L&C Tower and First National Bank

The Life and Casualty Tower, known as the L&C, was Nashville’s first post-WWII skyscraper. Standing at 409 feet with 30 stories, the building was the tallest building in the southeastern U.S. when it was completed in 1957. The tower was the vision of the company’s president, Paul Mountcastle, who began an ambitious expansion of the company in 1952. That growth resulted in L&C’s domination of the insurance markets in Tennessee, and thus the company’s need for a much larger building for its headquarters. 

Architect Edwin A. Keeble, who received his engineering and architecture degrees from Vanderbilt University and the University of Pennsylvania, was inspired by the Philadelphia Saving Fund Society Building. The L&C building’s International Style features a dark marble Art-Deco-like entrance. Function drove the design of the building with its double-pane windows flanked by vertical aluminum fins. This was the result of a collaboration between Keeble and an astronomer at Vanderbilt University. The design blocks the sun between 9:30 AM and 5:15 PM keeping the building cooler in the summer. In the winter, light floods the building during daylight hours. These efforts made for huge savings in energy consumption decades before conservation was a priority. 

For decades the twenty-five-foot-tall, neon L&C letters mounted on the face of the building’s core, provided Nashvillians their daily weather forecast. Tied to the airport’s U.S. Weather Bureau station, it changed colors—red for rain or snow, blue for clear, pink for cloudy, and rippling lights to signify a temperature change. 

Now turn away from the L&C Tower to look at the First National Bank on the other side of Fourth Avenue.

Iconic now to Nashville’s skyline, the city’s collection of skyscrapers began with the construction of the First National Bank Building in 1905, made possible by a then-new technology—steel. Steel designed for use as a framework for buildings was invented only two decades earlier in Chicago. The original Neoclassical building was designed by architects Barnett, Hayes and Barnett. A major 12-story addition, by architects Hart, Freeland and Roberts in 1938, doubled the building’s footprint and its floor space, and provided the impetus to renovate the original structure in the Art Deco style, a staple of skyscraper design during that time.

The building has had many names throughout its life including “Third National Bank,” which is emblazoned in cut stone on its Fourth Avenue façade. In 1997, a major renovation converted the building into a hotel, the Courtyard by Marriott. Take a peek inside as the lobby and lounge showcase the original bank lobby design and includes its bank vault. 

Walk one block west up Church Street to Fifth Avenue North and stop in front of the flagpole in front of Downtown Presbyterian Church. Along the way, you will pass the sign for Deacon’s New South on the left before you reach the church.