A Star is Born!
Thank you to those who attended the premiere of The Citadel, Birth of the LeVeque Tower, a film by Seth Moherman, on Wednesday, April 27 at 6 p.m. at The Westin Great Southern Hotel. The film was produced by Columbus Landmarks Foundation with support from an Ohio Humanities Council grant.
A second screening of the film will be scheduled in the fall. DVDs will be available for sale soon. Please check back.
Built first as the American Insurance Union Citadel (or AIU Building), one of Columbus’s most beloved and certainly architecturally distinct buildings has a fascinating dichotomy of idealism and egotism, architectural hubris and down-to-earth drama.
At 12:30 p.m., on September 21, 1927, at Broad and Front Street, with trumpet cannons blasting 17 salutes, airplanes circling overhead dropping cascades of flowers onto the crowd, the AIU Girls Glee Club singing “Ode to the Citadel,” the architect, C. Howard Crane, in the words of filmmaker Seth Moherman, “…stood upon the stage (the old Keith-Albee Theatre), prepared to hand the keys to the building over to President (John) Lentz, but before he did, he proclaimed:
‘Before I relinquish this building, I must tell you why we have been able to have such a beautiful and such a
wonderful structure…back of this job was John J. Lentz. He is truly a great man…a man of such visions, such high ideals, and capacity for work...I take great pleasure, in formally presenting to you, the key to the Citadel…a symbol of the high and noble ideals of your great company…’”
This program is made possible, in part, by the Ohio Humanities Council, a state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities -