Best Building Named for a Bad Company

The Union Carbide Building, which stands to the west of the new downtown library, is a ten-story art-deco beauty that projects strength and elegance. The smooth, stone exterior at ground level yields to dark brick as the structure reaches for the sky, creating handsome contrast. Today the building is home to several law offices and nonprofit groups. Its namesake, which accepted moral responsibility for a 1984 gas leak at a pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, that killed 4,000 people in just a few hours, exists no more, having been acquired by Dow Chemical in 2001.