Professional Building
Phoenix’s 1932 Art Deco tower at Central and Monroe served three decades as the city’s medical-and-banking address, gained Hollywood immortality in the opening frames of Psycho, and today stands renovated as a downtown hotel inside its original Streamline shell.
At a glance
Completed in February 1932 at the corner of Central Avenue and Monroe Street, the Professional Building is a twelve-story, 171-foot Art Deco skyscraper designed by the Los Angeles firm Morgan, Walls & Clements. The design plays up angles and setbacks in a classic Streamline manner: a central tower rises cleanly from a two-story base, with a western wing and decorative cast-metal grills framing the entrances on both street elevations. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1993 and restored from 2014 to 2015, reopening as a Hilton Garden Inn while preserving the Art Deco shell that has made it one of downtown Phoenix’s most recognizable landmarks.
Key facts
- Completed: February 1932
- Architect: Morgan, Walls & Clements (Los Angeles)
- Contractor: L.E. Dixon Construction Co.
- Style: Art Deco / Streamline Moderne
- Height: 171 ft (12 floors)
- Address: 15 E. Monroe St. (corner of Central Ave.), Phoenix, AZ 85004
- NRHP: January 8, 1993 (ref. 85003563); Phoenix Commercial MRA
- GPS: 33.4501°N, 112.0735°W
History
The Professional Building arose from an unlikely collaboration. In 1930, members of the Maricopa County Medical Society met to address their need for a dedicated professional facility—medical, dental, and laboratory offices in one address. At the same moment, Valley Bank and Trust Company was planning a new headquarters. Combining both programs into one building at Central and Monroe made financial and practical sense, and the result was a twelve-story tower that opened in February 1932 with Valley Bank occupying the bottom three floors and physicians and dentists the upper seven.
In 1958 the building gained one of the city’s great landmarks within a landmark: a 49-foot-diameter rotating sign for Valley National Bank, mounted on the rooftop and visible forty-nine miles at night. The same year, a mostly-glass additional floor was added to the western wing, cantilevered at forty-five degrees from the main core in a detail that still reads as startlingly modern today. When Alfred Hitchcock filmed the opening sequence of Psycho in 1960—a slow pan across the Phoenix skyline—the Professional Building and its rotating sign were clearly visible, giving the tower a permanent place in cinema history.
Valley National Bank moved to its new Chase Tower across the street in 1972. Over the following two decades the building gradually emptied, and by the early 2000s the rotating sign had been removed and the tower sat vacant. A 2014–2015 renovation by CSM Lodging, supported by historic tax credits, converted the building to a 170-room hotel with the original facade and lobby intact, reopening in December 2015 as the Hilton Garden Inn Phoenix Downtown.
What you see
The Professional Building’s exterior discipline is characteristic of Morgan, Walls & Clements at their most restrained. The tower rises from a two-story base in a single vertical shaft with minimal ornamentation—the emphasis is on the clean setback geometry of the Art Deco formula and on the quality of the cast-metal grills that cap the entrance bays on both street fronts. The 1958 glass-and-cantilever western addition is an architectural curiosity: attached at forty-five degrees to the main tower, it reads almost as a modernist afterthought yet has become inseparable from the building’s silhouette.
Inside, the lobby has been restored as part of the hotel conversion, preserving the proportions and materials of the 1932 original. The building stands at a corner that was, for much of the mid-twentieth century, the gravitational center of downtown Phoenix—Valley Bank on the ground floor, the physicians above, the skyline sign rotating against the desert dark.
Practical information
- Current use: Hilton Garden Inn Phoenix Downtown (170 rooms); lobby viewable during hotel hours
- Exterior: Accessible at any time from the street-level sidewalk
- Best photography: Morning light favors the Central Avenue elevation; the building photographs best from across the intersection
- Note: The original rotating Valley National Bank sign is no longer present, removed in the early 2000s before the renovation
Getting there
The Professional Building is located at the corner of Central Avenue and Monroe Street in the heart of downtown Phoenix, Arizona. It is a short walk from the Phoenix Art Museum (0.7 miles north) and directly adjacent to several METRO Light Rail stops on Central Avenue. Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport is approximately 5 miles southeast. The building sits within the dense walkable core of downtown Phoenix.
Nearby
- Maricopa County Courthouse — three blocks east; 1929 Spanish Colonial Revival and Art Deco civic complex
- Chase Tower (Phoenix) — immediately to the west; Valley National Bank’s 1972 replacement headquarters
- Heard Museum — 0.5 miles north on Central Avenue; world-class collection of Native American art
Sources
- National Register of Historic Places listing #85003563, January 8, 1993; Phoenix Commercial MRA
- Arizona Republic, “New hotel is baking on vintage vibe,” April 21, 2008
- Phoenix Business Journal, “Look inside the new Hilton Garden Inn Phoenix Downtown,” December 14, 2015
- Hitchcock, Alfred, director. Psycho. Paramount Pictures, 1960 (opening Phoenix skyline sequence)
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