Southern New England Telephone Company Administration Building

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 24^th 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.