This column, written by LVEDC President & CEO Don Cunningham, originally appeared in The Morning Call and on the newspaper’s website on June 18, 2023.
When I read the obituaries, I root for people to have lived 100 years.
I can’t help it. I don’t know why. It would be more appropriate for me to just hope that they’d lived a high number of good and healthy years. 
My great-grandmothers lived to be 99 and 98 years old. I always wished that they had made it to 100. I don’t think they cared. Their good and healthy years had long ended.
Last week, when I learned that PPL Corp. is leaving and selling its iconic 23-story building in downtown Allentown, it hit me like one of those obituaries. I worked at PPL as a young man in that building. Nostalgia washed over me.
Opened in 1928, the Tower Building won’t make 100 years as PPL’s corporate headquarters. The beautiful art deco skyscraper put both Allentown and the Lehigh Valley on the map – and helped to launch PPL to the Fortune 500 company it became.
I remember the feeling of walking in the door on my first day in 1993. It was hard to believe I’d be working in that magical building I’d gazed at since I was a kid.
I’ve been fortunate in my career. I’ve worked in a lot of significant and historic buildings – the old Globe-Times newspaper in south Bethlehem, Colonial Hall at Moravian College, Bethlehem City Hall, the Pennsylvania Capitol, the former Leh’s Department store in Allentown after becoming the Lehigh County Government Center and the Bethlehem Club in downtown Bethlehem built by Steel CEO Charles Schwab, now the offices of LVEDC.
None of those made my heart pound like the Tower Building. It was built at a historic time of transition in America. The development of steel, electricity, elevators and automobiles had given rise to office buildings in city downtowns that reached toward the sky. They were filled with office workers growing a new economy of innovation and prosperity. The ’20s roared and all seemed possible in America.
In many regards, Allentown and, hence, the Lehigh Valley, were ahead of much bigger cities. It was a bold move for a company not yet 10 years old – consolidated from nearly a dozen small Pennsylvania electric companies – to embark on such a grand headquarters.
It cost PPL $3.5 million – plus $676,000 for the land.
“I really believe the building helped to sell the company to the public,” said Saxon Scheirer, one of the first employees to occupy it, when interviewed in 1978 at the building’s 50th Anniversary. “One fellow said that seeing the Tower Building convinced him that electricity was here to stay.”
The company hired architect Wallace K. Harrison in New York City. He’d never designed a skyscraper but had studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris after World War I.
Harrison would go on to incorporate much of the Tower Building’s design into his design of Rockefeller Center in New York. He would later serve as the lead architect for the United Nations Building and Lincoln Center.
Harrison said in 1950, “that building, the first skyscraper I ever worked on, has always seemed to me the perfect illustration of why the skyscraper was the logical answer to the changing business scene in this country.”
Today, the building’s retirement as PPL’s corporate home indicates a new business scene. Developments in technology and new thinking toward remote office work are shifting the landscape of urban downtowns. Office buildings are losing tenants.
It’s very pronounced in America’s large urban centers such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York and Atlanta where skyscrapers number in the dozens and workers in the millions.
Values for top-tier office properties have plunged 25% with the broader market 40% below prepandemic levels, Green Street, a real estate analytics provider, reported last month in Bloomberg Business Week.
Buildings that survived the Great Depression, World War II and numerous economic cycles, won’t survive the changes wrought by the global COVID pandemic.
The good news is PPL will keep its headquarters in downtown Allentown and move just two blocks to the shiny Two City Center office building, across from the PPL Arena. It makes business sense for PPL. The Tower Building’s good and healthy years had long ended. Only 400 employees still occupy the building’s more than 200,000 square feet – twice as much expensive-to-maintain space as is needed. Many of those have been working remote.
PPL will thrive in a new, first-class building with a 20-year lease.
Business changes. Icons come and go.
The seeds of the Tower Building’s end as PPL’s headquarters were sown in the 1990s when electricity was deregulated, ultimately leading utilities to spin-off generation from delivery. New companies were created, and thousands of employees moved to new locations.
At PPL, its generating assets became Talen, a new company owned by private equity, and building occupancy was cut in half.
What comes next for Allentown will not be easy. But the city has weathered the loss and transition of grand buildings in the past – Hess’s, Leh’s, the Americus Hotel.
Residential housing is needed – and the views would be spectacular.
One of my best assignments at PPL was working on a community project in the mid-1990s to help restore the then-endangered peregrine falcon.
PPL partnered with the Wildlands Conservancy and other conservation groups to build nests on the 23rd floor parapets. I spent time outside at the building’s very top. The wind was fierce. It was often cold. The views breathtaking.
The nests worked. Peregrine falcons landed there – and gave birth, several times. A closed-circuit camera was installed so people could watch the chicks grow. The birds were removed from the U.S. endangered species list in 1999. The Tower Budling had done its part.
Maybe it doesn’t matter that it won’t make it to 100 as PPL’s headquarters. It’s really the quality of those years that count, right?