For this 22-story, 250-foot-high, concrete-framed Tower Building, Lindsley, with Memphis engineers Gardner and Howe, captured the Lamar Life Building’s (JM20) verticality and setbacks, but he employed colorful geometric Art Deco ornament. His marble-clad and coffered first-floor entrance lobby sets a Mississippi high point in Art Deco opulence. Claude H. Lindsley (1894–1969) had no formal architectural education. Born in Lincoln County, he began working for McComb architect Xavier A. Kramer (1879–1943) in 1914 and achieved partnership in 1920. In 1923, Lindsley opened his own office.
The building’s owners struggled to fill its 50,000 feet of office space when it opened at the beginning of the Great Depression, and the property went into fore-closure. The WPA and Farm Security Administration (FSA) occupied several floors at the end of the 1930s, along with underwriters and small oil companies. In 1951, the Standard Life Insurance Company moved here from their previous Art Deco headquarters, the twelve-story Plaza Building (1929; 120 N. Congress Street), designed by N. W. Overstreet, and installed the neon-lit sign atop the tower. In 2010, the building was converted from an office building to apartments.
Also built in 1929, the eighteen-story Merchants Bank (200 E. Capitol Street, later Deposit Guaranty Building) nudged out the Tower Building as Mississippi’s tallest by four feet. The steel-framed structure by Fort Worth’s Wyatt C. Hedrick is clad in ashlar stone and with its simple slab shape and Venetian-arcaded cornice provides a counterpoint to Standard Life.