Abroad in New York
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
What in architecture could be more audacious than removing the dome from one of the city’s stateliest Neoclassical buildings and replacing it with four new stories – and getting away with it aesthetically? That is what Charles McKim of McKim, Mead & White did when he was hired by James Stillman in 1907 to remodel the old Merchants’ Exchange at 55 Wall Street. Stillman was the president of National City Bank (which in 1976 changed its name to Citibank), and he had identified the old building as a fitting headquarters for his prestigious bank. (His was the Rockefellers’ bank: William Rockefeller sat on the board, and Stillman’s two daughters married sons of Rockefeller.) One imagines a major bank headquarters, even in 1907, to be in a larger building, yet there was something about the scale of 55 Wall Street – low and long – and its prominent colonnade that bespoke a quiet power. But Stillman still needed more room, and that’s where McKim came in.
I don’t know if either man might have wished to preserve the dome, but it was apparent it had to go. In addition, Stillman wanted a great banking space in the lower part of the building, making it all the more incumbent upon McKim to excise the dome and double the building’s height. (The interior includes a dazzling 29,000-square-foot rotunda peaking at 72 feet high.)
The building had its origin as the Merchants’ Exchange, built in 1836-41. Construction started in the year following the Great Fire of 1835, which had consumed the previous Merchants’ Exchange. The architect was Boston’s Isaiah Rogers. In 1862, 55 Wall Street became the United States Custom House. This is where the Customs Service resided during Chester A. Arthur’s tenure as collector of the port, and when Herman Melville worked for the service as a lowly inspector at Gansevoort Street. When Stillman purchased the building, the Customs Service had moved to the Cass Gilbert-designed building on the south side of Bowling Green.
One wishes to use the term “Neoclassical” rather than the customary “Greek Revival” to describe a building with a dome. Rogers had designed a stately row of beautifully crafted Ionic columns of Quincy granite. McKim’s solution was to conceal his four stories behind a screen of Corinthian columns answering to the colonnade below. It was always the practice to put the “lighter” Corinthian atop the “heavier” Ionic, so as not to disturb the senses of a person viewing the building. McKim understood that merely replicating Rogers’s Ionic colonnade might result in a ponderous structure. His use of the Corinthian in fact gives the building great grace, perhaps even more than when it had its dome.
In 1961 Citibank moved its headquarters to a banal modern office building at 399 Park Avenue, at 53rd Street, but 55 Wall Street remained a Citibank branch until 1992. It was briefly the Regent Hotel and is now Cipriani Club Residences. Above all it is an object lesson for today’s ego-driven architects on how to expand an old building.
