Finance History | 1 Riverside Plaza — Six Point Two Eight Million Dollars Bought Twenty-Three Small Utilities

People treat American Electric Power as a Columbus riverfront tower and a multi-state wires company.

The holding company that owns the tower was organized to buy other people's plants.

On 20 December 1906 American Gas and Electric Company began service as a New York holding company. On 2 January 1907 it took the assets of Electric Company of America.

The price was 6.28 million dollars in 1907 currency, paid largely in 99-year 5 percent collateral trust bonds.

Richard E. Breed, Harrison Williams, and Sidney Z. Mitchell put the vehicle together. Mitchell was president of Electric Bond and Share, a General Electric subsidiary created to salvage utility paper GE had taken in payment for equipment.

Original capitalization included 6.282 million dollars of those bonds, 3.5 million dollars of preferred stock, and 3.5 million dollars of common stock. Bond and Share kept a slice of the common for promotion work.

The point of the structure was scale. Isolated town plants could not finance large generating stations or long transmission. A holding company could float paper against a system and send current across state lines.

American Gas and Electric became American Electric Power in 1958, after the Public Utility Holding Company Act had already forced Bond and Share to loosen its grip.

Ground was broken for this Columbus tower on 11 March 1981. The building at 1 Riverside Plaza was dedicated on 7 October 1983.

The pin is the public plaza on the Scioto. The interiors are working offices.

A utility holding company is a device for turning many local franchises into one credit. The 1906 book did that with bonds. The tower is where the successor still signs the filings.

Photo: Sixflashphoto, 6 September 2017, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. AEP Building, 1 Riverside Plaza, Columbus.