Downtown

Chapter one · 1931

Fourteen storeys
on Sixth Avenue

Two years into the Depression, while the rest of the country was pulling money out of walls, Des Moines put some in. The firm of Proudfoot, Rawson, Souers & Thomas — the same office whose drawings shaped half the city worth photographing — sent a 190-foot Art Deco tower up into the line of high-rises the papers called the Sixth Avenue Canyon.

They gave it a base of black granite, bronze revolving doors, and a lobby of polished black marble, chrome and terrazzo — a room built the way banks used to make promises: in stone.

Chapter two · the office years

Half a century
of typewriters

For decades the tower did what towers were for: insurance men, lawyers, agencies, the clatter of keys fourteen floors up. Downtown Des Moines ran on buildings like this one — and on the canyon of Sixth Avenue, this was the one with the best doors.

Chapter three · the emptying

The lights
go out

Then the century turned and the offices drifted — west, out, elsewhere. Floor by floor the tower emptied until the best Art Deco building in the city stood dark on its corner, fourteen storeys of nothing, watching the skywalk traffic pass it by.

Chapter four · 2011

The city
steps in

In November 2011 the city found the tower a new owner willing to take on fourteen empty floors of granite and bronze. On paper it was a property transaction. In practice it was a rescue, and everyone involved knew it.

Chapter five · the restoration

Everything new,
except the room that mattered

The National Register of Historic Places added the building in October 2013, and the renovation rebuilt everything above it: 146 lofts where the desks had been, two floors of commercial space, a pocket park where there wasn’t one. The lobby they left almost entirely alone — the terrazzo, the black marble, the chrome — because you do not repaint a room like that. You dust it.

Chapter six · now

The roof
gets the last word

Today the tower is full of people again, and the top of it — where the setbacks step toward the sky the way 1931 believed buildings should — is a rooftop with the whole city laid out around it: the Capitol’s gold dome east, the river below, the canyon it helped invent all around.

The rest of this guide is what you can reach from its front door.