Video: The story behind the AT&T “Batman” building in Nashville
In a 2016 Tennessean video, Nashville architect Earl Swensson explains the idea behind the design of one of Music City’s most famous buildings.
For the past three decades, the AT&T Building on Commerce Street, affectionately known as the “Batman Building,” has been a landmark that has stood out and defined Nashville’s skyline despite its constant evolution.
Earl Swensson, the building’s architect, and the local American Institute of Architects recognized at the time that downtown Nashville was dying as the suburbs grew.
Swensson and the architectural committee reached out to 30 different organizations and asked them what they thought Nashville needed. One thing became clear from all of these meetings: a strong downtown.
“The mayor didn’t say we should do it. The governor didn’t say we should do it. The government certainly had nothing to do with it. That’s how Nashville did it,” Swensson, who died in 2022 at age 91, told the Tennessean in 2016. “That’s what we call the Nashville way.”
The shape of the South Central Bell building – later called AT&T – was designed solely to withstand wind.
The horns or spikes were invented at the time because when Swensson contacted consultants in Texas, he found that they were renting them to radio stations.
Nashville stations such as WSM and WLAC. Swensson had envisioned a good business venture leasing antenna space to the two stations until lawyers told him he couldn’t lease the towers.
In 2016, Swensson recounted how Ronald Lustig, president of Earl Swensson Associates, went to a luncheon and some people showed him a cardboard hat. “These were some of our competitors trying to embarrass us,” he said. “At the time, the building was just known as ‘the building.’ And they said, we’d like to introduce you to ‘Batman.'”
“So I talked to the owner (of the building) and asked him, ‘What do you think?’ These people called us the ‘Batman building’ and he said, ‘Fantastic!’ I said, ‘Whatever you like.’ He said, ‘I think that’s fantastic, it’ll get PR. Don’t you dare change it,'” Swensson recalled in a 2016 interview with The Tennessean.
The Tennessean helped cement the name in the minds of Nashville residents.
In July 1994, then Tennessee editor Frank Sutherland sent a photographer to take a picture of the building, which was completed and opened that fall.
When the photographer returned for the afternoon meeting to decide what would go on the front page, the editors examined the photo and realized that it looked exactly like Batman.
When asked if they would publish the photo, Sutherland said readers would miss the point if it was just a photo of the building.
They found a photo of Batman – in the form of Michael Keaton’s version of the superhero – at practically the exact same angle as the photo of the building and placed the two side by side on page one.
“Holy Skyscraper!” cried the headline in the Sunday edition of the Tennessean on July 17, 1994.
“Holy architecture!” began Tennessee reporter Jennifer Peebles’ story. “It’s 33 stories tall, with pointed ears and a blue hood pulled low over its eyes. Although it’s officially known as the South Central Bell Building, Nashville’s newest skyscraper has adopted a more familiar nickname: It’s the Batman Building.”
Sutherland said the newspaper rarely featured more casual photos on its front page at the time. “We weren’t joking,” he said in a recent interview.
Readers found the side-by-side comparison amusing and the Tennessean sold a lot of copies that day.
“We knew as soon as we saw it it was going to be iconic,” Sutherland said. “Why not have a little fun with it? It was something everyone would be talking about the next day.”
And they were.
“Nobody here calls it the AT&T building,” Sutherland chuckled.
About the building
name: AT&T Building, formerly South Central Bell and BellSouth
address: 333 Commerce St.
Nickname: The Batman Building
Height: The height of the building, including its twin towers, is given as 617 feet, although the architects specify it as 632 feet.
Floors: 33
construction: Work began in 1991 and the building was completed in 1994.
