception area were totally refurbished with modern wood paneling.
  3. 2004 - The building was converted into residential apartments. The architect in charge was Stephen J. Joncus.

Architect and team

Roy W. Foote was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design. But there was also one other architect involved, as far as we know. We are talking about Douglas Orr.

That being said, architecture is a complex discipline involving many professionals from different fields, without whom this building would have not been possible. We will surely be leaving out a lot of names here, but at the very least we know that there was one other part involved, that was Dwight Building Company as the Main Contractor.

Architectural Style

The Southern New England Telephone Company Administration Building can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The Art Deco movement flourished during the 1920s and 1930s, with many historians marking the outbreak of World War II as its final decline. Even though a couple of decades might not seem as much, the Art Deco movement had a great impact on architecture, and it's widely represented in many American cities due to the development boom that happened during that time.

Art Deco marked the abandonment of traditional historicism and the embracement of modern living and the age of the machine. In architecture, that meant leaving behind the ornaments of Beux-Arts and Neo-Gothic buildings and instead favoring simplicity and visual impact through geometric shapes, clean lines, and symmetrical designs. Ornaments were still an important part of the design, but they became bold and lavish, and were often inspired by ancient cultures or industrial imagery, instead of nature.

The Southern New England Telephone Company Administration Building was completed in 1938 during the last stretch of waht's officially considered to be the duration of the Art Deco movement. As a late-commer of the Art Deco movement and reflects the mature and refined characteristics of the style.

Spaces & Uses

The Southern New England Telephone Company Administration Building reaches an architectural height of 197ft (60m), 230ft (70m) if you count the antenna. It has a total of 17 floors, served by 6 elevators, which combined offer a total of 492,126 sqf (45,720m2) of usable space.

In regards to parking space, the building has a total of 38 spots available, which roughly equals 2 spots per floor (above ground), or one parking spot per every 12,949 sqf (1,203m2) of usable space.

When it opened its doors to the public in 1938, the Southern New England Telephone Company Administration Building was primarily used as Commercial space. That however, is no longer the case, and today it mainly provides Residential space.

About the residences

The Southern New England Telephone Company Administration Building has a total of 157 residential units throughout its 17 floors.

230ft (70m)
197ft (60m)

Materials & Structure

The Southern New England Telephone Company Administration Building uses a frame structure made of steel columns and concrete slabs.

A frame structure uses a combination of beams and columns to sustain the building's weight. The walls in this case are non-load bearing, which allows for more flexibility when distributing the interior spaces.

The facade is a non-load bearing masonry facade. This type of facade became common during the period when buildings, especially taller ones, transitioned from load-bearing wall systems to frame structures.

Frame structures allowed facades to be independent from the building's frame, enabling the use of lighter materials and larger openings. However, it took some time for architects to incorporate these new posibilities into their designs, and so for a while they simply replicated the look and feel fo buildings people where used to seeing.

Non-structural Masonry Facade
Non-structural Masonry Facade

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features a whitish Indiana limestone clad, emerging from a low pink granite base in front and an ornamental cast iron railing along the side boundaries.

On the main facade a shallow 2 stories high projecting pavilion houses three entrance doors with metal frames and glass. The windows above the entrances are protected by gilded frames and painted steel grilles with Greek borders on the sides. The projecting pavilion is repeated on the side elevation.

Other decorative exterior elements are the three panels over the main entries, abstract ionic capitals over the end of each window bay, and huge palmette carvings on the walls at the top of the building.

Other materials found at the Southern New England Telephone Company Administration Building include, benedict-nickel, found on doors, fluted columns, light fixtures and original pendant lamps. This material is a nickel-bronze alloy, and marble, used in a reddish-brown color on the hall's walls, and in a light travertine stone from Montana on the elevator areas.