“I can see Oskaloosa from here!”

When you describe downtown Lawrence to people who’ve never been here, how do you do it? Do you describe individual shops, restaurants or businesses, like Liberty Hall or the Eldridge? Or maybe the tree-lined street itself, lit up with thousands of lights during the holidays? How about the tower? Do you ever mention it? You know, the giant brown brick tower looming above downtown like some enormous abandoned space alien Jenga game, or the never-finished 1980’s dream condo of a cocaine-fueled Gordon Gecko wannabe.

Like any tall structure these days, it’s sprouting cell phone antennas along the top, but otherwise it appears to be completely empty. No bells as part of a bell tower for a modernist church. In fact, it’s a completely stand-alone structure. So what is it for anyway?

The tower’s relative anonymity is an odd fate for it. At the time it was proposed, a spokesman for the company building it hoped to create a tower “that people will want to look at.” That company was Bell Telephone, the progenitor (through many iterations) of the current owner of the tower, AT&T. Today its sole function is as a cell tower. But its construction predates cell phones by decades.

The story of the tower starts with the building next to it at 734 Vermont Street. It was originally a telephone central office building for the Bell phone system, housing the massive physical telephone exchanges that served Lawrence. Long distance calls coming into and out of Lawrence were routed to this building via a dedicated copper cable. An alternative system in use since the 1950s - using microwaves to beam the information - offered greater capacity, including data and video transmissions. Microwaves can travel great distances in earth’s atmosphere in a tight beam but there’s a catch: they are strictly line-of-sight. That means as tall a tower as possible to be able to “see” other towers miles away.

At the time of the tower’s proposal in the spring of 1978, a Bell spokesman stated that the cable serving Lawrence would be “overburdened” in less than a year, but that the installation of a microwave relay station would be able to handle growth in the area “for at least 20 years”. The need to be close to the central telephone exchange, and tall enough to see relay towers already part of the Bell system dictated a 150 foot tower in the heart of downtown Lawrence.

You’ve seen microwave towers before:

They are, as a general rule, uniformly ugly. To it’s credit, Bell recognized this and proactively suggested an enclosed structure from the get go. According to the Lawrence Journal-World on May 25, 1978, the original “design” called for a square tower with the microwave antennas perched atop it like giant conch shells:

Unimaginative as this concept was, it was never truly the design Bell wanted. It was merely a jumping off point, to demonstrate to city and county officials that Bell would work to minimize the ‘eyesore’ factor of such a structure. Within two months, architects from Design Build (a precursor to Gould Evans) unveiled the three-legged design that we recognize today, its openings for the giant receivers and transmitters pointing toward a Bell tower in Oskaloosa:

According to a statement, Design Build noted that while such a huge tower downtown might seem “incongruous … all of the great towns of the past - whether small hamlets or large cities - had some some form of tower in their skylines.” (Lawrence of course had such an iconic sight - the original Fraser’s two towers - prior to the building’s demolition in 1965) And the firm had high expectations for how the public would respond to the tower. In the journal-World’s article covering the official unveiling of the design on July 21, 1978, architect Bob Gould called the tower “a major landmark for the downtown,” and noted that his firm had “carefully studied the great towers of the past” and that “their characteristics were incorporated into the present designs.” (I will leave it to those more qualified in the architectural arts to point them out.) Furthermore, Gould thought that the tower “could be lit at night, and might become a gathering place.”

Apparently this idea was taken seriously as a pocket park with benches and picnic tables under the tower was considered at the time. (One would think that, having studied the great towers of the world, the designers would’ve noted that pigeon defecation is the number one element they have in common.)

Construction got underway in the spring of 1979 and finished later that year (thankfully that poor copper cable managed to hold out a few extra months). Lawrence had a new addition to its skyline.

A 20 year lifetime proved to be optimistic, however. Landlines would have their revenge. By the mid 90s, fiber optic cables far outclassed the carrying capacity and reliability of microwave transmissions for telephony, data and video. In 1995, Southwestern Bell was in the process of decommissioning the tower and was wasn’t sure of it’s future. A company spokesman thought it could possibly be converted into a clock tower, and Lawrence’s city manager was open to the idea of the tower being gifted to the city. But the rapid rise of cell phone usage that decade soon made a tower with a clear ‘view’ of the entire Kaw Valley a valuable property again. Almost as soon as the microwave antennas were removed, Southwestern Bell’s cellular phone division - then called Cingular - was quietly installing equipment in a newly built building at the tower’s base, completing its conversion to a cell phone tower and forever ending the dream of picnicking under the tower that was had by no one ever.

So the tower continues to stand sentry over downtown Lawrence, shouldering our need for strong connections to networks to provide this very article you are reading, and ready to be the tall thing for whatever future technology we come up with that requires tall things to work. Or failing that, a safe haven from the zombie apocalypse.

TRIVIA

Basic trivia: The AT&T tower is the tallest structure in downtown Lawrence at 154 feet

Bar trivia: It is 46 feet taller than the second highest structure, the U.S. Bank Tower at 9th and Mass.

Showing off trivia: Lawrence originally had only four phone number prefixes - 749, 841, 842 and 843 - because the size of the telephone exchange building on Vermont street was too small to handle more advanced switching equipment.

LFK trivia: When the tower was first discussed with the public at the original city-county planning commission meeting, no Lawrencians showed up to voice opposition (seriously). The public did voice concerns to city commission members by the time the three-sided design was unveiled a few months later. But the concerns were entirely about the microwave radiation somehow frying them. LFK, baby!