What's atop the Schaefer Tower in Baltimore?

Daily Record, The (Baltimore), Jun 20, 2008 by Andy Rosen

It rises up from the corner of Baltimore and St. Paul streets, a mass of copper and gray, glass and steel that shoots more than 27 stories into the sky.

The curiosity of the William Donald Schaefer Tower comes with the "more than," because the state office building extends beyond the Maryland Transit Administration conference room that constitutes its last finished floor. Higher and higher it rises, past a floor that is sparsely populated by electrical equipment and abandoned office chairs, before it comes to a neat point with a narrow spire.

A flagpole clings to the side of the spire, which mostly houses a spiral staircase that steeplejacks take to the very tip of the building.

All told, the Schaefer Tower reaches 36 stories, nine of which are unoccupied. There are no windows at the very top, just a stuffy, opaque cap that contains old flags and related paraphernalia. Names of people who have visited the pinnacle are scrawled in permanent marker all across the ceiling.

According to the state Department of General Services, the flagpole reaches 690 feet. This makes the Schaefer Tower the tallest building in Maryland, the department says, though building height rankings generally do not include antennas and flagpoles.

According to Emporis Corp., a German building information company, the Legg Mason building is the tallest structure between Philadelphia and Charlotte, N.C., at 529 feet. The Schaefer Tower, which by Emporis' calculation stands at 493 feet, is ranked third in Baltimore among completed structures behind the Legg Mason and Bank of America buildings.

Bob Aydukovic, vice president of economic development for the Downtown Partnership of Baltimore Inc., directs tours of downtown and said he often gets questions about the Schaefer Tower. He said it's an interesting component of the city skyline.

"If you're standing down at the corner of Baltimore and Light streets, it's a building with a lot of presence," he said. "It's a nice feature to have, and I'm sure a lot of business people look up and scratch their heads and say, 'Why is that there?'"

Just more than 20 years old, the building already has a solid place in Baltimore lore. Stories about its planning and construction abound. For example, designers originally considered using green metal facing instead of the trademark mirrored glass and metal that adorn the tower.

The building was named for Schaefer, the former Baltimore City Council president, mayor, governor and comptroller, when the state bought it 15 years ago, and a bust of him sits in the lobby.

But the 305,400-square-foot building began its life as the Merritt Tower, named for a savings and loan company that failed in the 1980s. It has also been affectionately referred to as "the finger" by some in the design community.

The state bought the tower, then called 6 St. Paul Centre, from New York-based Chemical Bank -- a predecessor of JP Morgan Chase & Co. Chemical was the last in a series of owners after the building was sold by Merritt Commercial Savings and Loan, which was bought out of financial trouble with state assistance during the savings and loan crisis in the mid-1980s. The state paid $12.2 million for the tower, which Merritt sold at auction for $30 million.

Merritt owner Gerald Klein's hopes for the tower played a big role in its design, said J. Robert Hillier, a Princeton, N.J.-based architect who designed the tower. Klein wanted the building to be the tallest in Baltimore, but had a relatively small plot of land to work with.

Baltimore, like other cities, limits the amount of buildings' square footage based on the size of the land they're built on. So to go tall, Hillier said he had to get creative. He elected to taper the building into a spire.

"It's an iconic building," he said. "And it's weird because it's so narrow for its height, and that makes it distinctive."

Hillier said the height of the building was a challenge because it called for smaller floor plans, which were constrained by both the building's narrowness and the need for multiple elevators. It takes two elevators to get to the upper floors, one to the 22nd floor and another to the top.

That is what Hillier said his client wanted, though.

"He saw the building as a billboard, which was about him and his company," he said.

Klein, who died several years ago, had intended to use the top floors as luxury apartments, and several people who are familiar with the building said they believed he may have wanted to live there himself. The structure was complete in 1986, according to the Department of General Services. However, DGS said those floors were finished as office space at the time the state bought the tower.

The Daily Record visited many of the building's top floors, including the MTA offices and the conference room, as well as some of Gov. Martin O'Malley's staff offices. The governor's actual office was off-limits. The state keeps a Baltimore office for the governor near the top of the building, and it is O'Malley's home base while the State House undergoes renovations this year.