Norwood Building
a.k.a. Norwood Tower
114 W. 7th St., Austin, TXThe Norwood Building, designed by the noted Texas architectural firm of Giesecke & Harris and constructed in 1929, is the only Gothic Revival- or Commercial Gothic-styled tall building in the city of Austin. It is located adjacent to the Congress Avenue Historic District and has been designated a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark (RTHL) by the Texas Historical Commission, and it is also a City of Austin Historic Landmark. The sixteen-story Norwood Building is ornamented with typical Gothic trefoils, gargoyles, and arches, but other ornamentation includes references to the professions of the building's tenants, including the practices of law and medicine. The two-story, cruciform-plan penthouse, is a single residence that opens to a roof garden. Although late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century development now dominates the city's skyline, and the building is no longer the tallest in Austin, it appears much as it did upon its completion, and it is still serves a variety of professional tenants. The Norwood Building is therefore nominated to the National Register of Historic Places, at the local level of significance, under Criterion C for Architecture.
Local significance of the building:Listed in National Register of Historic Places in 2011.
The National Register of Historic Places is the official list of the Nation’s historic places worthy of preservation. Authorized by the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, the National Park Service’s National Register of Historic Places is part of a national program to coordinate and support public and private efforts to identify, evaluate, and protect America’s historic and archeological resources.