Dissing the ConRoy Building, and being inaccurate about it.

What the crap?

The original intent of this blog was simply to record the ghost signs of Casper, Wyoming.  It did that pretty rapidly, and then it went on to catch them elsewhere and expand out a bit from there. Basically, we like historic buildings here.

One of the things we've noted, however, in doing this is that fables grow up around buildings.  Sometimes it's really hard to figure out their origin.

I've been familiar with this building for over fifty years.  It's one of three sister buildings in Casper that all were designed by the Casper architectural firm of Casper firm of Garbutt and Weidner, who at least based on these three buildings, were heavily into the same appearance for their "skyscrapers" at the time. This is the "ConRoy Building", the Consolidated Royalty Building.  We noted its centennial several years, well nearly a decade, ago, elsewhere:

Happy Centenary! Things or rather places, that are 100 years old.

I've been meaning to post this forever but just wasn't in any big hurry to do it. Then it suddenly dawned on me that if I didn't do it soon, these places would be 101 years old, not 100. So here goes.

A thread dedicated to a few local places and establishments that made it to year 100 in 2017.

The ConRoy Building

 

 The ConRoy (Consolidated Royalty Building).  The building's appearance has changed somewhat, but you have to really observe it to notice the changes.  The windows were replaced from the original style about fifteen years ago, giving it more modern and more efficient windows.  The elevator shaft, not visible here, is an enlarged one to accommodate a larger elevator than the one put in when it was built in 1917.  The awning restores the building to an original appearance in those regards which it lacked for awhile, but at street level the building has a glass or rock masonry treatment which clearly departs from the original.

One that I've mentioned here before is the ConRoy, or Consolidated Royalty Building.  Built in 1917 as the Oil Exchange Building, the building was one of Casper's first "sky scrapers",  if in fact not the absolute first.  Ground was broken in the summer of 1917 and the building was completed some time in August 1917. The Consolidated Royalty Oil Company, a company in which former Governor B. B. Brooks had a major interest, occupied the fifth floor of the structure.

 

The ConRoy Building occasionally gets some interesting avian visitors.

Unlike its two sister buildings, the Wyoming National Bank Building (now apartments) and  the Townsend Hotel (now the Townsend Justice Center) designed by the same architect, the building has never been vacant and remains in use today.  At least one of the current tenants descends from a firm that was a very early tenant, and perhaps a 1917 tenant.

 

The building has been updated over time, and its appearance is slightly changed due to the addition of an odd decorative rock face in the 1950s, but it by and large looks much like it did in 1917 from the outside.  It's one of the few old downtown Casper buildings that hasn't undergone major appearance changes over the years.

May 2, 1917 edition of the Casper Daily Tribune announcing vacancies in the yet to be built Oil Exchange Building.  The remainder of this issue was full of war news, and indeed it was partially the oil boom caused by the war that brought the building about.

More recently it figured here, as the owners of the building commissioned some murals on the fire escape doors:

Backdoor art.

So how on earth does it end up in a political campaign?

Frankly, I have no idea, but the entire idea of it being built by "a Democrat" is a real wild one.  The principal figure in the building being built was B. B. Brooks, who served as a Republican Governor for Wyoming, as we noted above.  Brooks had his offices on the fifth floor of the building.

B. B. Brooks, Republican.  He would not be amused.

This building has been continually occupied since 1917, and some of the businesses currently in it have been in the building since the 1940s although as earlier noted, one of them might have been in the building as early as 1917. Of the other two sisters, one is now the Townsend Justice Center which houses Natrona County's courts, and Wyo. Bank Bldg is an apartment building with a cafe on the street level.

All three buildings originally had, fwiw, massive period style lobbies which are sadly now all gone although you can catch glimpses of them, particularly in the Wyo. National Bank Bldg. The ConRoy once had a cigar store and magazine stand on the street level, after the lobby was taken out, and into the 50s, which explains the current appearance of its very small lobby today.  Basically, the ConRoy and the Wyoming National Bank building were victims of "modernization" concepts in architecture from the 1950s and 1960s, at which time those buildings were forty years old and less, and nobody thought of them being particularly historic.  The Townsend probably retained its architecture the longest, as it was a hotel originally, and up into the 70s when it closed. By that time it was pretty much a flop house with a popular cafe.  I recall it as my father had lunch there until the cafe closed, which many other downtown businessmen and professionals did as well.  It made for an odd place to go as a kid, which I sometimes did with my father, as the cafe was really popular, as was the adjoined Petroleum Club, but in the lobby the working girls were recovering from their prior night.

The ConRoy, on the other hand, has hummed on much like it has since 1917, although some of the notable early tenants, like the Casper Star Tribune, have moved on.  The building was recently featured in the Oil City News when some of the equipment for a new elevator, replacing the one from the 1950s that replaced the one from 1917, was lifted by crane into the structure.

Anyhow, this is baffling.  Of course, I only know of this as somebody else whose familiar with the building pointed it out to me and was horribly amused by it.  I don't know that I am, as I like things to be accurate.

But why would a person do this, and how would such a wild rumor get started?