Background and history
The tower was originally conceived in the late 1970s by Frank E. McKinney Jr., chairman of American Fletcher Corporation, the holding company for American Fletcher National Bank and Trust Company (AFNB), which at the time was Indiana's largest financial institution, to allow for consolidation and expansion of his company's headquarters.[5] Land was slowly being assembled for the building, with several predecessor structures along Ohio Street and Pennsylvania Street being demolished in those years and the early 1980s to clear the way for what McKinney hoped would soon be Indiana's tallest office tower.
Before construction of the building began, American Fletcher became the first major Indianapolis bank holding company to be sold to an out-of-state financial institution, agreeing in the spring of 1986 to merge with Ohio's rapidly growing Banc One Corporation.[6] Upon consummation of that merger, Mr. McKinney became chairman of Bank One's Indiana operations and tower planning picked up momentum. Ground was broken and construction began in June 1987 on the newly designated Bank One Center Tower which was to be integrated with AFNB's existing headquarters complex on Monument Circle and adjacent Market Street.[3]
This was done mainly to secure the prestigious Monument Circle address for the new tower, which rises between Ohio Street and Wabash Street (the east–west alley between Market and Ohio). Thus, the Ohio Street entrance to the tower is the complex's back door with a concourse-style passageway on the second level running over Scioto Street (the north–south alley between Pennsylvania and Meridian) to connect the skyscraper (and its attached parking garage along Pennsylvania Street) to the main entrance in the original 1960 American National Bank Building at 111 Monument Circle.
A separate skywalk across Scioto once connected the Circle Building to the adjacent Fletcher Trust Building at 10 E. Market Street, but that was later removed after the bank moved all operations formerly located in that structure into the new tower. The Fletcher Trust Building itself was subsequently sold and has since been renovated into a Hilton Garden Inn hotel. Banc One Corporation (later renamed Bank One Corporation) went through several additional major acquisitions before it was itself bought by J.P. Morgan Chase in the early 2000s. Upon consummation of that merger, the Indianapolis structure was renamed to become known as the Chase Tower, but Chase was not allowed to attach its name and logo to the top of the building until 2013 after the building changed owners.[7]
On May 6, 2016, Salesforce announced plans to lease hundreds of thousands of square feet in the building and start moving employees there in early 2017. The building has since been rebranded as Salesforce Tower Indianapolis.[8]
