Smith-Young Tower

The Smith-Young Tower, constructed from 1927 through 1928, is an exceptional example of a skyscraper in downtown San Antonio. The building, bearing masterful treatment of form, scale and ornamentation, meets Criterion C in the area of Architecture as one of the best illustrations of Late Gothic Revival commercial design in the state and as the work of master architects Atlee B. and Robert M. Ayres.

J.H. and F.A. Smith, natives of Crockett, Texas, began careers as road builders in 1905. J.W. Young, also a native of Crockett, worked as attorney for the brothers beginning in 1908. Successful South Texas developers, the brothers and Young turned their interests to general contracting and, in 1922, incorporated as Smith Brothers in Dallas. J.H. Smith concentrated his time on the contracting business, serving as the company's president. Vice president F.A. Smith managed the company's farm and ranch interests; at one time the company owned more than 40,000 acres in Texas. Young also acted as a vice president. W. Broadnax and R.J. Windrow of Dallas joined Smith Brothers, Inc., in 1922. The same year the Smith Brothers Properties Company traded the 3,000-acre Riverside Plantation in Washington County, Texas, for L. Ward's 10-acre estate, Bowen's Island, a natural peninsula in the San Antonio River connected to the city at the present-day Navarro Street Bridge on the east side and bounded by the river on the other three sides. [Bowen's Island was known as Galveston Island until 1845.] Estimates suggest that the monetary value of this transaction was approximately $600,000.

The 1920s was an era of unrivaled prosperity across the United States paralleled by commercial growth and consequent construction booms. San Antonio, then the largest city in Texas, flourished as an urban center. The economy thrived on the numerous rail systems that ran through town, affording transportation for local industries such as flour mills, foundries, breweries, and ranching, in addition to several military establishments.

In 1923 the Smith Brothers Properties Company was organized in San Antonio to develop Bowen's Island. [In 1926 the City of San Antonio cut a channel that allowed the river to follow a more direct southerly course between Villita and Nueva streets. The new channel reduced the threat of floods. See Photograph 1.] Literature and correspondence the company produced suggest that the developers envisioned Bowen's Island as a multiple use complex similar to Rockefeller Center in New York, a project that was also in the conceptual stage. To that end the company constructed several buildings including the 1924 Ormsby Chevrolet Company Showroom (demolished), the 1924 Allen Auto Electric Company (demolished), two 1924 garages, the 1926 A.B. Frank Company Wholesale and Drygoods Building (now the City Public Service Building), the 1926 Montgomery Ward & Company Department Store (demolished), the 1927 Plaza Hotel and Garage (now the Granada Homes/Hotel), and the 1928 Federal Reserve Bank Building (now the Mexican Embassy).

Architects Atlee B. Ayres & Robert M. Ayres had already designed all of the major buildings the Smith Brothers Properties Company had erected on Bowen's Island. Again Smith Brothers turned to San Antonio's most prominent architectural firm to design a monumental tower of noble scale and form. Preliminary drawings were underway by December 1927, with 29-year-old Robert Ayres serving as chief designer. Joseph Dodge, a draftsman with the architects' office, was also assigned to the project and worked especially close with the general contractors, McKenzie Construction Company, a firm that had worked on other Bowen's Island buildings as well as the 1926 Olmos Dam on the San Antonio River north of the city.

Robert and his father, Atlee Ayres, were two of Texas' most important architects in the 20th century; their work left a lasting impact on South Texas' distinctive Spanish-influenced building designs. Atlee Ayres (1873-1969), born in Hillsboro, Ohio, came to San Antonio with his parents in 1888. As a collegian, he took courses at the Metropolitan School of Art in New York City, a subsidiary of Columbia University. There he won first prize in the school's annual design competition. His teachers included William Ware, a student of Richard Morris Hunt. He took drawing lessons at the Art Students League and studied painting under Frank Vincent Dumont. Following his 1894 graduation, he returned to San Antonio briefly, working for other architects and then practicing in Mexico until 1900. He shared a firm with CA. Coughlin from 1900 until 1905 when Coughlin died. Atlee then practiced alone in San Antonio designing the 1906 Heimann Building, the 1909 First Presbyterian Church, and numerous residences for prestigious San Antonio citizens like Colonel George W. Brackenridge. He was appointed State Architect of Texas in 1915, which allowed him opportunities to design several buildings for the state. In 1922, when son Robert (1898-1977) graduated with an architecture degree from the University of Pennsylvania, they joined in partnership. In 1926 Atlee published Mexican Architecture, a collection of photographs, drawings, and texts on buildings of colonial Mexico.

The Ayres team designed many important buildings in San Antonio, including the 1925 Municipal Auditorium (NR 1981), the 1927 Plaza Hotel, the 1928 Federal Reserve Bank Building, and the 1931 Administration Building at Randolph Field, known as the "Taj Mahal" (NR 1987). Their work outside San Antonio includes the Blind Institute and, on the University of Texas campus, Carothers Dormitory and the Pharmacy Building in Austin; county courthouses in Kingsville, Alice, Refugio, Del Rio (NR 1977), and Brownsville (NR 1980); and Episcopal churches in Kerrville and Corpus Christi. In addition, the architects designed several hundred homes in San Antonio and other cities and became strongly associated with distinctive and prevalent Spanish traditions of composition.

In the 1920s architecture, on an international level, was making a bumpy transition from traditional to architectonic objectives. The 259 entries, presented in competition for the design of the Chicago Tribune Tower in 1922, ranged from Howells and Hood's winning Gothic Revival tower to Eliel Saarinen's Art Deco skyscraper to Dane, Knud Longberg-Holm's representation of the European modern movement. The diversity of the entries made apparent the polarization of architectural ideals at the time. However, in the midst of this transition, the widely publicized Tribune Tower (1923-25) served as a prototype for skyscrapers around the country, including the Smith-Young Tower.

This skyscraper is a mature example of a 3-part vertical block building, a most predominant form for large commercial buildings in the 1920s. Its composition is analogous to the units of a classical column with an obvious 6-story base, a 14-story midsection shaft, and an 11-story "capital" that has three recesses. The base frames wide-windowed retail space between structural piers and is set off from upper stories by a strong horizontal motif. The tower shaft consists of identical superimposed stories for offices, "fluted" by the expression of vertical framing members that outline the building's steel frame composition. The rib-like quality of these elements achieves a Gothic spirit as does historical detailing, reduced and simplified, in the form of cast stone griffins, gargoyles, and other decorative motifs. The "capital" was often recessed in several intervals like this, accenting the concept of unbroken vertical movement, and giving the building a ziggurat shape. Engulfed in vigor, progress, and capitalism, this stepped-back skyscraper silhouette became the embodiment of 20th century America.

While under construction, the Smith-Young Tower attracted widespread attention. Both the Saturdav Evening Post (13 April 1929) and Texas Pioneer (October 1928) published articles about its construction. The Young & Becker Company of Chicago handled real estate financing and advertising for the project. These promoters boasted in their literature that the tower was "a self-identifying business address...visible at the end of every street."

Sears, Roebuck and Company occupied the first six floors of the building for 10 years. Large display windows along St. Mary's and Villita streets, ornamental doorways and monumental fronts offered sensational distraction and enticed the attention of consumers. The upper stories were rented as office space, housing prominent local professionals and businesses including attorney J.H. Groce, architects Ralph Cameron, George Willis, and Ayres and Ayres, and the Humble Oil Company. To best accommodate tenants the building had numerous "modern" amenities like nine Otis elevators, steel sash windows (lower sections opened in to act as a wind guard, while upper sections opened out [See Photograph 17.]), ceiling fans, water fountains and bathrooms on each floor, ice water connections in each office, a penthouse at the 7th floor, a ladies' lounge at the 18th floor, an underground pneumatic tube system that linked to the Bexar County Courthouse, and a tunnel connecting to the adjacent Plaza Hotel.

The Smith-Young Tower bears a colorful history. It has served as a mooring mast for a blimp, a performance site for a duo of accomplished aerialists, as headquarters of the Third U.S. Army, and as a transmission tower for a television station. In the 1950s the San Antonio Transit Company owned the building and it was known as the Transit Tower. The Tower Life Insurance Company has owned the building since the 1960s and locals since refer to it as the Tower Life Building.