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WITW: The Friday reveal

Only one person hazarded a guess about this week's WITW, and that guess was the Jefferson Pilot (aka the Lincoln) building in downtown Greensboro.

It's a decent guess. Charles Hartmann, the same architect who designed the JP building, also did this one, which is the Atlantic Bank Building in Burlington:

WITW%20Atlantic%20Bank%20031309.jpg The building has some interesting history. Here's the text of one plaque:

The Atlantic Bank & Trust Building was originally completed in September of 1929, one
month prior to the stock market crash.

The architect, Charles C. Hartmann, trained in a Beaux Arts studio in New York City. He worked on the design of Grand Central Station in Manhattan and was briefly associated with Stanford White, and eminent proponent of the Beaux Arts style.

Hartmann also designed and supervised the construction of Greensboro's O. Henry Hotel in 1919 and the Jefferson Standard Life Insurance Company's headquarters in 1920. The Alamance Hotel, also designed by Hartmann, is located one block west of this location and was completed in 1924.

Hartmann's nearly forty-year career established him as one of North Carolina's foremost architects.

And another:

The Atlantic Bank & Trust Building's historic renovation was completed in July or 1993 by Roche Biomedical Laboratories Inc. for use as its corporate headquarters facility. Biomedical Laboratories (later known as Biomedical Reference Laboratories), a predecessor of Roche Biomedical Laboratories, was founded in October of 1969 in the former Rainey Hospital building, approximately 1.2 miles east of this location. Roche Biomedical Laboratories was established in June of 1982 with the merger of Biomedical Reference Laboratories and Roche Clinical Laboratories.

The building is now owned by LabCorp, just like most of downtown Burlington.

What I saw of the building's inside is nothing special. Any sort of architectural details in the lobby have been covered in sheetrock and surrounded with mid-priced furniture. (The first floor accessible to the public is now the customer lobby for LabCorp's credit union.)

I'll leave you with some details from the building's exterior:

WITW%20above%20door%20031309.jpg