Qualla: Allied Arts Building

Allied Arts Building: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pubdog (talk), Public domain. Construction started in 1929. Think about that date. The stock market collapsed in October of that year, the Depression closed in over the next two winters, and yet by 1931 the developers of the Allied Arts Building in downtown Lynchburg had finished a seventeen-story Art Deco tower of yellow brick and greenstone — forty feet wide, a hundred thirty-two feet deep, narrow as a domino and twice as tall as anything else in the city. It would remain the tallest building in Lynchburg until 1972. It was conceived in a more optimistic year and completed in a much harder one, and you can still read both moods in its setback profile and stepped crown.

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Image: Pubdog (talk) | Public domain

Allied Arts Building: A Tower for a Tobacco Town

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ben Schumin, CC BY-SA 3.0. Lynchburg in the late 1920s was a prosperous Virginia city built on tobacco processing, rail, and small manufacturing — the kind of place that had survived Reconstruction by leaning into industry. A seventeen-story office tower at 725 Church Street was a statement of confidence. ...

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Image: Ben Schumin | CC BY-SA 3.0

Allied Arts Building: Reading the Setbacks

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ben Schumin, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Allied Arts is unmistakably Art Deco, the style that emerged from the 1925 Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs and dominated American skyscraper design from about 1928 through 1935. You see it in the stepped setbacks toward the top, in the chevron and zigzag p...

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Image: Ben Schumin | CC BY-SA 3.0

Allied Arts Building: Forty Years on Top

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ben Schumin, CC BY-SA 3.0. From 1931 until 1972, the Allied Arts was the tallest building in Lynchburg. That is a long reign for an office building. The Bank of the James Building finally took the title in 1972, and decades later Liberty University's Freedom Tower would push above both — but for forty year...

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Image: Ben Schumin | CC BY-SA 3.0

Allied Arts Building: A Second Life

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ben Schumin, CC BY-SA 3.0. Like a lot of mid-twentieth-century office towers in cities Lynchburg's size, the Allied Arts lost tenants as professional firms drifted to suburban parks. For a stretch it sat partly empty, its lobby a museum piece, its setbacks a pigeon roost. The current chapter is residential...

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Image: Ben Schumin | CC BY-SA 3.0