They’re renovating the building where I spent most of my career. The former Illinois Bell Telephone headquarters in downtown Chicago was sold some years ago. It’s about to re-emerge as an updated office tower and just landed a law firm as a major tenant.
The building was practically new when I began working there in 1968. It was one of three buildings. Illinois Bell built its original headquarters at 212 Washington in the 1920s, expanded into an adjacent building of similar vintage and built the new 30-story building at 225 W. Randolph in 1966 to occupy most of the city block bounded by Randolph, Wells, Washington and Franklin.
It was an impressive complex with an expansive lobby that extended through the new and old buildings, a motor pool in the basement and a pedestrian plaza on Franklin St. Walking into the place made me feel kind of important. The complex was occupied by several thousand of the nearly 40,000 employees who worked for Illinois Bell when I joined the company.
I was impressed that the public relations department that hired me was at the very top of the building, on the 30th floor – which suggested that my profession was really important to the company. Years later one of the engineers who helped design the building told me that because this was the tallest building in the West Loop, they were worried that an airplane could hit the top floor. So they put the executives on the 28th floor and the engineers prudently located their offices on the 15th floor.
The building became an unplanned addition to Chicago’s art scene. One of my colleagues was an art expert who told his vice president that the boring but lavishly framed print on his office wall was a piece of trash. He suggested that as long as the company had to decorate the new building’s miles of beige corridors, buying original paintings from unknown artists would be a better value than traditional prints of landscapes and ruminant cattle.
The executives gave the guy a budget and turned him loose to buy art but were a little worried when he brought in a collection of wildly abstract paintings. They proved to be popular with employees who welcomed the addition of a little color to the 60s-modern décor. This evolved into a permanent art program with periodic art shows in the building’s lobby. Over the years Illinois Bell’s art collection increased in value and became a significant capital asset, which probably gave the company’s regulatory accountants fits.
The building was strictly an office headquarters without the phone company’s switchboards and equipment. Its design was a product of its time, an open floor plan with a central core of elevators and glass curtain walls. It reflected the company’s hierarchy with private offices for managers and cubicles or open desks for working stiffs with identical furniture. I started out in a cubicle and eventually was promoted to a 10-foot-square office with a carpet, water jug and speakerphone. Higher-ranking managers got bigger offices with fancier water jugs.
Overall, the building was a fairly pleasant place to work. The entire 20th floor was a cafeteria and employee lounge. Coffee carts circulated through the offices twice a day and in the 1980s we got robot mail carts. Its location on the west edge of Chicago’s Loop was a couple of blocks from the El and commuter trains with plenty of restaurants within easy walking distance.
For many years the company leased space in the building to a barbershop. Not only did the barber enjoy a steady clientele, but whenever he had a gripe about his lease he would complain directly to the executives in his barber chair. When his shop eventually closed the barber opened a cell phone dealership.
After I left the company in 1990 the older buildings on Washington were sold and renovated as luxury condos with a new parking garage on the Franklin St. plaza. A private developer purchased the 225 Randolph building in 2007 and leased it back to AT&T until last year. The building was granted landmark status in 2021.
My 22-year career with Illinois Bell had more good years than bad ones. There even were a few times when I left the building after dark, looked up at its looming 30 stories and thought: “Yep, I think I moved it an inch today.”