Highrise #34

**Telephone Building** **Art by:** Chris Hytha **Story by:** Mark Houser This tall office in glazed terracotta seems tasteful, graceful, and deliberately unobtrusive so as not to steal the spotlight from its celebrated neighbor across the street, the New York State Capitol. That was surely deliberate: Paul Gmelin, the German-born architect who drew it up, worked for a New York firm founded by the son of Leopold Eidlitz, one of the architects who worked on the capitol. Albany was an early adopter of telecommunications technology. One year after Alexander Graham Bell won the gold medal for his invention at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the city became the first to get pho...View all