Leveque

In the days immediately following the groundbreaking, the American Insurance Union revealed that the new structure would be the largest building in the state and the fifth tallest in the world, surpassed only by the Woolworth, Municipal, Metropolitan Life, and Singer buildings, all in New York. In addition to the AIU’s headquarters, the finished tower would contain an additional six hundred rooms for the expanding Deshler-Wallick hotel, the two facilities being connected with an aerial walkway over the Wall Street alley. In the lower niche between the hotel and the AIU building would be the marvelous new Keith-Albee theatre, a showplace for top-drawer stage and screen entertainment, where, in the words of an attorney for the Keith circuit, “you can lose yourself completely for a time, and come back feeling like a different individual.”

In his travels as a politician and ambassasdor, AIU chief John Lentz had absorbed a hodge-podge of influences from public and palatial buildings all throughout Europe and the mid-east, and, like any 20s-era millionaire worth the name, he would spare no expense in bringing the fit and finish of foreign lands to American soil for his new “Citadel”. Lanterns for the tower’s massive street level entrances were modeled from angle lamps in Florence’s Strozzi Palace in Italy. Wall tiles for the building’s Spanish Tea Room were adapted from those found in a castle in Seville. Custom-cut glass was ferried over from Czechoslavakia. Oak and walnut paneling was ordered from England. And, as a kind of official signature, mottoes and credos of the American Insurance Union were to be imbedded in a huge bronze disc, sunk in the center of the main lobby floor.

Finally, as a grand gesture among grand gestures, the AIU’s main mezzanine-level auditorium would be equipped with a massive pipe organ and a ceiling fresco of painted clouds, its walls a richly detailed, one-third reproduction of the Hall of Mirrors, the gilded vault within France’s palace at Versailles, the room in which the armistice ending the Great War had been signed.