SAN ANTONIO – KSAT 12 News recently got a behind-the-scenes look inside the new Frost Bank Tower downtown.
Vice president of design and construction for KDC Real Estate, Chad Jackson, and project executive for Clark Construction, John Warren, gave reporter Tiffany Huerta and videographer Jason Foster a tour of the 23-story tower.
"If you look up here, you can see the split. This is the casting place for the tower side. And to the left, this is the precast parking structure," Warren said. "If you look down this level, it's going to be those retail shops that I mentioned before and that below is the parking structure, (which) will hold about 1,000 cars. And to the right, here, it's the tower side which goes up 386 feet."
Frost Bank headquarters will take up the first 16 floors. The rest of the floors will be reserved for businesses.
Warren said the design of the building stands out among others downtown.
"Every single floor steps in 6 inches as you go up the tower. At the corner of each octagon, it steps out 4 inches, and that's what gives it the twist going up," Warren said.
The Frost Tower is the first new office tower built downtown since 1989.
"The goal is to revitalize this area of downtown, get more energy to the west side of downtown," Jackson said.
Frost Bank Tower Fun Facts:
1. At a height of 386 feet, it would take 75 Frost Towers to match the height of Everest (29,029 feet). It would take 94 Frost Towers to match the depth of the Mariana Trench (approximately 36,070 feet).
2. The tower will require 20,000 cubic yards of concrete to construct, which is almost 2,200 concrete trucks. That's enough concrete to construct a 5-foot-wide by 4-inch-thick sidewalk from downtown San Antonio to Kerrville.
3. The tower will weigh 80 million pounds, or 40,000 tons, when completed. That's equivalent to almost 6,700 full-grown elephants stacked on top of each other. The tower will require over 2,000 tons of reinforcing steel to construct.
4. The tower will extend 386 feet from ground level to the top of the crown structure, tying it for the sixth-tallest building in San Antonio with the Bank of America Plaza.
5. The concrete used in Frost Bank Tower is enough to build a 5-foot-wide by 4-inch-deep sidewalk between the site and The Alamo seven times over.
6. There's enough concrete to go around the downtown loop of the Riverwalk (with the same sidewalk) 4.25 times.
7. There's enough concrete to go from The Alamo to Mission Concepcion and one-third of the way back.
8. Site and civil utility work might take around 100 workers.
9. The Frost Bank Tower is the first downtown office building since the Weston Centre in the 1980s.
10. The building is the farthest western expansion of the San Antonio skyline, which is important to downtown in the longterm.
11. There are 593 steps from the ground floor to the roof.
12. There are 661 steps from the ground floor to the T.O. Parapet.
13. The concrete used in the tower is enough to cover a 7-foot-high football field.
14. The tower skin is made of approximately 187,396 square feet of glass, which is enough to cover an NBA basketball court 40 times.
15. At 385 feet 9 inches tall, the Frost Bank Tower will rank as the seventh tallest in San Antonio, surpassing The Towers on Park Lane.