New Jersey Bell Headquarters Building, Art Deco office building in Newark, United States.
The New Jersey Bell Headquarters Building is a 20-story Art Deco office building in downtown Newark, New Jersey, clad in buff brick and sandstone. It now houses a mix of residential apartments and office spaces and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
The building was completed in 1929 for the New Jersey Bell Telephone Company, at a time when telephone companies were among the largest commercial builders in American cities. Over the following decades it changed hands several times before being converted to mixed residential and office use.
The sculptural work on the facade was created by Edward McCartan, an American sculptor known for his decorative figures on public buildings in the 1920s. His reliefs on the pilasters represent themes tied to communication, reflecting the building's original purpose as a telephone company headquarters.
The building sits in downtown Newark and is easy to approach on foot from the surrounding streets. The facade details are best seen in daylight, though the evening lighting of the upper floors offers a different perspective worth seeing.
Since its opening, the building has been lit at night with warm orange lights focused on its upper floors, a feature that was part of the original design rather than added later. This makes it one of the earliest buildings in Newark to have been designed with permanent exterior lighting as an intentional architectural element.
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