The Sterick Building at 8 North Third Street is shown in this undated construction photograph.  Architect Wyatt C. Hedrick's father-in-law, R.E. Sterling, financed the building and the name of the building became a combination of their names.  When it was finished in 1930, the 365 foot tall, twenty-nine story structure became the tallest building, not just in the city, but also in the South.   In 1947, the nine-foot cast-stone Gothic spires had to be removed from the thirteenth, twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth floors, because repeated lightning strikes had split them.  The original color was the light gray of the building's limestone and granite stonework and of the cast-concrete panels that covered most of its upper floors.  It was painted for the first time in the sixties, and in 1982 it was sandblasted and painted the present pale yellow with dark brown and maroon trim.  The roof was originally green.
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