Martin Office Building, USA, April 2016

Sheavy · Feb 3, 2017

The Martin Office Building, also known as the American Life Building, and the Stonewall Building, was built in 1925. it originally housed the Birmingham City Commission as well as various other firms and tenants. Sometime in the sixties The American Life Insurance Company moved their headquarters into the building and it came to be known as the American Life Building. ALI later acquired the Stonewall Insurance Company, which occupied the building until around 1979. The building gradually started being vacated until it's only function was as a document storage building until 2000. It has been essentially vacant since then. There have been numerous proposals and plans to renovate the building, all of which have fallen through. The farthest any proposal got was in 2008 when work got started to turn the building into some apartments. The work had gotten as far as complete asbestos removal, about 90% of the building being gutted, and the top floor almost being completely renovated into the new apartments when the 08-09 economic collapse completely stopped the project in it's tracks. it has since sat empty, with only a few vague proposals that went nowhere.

I do wish I would've been able to see this building prior to the 2008 renovation work, as the old architecture and interiors are still very photogenic even being almost entirely barren. There's also a significant amount of squats in the building, we didn't run into any sqautters while we were roaming around however. We did run into a group of obnoxiously loud 15-16 year olds who we heard coming into the building while we were on the sixth or seventh floor. We decided to spook them in the staircase as they made their way up.

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