More than likely, you have squinted up at the soaring twin spires that dominate the Nashville skyline.
Perhaps you have wondered what it would be like to stand between them, the wind ruffling your hair, the skyscraper's AT&T letters just a few feet from your outstretched fingers, the monuments of Music City like tiny icons more than 30 stories below you.
Let me tell you: It feels like being a superhero. Batman, perhaps. (Or, in my case, a super sidekick like Catwoman.)
This week, the iconic skyscraper that serves as AT&T's Tennessee headquarters celebrates its 20th anniversary. The Commerce Street office tower, which was designed by Earl Swensson & Associates and opened in October 1994, is our state's tallest building.
With its dark facade and pointy peaks, it certainly is worthy of its colloquial nickname: "Batman Building."
So how, exactly, does one get to the top of this structure? One must climb.
Beginning in the belly of the building and stopping at nearly every floor, I chose the anniversary of the grand opening to experience a day-in-the-life of the AT&T building.
To the Bat Cave.
• UNDERGROUND LAIR — a.k.a. parking garage: Nine stories underground, the parking garage is the largest excavation ever attempted in the state. There are 1,308 parking spaces with the deepest point 94 feet below street level at the corner of Fourth and Commerce streets. I glimpse a few cars and ascend to the basement.
• BASEMENT: Piles of packages tower behind a chain-link gate in the concrete expanse where Michael Howard has worked for seven years. "This is the Bat Cave," jokes Howard, looking suave in his cap and dark-rimmed glasses. The Novitex employee is the master of the mailroom, the man who delivers mail to the AT&T employees who occupy floors 16 to 27 in the building above him. He journeys up every day, taking the elevator to the top and the stairs back down. "There's no hard packages," he said. Then reconsiders recounting the 12 pallets of calendars he once delivered to employees. He claims to have seen Batman on the 18th floor a few months ago, slinking around with Superman.
• GROUND FLOOR: A maze of twisting hallways takes us past a vacant wellness center (it is 9:24 a.m.), training rooms and the maintenance shop where a forest of fake Christmas trees are stored and a crew of workers take a break from cleaning the building's cooling towers. "You will be so turned around before you leave here," promises AT&T Corporate Real Estate Manager Melissa Thomason, who serves as our tour guide. In Human Resources, Lisa Anderson enjoys her ground-floor office, with the street-view window that allows ample ogling of camera-toting tourists. It feels safer than her former home on the 22nd floor. When a tornado crusaded through downtown in 1998, she remembers seeing office furniture sucked out of nearby buildings zip past her windows. "You could feel the building sway," she said.
• LOBBY: A three-story winter garden atrium, complete with palm trees, serves as the building's foyer. Here members of AT&T's senior team recruit mentors to support Governor Bill Haslam's Drive to 55 initiative. The smell of sizzling chicken strips draws one into the nearby Chick-fil-a, where a wall of historic photos document the building's construction.
• FLOOR 2: When building construction began in 1991, Broadway was "not necessarily a place people wanted to go or be," said Charlie Howorth, executive director of the Tennessee Business Roundtable, which occupies this floor as part of the state's economic development center. There was no traffic, he said. No people. Not any more. The Batman Building has been part of the growth that has flickered like a time-lapse movie outside its windows. "What has happened here is just this side of a miracle."
• FLOORS 3-7: Nothing to see here, folks. These floors are vacant.
• FLOORS 8, 9 and 10: I am told these spaces are occupied by U.S. Bank and the Federal Reserve Bank, which weren't keen on having visitors. Presumably, this is actually where Bruce Wayne keeps his billions.
• FLOORS 11, 12 and (yes!) 13: When executives from Pillsbury law firm's New York offices come to visit Nashville, they are always surprised to exit the elevator on the 13th floor. No superstitions here. Few, if any buildings in the Big Apple have one. Pillsbury law firm opened its operations center in Nashville in 2012, employing more than 170 people to support 18 offices around the world. With its slick curved walls, colorful furniture and use of frosted glass, Pillsbury is a sleek space. The 11th floor is actually a construction zone, where the firm will expand its footprint. Being in the Batman Building is definitely a high point. "When people come to visit, they walk around their mouth agape," said Kathleen Pearson, director of administration.
• FLOORS 14 and 15: When looking at photos of the Nashville skyline, attorney Mark Manner can almost always pick out his corner office, where a pair of telescopes point space-ward. As managing partner of h3gm law firm, which has been housed in this space for two years, he loves the prestige of the building. "It just screams Nashville," he said.
• FLOOR 16: This is a bat bridge, or a floor with an employee lounge that connects the tenant side of the building to the upper floors that house AT&T. Here, Jim Graves oversees network services. He was the company's state president when the building opened. He distinctly remembers driving a car filled with kindergarteners by the building not long after it opened. When they screamed "the Bat Building, that's when I knew we had a hit," Graves said.
• FLOORS 17, 18 and 19: The beat of a nearby boom box sets the tone. Three floors hold 160 call center employees, all sitting in cubicles covered by party-like paraphernalia. I pop in to a manager meeting on Floor 17 and take a quick poll. What's the best thing about working in the Batman Building? The views and the fame.
• FLOOR 20 and 22: Would you enjoy a taco bar? Just visit the 20th-floor kitchen area. The decorative enthusiasm floats upward with balloons that turn collection centers into a colorful explosion. It's important to inject that enthusiasm into the job, said Randy Timmons, and that includes workplace. Moving from the old AT&T building in Green Hills to here was like trading in a 30-year-old clunker for a brand-new Cadillac, he said.
• FLOOR 21: With her senior team assembled, Joelle Phillips, president of AT&T Tennessee, conducts a meeting in the executive space. The floor is certainly breathtaking with a window-walled board room and pristine meeting spaces.
• FLOOR 23: The most distinguishing items here are the maps that hang on the walls. This is the engineering and construction team floor.
• FLOOR 24: It's getting quieter the higher I get. Here AT&T staff connect state agencies to data centers. Lots of sensitive information.
• FLOOR 25: The entire time Debra Kelley has worked in this building, she has only been on five floors — the training rooms on the ground floor, the lounge on 16 and the top three floors to which most people have access. She works in AT&T customer service on 25, but 27 is the manager's favorite (she walks laps up there). She used to see a lot of airplanes — 9/11 made that less. The occasional praying mantis citing does beg the question: "How did it get up here?"
• FLOOR 26: There are many rumors about the building. One, business solutions employee Jeff Sanford recalls, is that it was built on remains of a dinosaur. Another is that the top of the building is actually designed to look like a telephone sitting in its cradle. The second one, according to AT&T documents, seems to be true.
• FLOOR 27: What must be the state's highest event space, this open floor plan offers a 360-view of the city. AT&T has employee-only functions up here. It's a fabulous place to watch fireworks. There's also yoga at lunch on Wednesdays. For most people, this is the end of the journey. But I have connections. I turn to the service elevator and press 28.
• FLOORS 28 and 29: I step out in a less than exotic space below the sloped glass of the building's peak. Contrary to popular belief, the area does not contain the executive offices. It actually hides two floors of storage and building mechanical apparatus. With gray foam insulation covering pipes and beams, there is an artistic aura to the dark space.
• FLOOR 30: A floating metal staircase that hovers over the storage creaks and jiggles slightly as I climb. The anticipation mounts. There was a time just after Justin Temple joined the building maintenance staff five years ago that he used to run these stairs three times a day to stay in shape. Why did he stop? He could tell a cool story about losing a limb, but reality is more honest: "Laze," he said.
• LOW ROOF: Holy stratosphere, Batman. I have made it. As I marvel at Music City below us (and try ignore the vertigo), there is only one thing left to do before descent, take a super selfie.
BY THE NUMBERS
632 feet — Height of building, making AT&T's Tennessee headquarters building the tallest in the state.
$94 million — Cost to put it up. The building came in $6 million under budget and five months ahead of schedule.
2 1/2 years — Time to construct the building, which was completed in September 1994. BellSouth workers started moving the next month, consolidating from offices in 14 other sites throughout Nashville.
2.8 acres — Land on the site, which is bounded by Commerce Street, Third and Fourth avenues and an alley.
33 models — Number of models for the building that were prepared by Earl Swensson Associates, architect for the project, before finding one that would work for executives of BellSouth, then known as South Central Bell.
9.8 million pounds — Steel in the building, in the form of more than 900 tons of structural steel and more than 4,000 tons of reinforcing steel.
230,000 cubic yards — Rock removed from the site during construction. Pile that on the Titans' playing field in LP Field and it would be almost 108 feet deep, or 36 yards, if you go by the first-down markers.
1.1 million pounds — Post tension cable in the building. The half-inch wire cable, inserted in the concrete floors before they were poured, is long enough to stretch from Nashville to Charlotte, N.C.
— Tennessean archives
