The Southern Bell Telephone and Telegraph Building – 45 North Magnolia

February 1925

The Southern Bell Telephone and Telegraph Company purchased property at the corner of North Main Street (now Magnolia) and Summerlin Place (now Wall Street) in February 1925, for the construction of what was first thought to be a two-story building with a basement and fortifications to allow the construction of two additional floors at a future date. The lot, described below, and was purchased for $33,000.

August 1925

An article published in the Orlando Sentinel, August 4, 1925, said the three-story building, land and equipment would cost $900,000 and included the proposed use for each of the first three stories and basement as well as the fourth and fifth floors to be added later.

The first floor would feature a commercial and public space, along with offices, with the majority of the square footage designated for a kitchen, dining room, and rest rooms.

The second floor was for toll switchboards (long distance), information and administrative telephone desks, and amenities for the young women who worked there 24 hours a day including a recreation room, quiet room, locker room, and a toilet room.

The third floor was for one machine switch unit to provide service for between 12,000 and 13,000 telephone stations.

The fourth floor to be added in the future as demand warranted, would contain two additional machine switch units to accommodate at least 35,000 telephone stations, and the fifth floor would accommodate any future contingencies.

December 1925

Site preparation for the three-story structure with basement was well underway by December 1925.

The front page of Section 9 of the Orlando Morning Sentinel on December 22, 1925, features photos of some of the major construction projects in the city. The photo on the bottom left is the Southern Bell Telephone and Telegraph building, but it appears that they have recently begun construction on the basement or foundation.

Building Complete Late 1926

It is unclear when construction on the three-story Southern Bell Telephone Company building was completed, but an article in the October 5, 1926, Orlando Morning Sentinel shows it was around October 1926: “Now that the new million-dollar Southern Bell Telephone Company’s plant is completed in Orlando and the dial system will go into effect next month, there arises a question of an increase in telephone rates…”

The article continues, stating that the new building and equipment are on par with the best in the world: “The new plant, recently erected is said to be second to none in the world. Some, of course, are larger, but the last word in up-to-date equipment has been installed and changing from the manual to the dial system will give Orlando the most modern service.”

Additions

Eventually, three additional stories were constructed on top of the original three-story Southern Bell building. The Orange County Property Appraiser’s site shows that the original structure was expanded, and two additional floors were added in 1937 and another in 1946.

Examine the photo, above, carefully. Notice that the brick color changes slightly above the windows in the 1925 building with the tiled detail under them. The windows in the new stories have mimicked the rectangular decoration but with brick.

The original structure was eventually expanded to the north and east of the original 1925 structure, eliminating Oak Street which had divided the block from west to east, resulting in 208.75 feet frontage on Magnolia (formerly Main) and 179.36 feet on Washington and Wall Street (formerly Summerlin Place) as shown in the images below.

There was also a tower with 16 antennas reaching 218 feet above ground level. The tower was eventually removed with a huge crane in the early 2000s.

A photograph of the Orlando Public Library that opened in 1966, captured the tower in the background.

Break Up of Bell Telephone and Telegraph

The breakup of the Bell System became official on January 1, 1984. Pursuant to United States v. Western Electric Co., a three-dimensional conveyance easement and operational agreement was signed by Southern Bell Telephone and Telegraph Company and AT&T Communications of the Southern States, Inc., on December 31, 1983, regarding shared use and ownership of the land, buildings and equipment at 45 North Magnolia. The 128-page deed describes in great detail, even the “air space” conveyed by distance from the ground based on data from the United States Geological Survey.

Artwork by Don Reynolds

The Magnolia side of the original 1926 Bell Telephone and Telegraph building has one large painting and a series of five smaller murals depicting the history of communication created by artist Don Reynolds in 1997. He began research for his “Waves of Communications” mural about a year earlier, even getting a tour of the interior of the building. Mr. Reynolds described his experience: “I remember taking a tour of the building with the AT&T officials and them showing me, down in the basement, the new fiber optic control system just coming in. There were many elements of the mural composition that went through my head at the time knowing the limited timeline I had to start and finish this project, but it was fun nevertheless.”

Waves of Communication

The first image spanning the six-story building is followed by five smaller paintings on the west facing side of the building. It appears to be a mythical human figure harnessing the electrical and telephone lines from the telephone pole in the center of the painting, standing atop a portal with water gushing forth from what appears to be the Lake Eola fountain in the center. The title of this piece is reported to be “Waves of Communication.”

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The other five painting that comprise the mural trace many forms of human communication from ancient times to recent history with images and text.

The first image shows what appears to be an animal from a cave drawing, the great pyramids with hieroglyphs of the ancient Egyptians, perhaps an ancient islander communicating with a conk shell, an inhabitant of the continent of Africa communicating with a drum, smoke signals being used by Native Americans, a carrier pigeon, and a Pony Express rider.

The second painting includes faces of three men, others erecting a telegraph or telephone pole, and a lineman on a telephone pole with a receiver in hand, and what looks like, perhaps, switchboard operators sitting on stools. There is a tuning fork, a transmitter (1876), an old candlestick telephone (1892) in the lower right. Alexander Graham Bell may be one of the faces as he used the tuning fork to transmit sound, however, none have his great beard. One of the faces could be Johann Philipp Reis, a German inventor.

The third painting includes an old dial phone and push buttons from the phone that replaced the rotary dial. There are also cables that appear to be leading to circuit boards and one in the hand of a person dialing a phone number with data spewing forth all with a town in the background.

In the photograph, below, provided by the artist, you can see Don Reynolds working on the above mural image using spray paint on sections he had previously sketched onto the brick wall.

The fourth painting, shown above, is the most unusual. It shows a colorful telecommunications satellite dish, a frog jumping with data symbols, another making a splash in the water, and a fish-frog creature flying out of the water meant to denote “leapfrog technology”. There is the image of a man with white hair and text, part of which, appears to be the word “Marconi” holding a cell phone and a tin can with a string (old kid’s play phone). www.ATT.COM/WORLDNET is lettered on the bottom. WorldNet, the long-distance giant’s own online service, launched in 1996 with the promise of making the Net “as universally available, and as easy to use, as telephone service”.

The last painting appears to show a telecommunications satellite owned by a U.S. company (flag on side) with light or, perhaps, information and communications being beamed up from earth. It might mark the launching of the first satellite phone network intended for the general public in 1998 by Iridium with satellites and satellite phones produced by Motorola, but this is pure conjecture.

Mr. Reynolds has had an amazing life, and his works of art are numerous and varied. For more information about Don Reynolds, please visit this post on the artist.