Hedrick and his designer Thomas Stanley’s appropriation of the high-rise slab set astride a lower-level podium affiliated the American Bank of Commerce with Lever House (1952) in New York City, although the Odessa version lacks the floating quality of the Manhattan original. But the twelve-story slab’s aluminum and glass curtain wall persuasively asserted modernity in downtown Odessa. Elizabeth Drane Bartell in Hedrick’s office produced the two-story tile mural panel celebrating the vegetation and sources of wealth of the Permian Basin on the bank’s E. 7th Street side.
Dallas architect George L. Dahl also appropriated the Lever House formula for the former First National Bank’s headquarters of 1961 at 700 N. Grant. The six-story slab faced with snappy red porcelain enamel spandrel panels below horizontal window bands is set on a two-story podium that spans most of its block. Dahl incorporated an undulating concrete solar screen in the podium’s second level.
Two blocks away at 500 N. Texas Avenue, the former Ector Theater (1951) is a Wyatt C. Hedrick design with walls composed of a grid of square cast-stone panels and a vertical blade sign.