The Cleveland Trust Company (today Ameritrust Bank) commissioned Breuer to design their new headquarters on the recommendation of Sherman Lee, the Director of the Cleveland Museum of Art for whom Breuer had recently completed a new education wing. The original project by Breuer and his partner Hamilton Smith, called for two towers surrounding the 5-storey neo-classical bank at the intersection of Euclid Avenue and East Ninth Street designed by George B. Post in 1908. Only the first phase of the project was built leaving the site somewhat unbalanced and reducing the footprint of the built tower, which had one corner removed in order to eventually receive a second, smaller tower. Visitors entered the lobby by way of a screen of square black granite piers. Twenty-five stories of office space rose above the lobby, each clad in a modular façade of identical cast-stone window frames, capped by wider bands of black granite at the cornice line and corners. The façade was broken into grids of twenty-five windows by thin strips of the same black granite used at the base and the crown. Today, preservation advocates fight to save the building (Breuer’s only completed office tower), which has been vacant since 1992 for a variety of reasons including the need for substantial asbestos abatement.