Longaberger Basket Building

A seven-storey office building shaped exactly like a giant Longaberger picnic basket

The Longaberger Basket Building on East Main Street is a seven-storey office building constructed to look exactly like the company's best-selling Medium Market Basket, scaled up 160 times. The handles alone — the two arching stainless steel elements over the roof — weigh 150 tons each. The building cost $30 million when it was completed in 1997 and held 500 employees.

The Longaberger Company, which made handwoven maple baskets in the surrounding Ohio countryside, closed in 2018, and the building has been vacant or partly used since then. It remains one of the most extraordinary examples of novelty architecture in the United States — a functioning office building that is unmistakably, from any angle, a basket. Worth a drive-by even if you can't go inside.

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When the building was completed in 1997, the two handles on the rooftop were engineered to be heated in winter — otherwise the weight of ice and snow would have created a structural problem, since the basket handles are not load-bearing in the traditional sense but are attached to the building's frame at precise angles calculated to handle wind loads.

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