This historic Wichita building — the city’s first skyscraper — has a cheerful new look
It was built in 1907 by Louise Caldwell Murdock, who wanted the seven-story building to be a tribute to her late husband, Roland P. Murdock — the former business manager of The Wichita Eagle and brother of founder Marshall M. Murdock.
It was Wichita’s first skyscraper.
But the building at 111 E. Douglas, once home to retail businesses, offices and even Caldwell Murdock’s interior design studio, has sat vacant and deteriorating since the mid-1990s.
This week, though, a bunch of tempera paint and some energetic young Wichita artists changed that. The Caldwell Murdock building got a colorful new look, and the change has social media buzzing.
Local artist Delilah Reed and several friends just finished a seven-day project that added colorful hearts and other designs to all 240 of the aging building’s Douglas-facing window panels.
The building, which sits next to the site of the soon-to-close ICT Pop-Up Urban Park, now has a cheerful facade bathed in primary reds, yellows, greens and blues, and the finished product gives downtown’s most traveled street an eye-catching pop of color.
The project was the brainchild of Emily Brookover, the director of community development for Downtown Wichita.
She’d been talking with the building’s owners at Bokeh Development about adding some color to the building’s windows as a way to “do something happy for the community,” she said.
The company agreed, and Brookover said she instantly thought of Reed and Reed’s friend and frequent collaborator, Maggie Gilmore.
The pair had brightened up the building once before. Back in 2016, the two turned the ground level facade of the building into a public chalkboard as part of a project called ICT Chalk Talks, which was financed by the Knight Foundation Fund at the Wichita Community Foundation.
The artists added permanent artwork of a butterfly and a cicada to the space above the chalkboard, and it’s remained ever since.
Reed said she chose a heart theme for the project, and she got to work on it last week. The building’s six stories of windows were covered with a mix of glass and of plywood where the glass was missing.
Reed said she used tempera paint to color the glass panels from the inside of the building. The plywood panels she removed, painted then replaced.
It was sweaty work, and in all, it took Reed 40 hours and a group of about four helpers that included Gilmore to get the job done. The group finished the project on Tuesday morning and shared photos on social media.
The posts blew up, Brookover said.
“The social media response has just been amazing,” she said. “People are just excited to see something positive and so lovely.”
Caldwell Murdock, who died in 1915, was a businesswoman and interior designer who provided the seed money to start the Wichita Art Museum.
After her husband died, she had the building erected and named it after him and her father, Jonathan Caldwell.
It was in use until the 1990s then joined the roster of vacant downtown buildings. In the early 2000s, developer Kelly Donham bought the building and planned to turn it into a downtown hotel and conference center, but those plans stalled.
Brookover said she’s happy with the way the project turned out and that she hopes Wichita can enjoy it for years to come.
“You always have an idea of what you think it will look like,” she said. “But the beautiful thing about turning it over to artists is that it then becomes more than you had imagined.”
This story was originally published August 25, 2020 at 7:11 PM.
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