Chase Tower is
a 21-story skyscraper in downtown Austin, Texas at the intersection of Lavaca
and West Sixth Street. Owned by JPMorgan Chase & Co, this building is a
major banking center for the city of Austin as well as the surrounding area.
The Chase Tower houses 389,503 square feet of office space and Chase is a major
employer in the Austin community. Furthermore, the Chase Tower has an
underground parking garage and it is connected via a skywalk to a parking
garage on the opposite side of Lavaca.
For our
English project, our group (Connor Smith and Payton Broaddus) initially chose
Austin City Hall as our location, but after seeing a crowd of protestors
picketing outside Chase Tower, we decided to move location and investigate the
role Chase Tower held in the city of Austin. From our research, we found a
serious divide on people’s views of both the physical Chase Bank building as
well as what it represents.
From one point
of view, the Chase Tower is portrayed positively as a public domain and an
important part of Austin, and many of the iconic small business and restaurants
in Austin were created using capital loaned from the Chase Bank. Looking at the
architecture alone, one sees a building that is very grand with its slick black
walls and shiny silver windows. This outside appearance of elegance reflects
the professionalism of Chase and its employees. During the time we spent there
we observed that each of the employees and customers was wearing the
professional attire of sport jackets and ties. In one way, then, the Chase
Tower is a physical economic and business center of the Austin community.
 |
| Photo by Connor Smith - 403 Lavaca Street between Antone's and Lavaca Street Bar |
On another
level, the Chase Tower also physically acts as a center of local and national
politics in the Austin community. On September 26, 2011, Speaker of the House
John Boehner came to Austin for a fundraising dinner held at the upper levels
of the Chase Tower. From protestors on the ground, we learned that Boehner’s
purpose for holding a fundraising dinner was to gain financial donors for his
reelection run, and that each person would have to pay upwards of thirty
thousand dollars to attend this fund raiser. By choosing Chase Tower rather
than any other corporate place to hold his luncheon, Boehner showed that Chase
Bank was a fundamental tool in the Austin community for connecting wealthy
local business owners to people in the national government. Thus, looking at
Chase Tower, you see a corporate entity that plays an important role in
connecting the City of Austin’s powerful people to the national political
arena.
In a way,
Chase Tower can also be described as a public place. The Chase Tower follows
the city rules of the sidewalks around the building being public space, and
thus they had to allow people to protest outside of the building. Surprisingly
the lobby at the bottom of the building is also open to anyone, and we even saw
a few protestors stand in the air-conditioned lobby to escape the heat outside.
Furthermore, the police and security guards at the building were very friendly,
answering all of our questions and even giving us advice that they were not
necessarily supposed to do. For example, an officer who will remain nameless
said that he could not give his consent for us to take a picture of him, yet he
slyly added that nothing was stopping us from taking a picture of him without
asking (which we did). Chase Tower surprisingly had that unique Austin feel
(like you would find at places like Amy’s or Barton Springs) even though it was
a large corporate building.
However, many
people at the protest thought negatively of both the Chase Tower and Chase
Bank. I asked one of the protestors what he thought of the actual building and
its architecture, to which he replied: “Well architecturally, it shows crap can
pile high and pile deep.”
 |
| Photo by Connor Smith - Chase Bank at 6th and Lavaca |
Although the
building on the outside looked nice, to many people the polished surface of the
bank could not hide the corruption they believed to be rampant underneath. For
many of the protestors, they had a legitimate reason to be angry and suspect
corruption in the banking industry. Many of the people we talked to were
unemployed, and many others were facing foreclosure by banks due to defaulting
on payments. Seeing as how in recent years the federal government bailed out
and gave stimulus money to a number of large banks (include JP Morgan Chase and
Co.) in order to reduce foreclosures and stem the recession, many of the
protestors were angry that they still face threats of foreclosure and suspected
foul play on the part of the banks. The anger they felt at John Boehner for not
signing the “American Jobs Act” (a bill to jumpstart the economy and help get
jobs for the unemployed) transferred also to the banks for mismanaging federal
funding and punishing the “middle class.” Thus, the Chase Tower can also be seen
as a hub for political cronyism (as seen by Boehner recently holding a luncheon
there) as well as hub for corrupt business practices.
Finally, by observing both the architecture as well as
the people there, I noticed that despite its Austin feel, in other ways the
Chase Tower is a private domain that is almost entirely disconnected from the
rest of Austin. By comparing the people who worked at Chase Tower and the
protestors outside the building, one could see a stark contrast between the
economic statuses of the two groups. Whereas the majority of the people who
work at Chase Tower were clearly well off and were probably upper class or
upper middle class (evident by their attire), the protestors represented the
middle class majority of Austin. Nearly everyone I interviewed identified
themselves as middle class, and they definitely did not identify themselves
with the people of Chase Bank. For example, I interviewed a woman who was one
of the first African Americans to graduate from the University of Texas, and
she strongly identified with the middle class and the middle class struggle.
This
difference between the “middle class” and the “white collar high paid bankers”
shows a clear economic divide that helps define the Chase Tower as a fairly
separate entity from the mainstream of Austin.
 |
| Photo by Connor Smith - Chase Bank at 6th and Lavaca |
Furthermore, the architecture of the Chase Tower
radiates an aura of power and supremacy that separates the building from the
rest of Austin. Not only does the Chase Tower overshadow the other buildings
and show a sort of supremacy over the rest of the city, but also the chilly and
elaborately decorated interior of the building similarly shows a clear
distinction from the hot and dirty sidewalk outside the lobby. This idea of
supremacy and power compared to the rest of Austin can further be shown by the
skywalk that connects the Chase Tower to the parking garage across Lavaca. By
making it so that employees of Chase do not have to walk across the sidewalk
with other pedestrians, the Chase Tower literally puts the people of Chase
above the traffic and other citizens in the city. An image that perfectly
captured this was the two well-dressed bankers watching the protest from the
parking garage. After a few minutes they got bored with watching the protest
and simply traveled across the skywalk to their office, thus physically avoiding contact with the
middle class protestors. In effect, the Chase Tower is both architecturally as
well as emotionally disconnected from City of Austin.
No comments:
Post a Comment