The effort to build the Woodmen Tower in 1966 kicked off the city’s preservation movement. While the historic buildings it replaced can never be brought back, its construction is widely credited with helping reverse a trend for a downtown that was suffering and increasingly vacant.
Among the razed buildings were the old City Hall and the Bee Building. The Bee Building was completed in 1888 and stood at 17th & Farnam Street. Four years later, it was joined by City Hall to its west.
Built by Edward Rosewater on the site of his former homestead, the Bee Building served as the home to his Daily Bee newspaper. Before starting the paper in 1871 to support both his political agenda and civic projects, the Bohemian immigrant was a member of the Union Army’s Telegraphers Corps and transmitted President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.
The building was a 7-story structure that was designed by architect Solon S. Beman of Chicago in a Romanesque Revival-style. It was faced with red granite and featured carved beehive ornamentation that played off of the paper’s name. Following Rosewater’s death in 1906, the newspaper struggled and was sold to the Omaha World-Herald in 1937, which ceased its publication. The building itself changed hands several times before it was purchased by Woodmen of the World in 1932.
Next door, at 18th & Farnam Street, was the old City Hall. Completed in 1892, its chief architect was 27-year-old Charles F. Beindorff, who was commissioned after winning a design competition. Designed in a Richardson Romanesque and Gothic Revival-style, the 5-story building was constructed by John F. Coots of Detroit. It featured a granite base on the first floor and red sandstone on the upper four floors. Nicknamed the “red castle,” it also had a clock tower that rose nearly 20 stories high as well as a steepled roof crowned with gargoyles…