United States Assay Office Building

 office building, 1921_construction

158-foot, 12-story office building originally completed in 1921 as a 3-story building with five floors underground to contain the largest vault in the world. Designed by York & Sawyer in Italian Renaissance style, the building was acquired by the Seaman's Bank for Savings in 1953, and nine additional floors were added. The face of building was later moved to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and reduplicated in concrete on the existing building.

The building has a 5-bay wide facade along Wall Street, and three additional visible bays on its western elevation. The ground floor has five large arches on Wall Street - three serving as entrances - and three arches on the western elevation, all set into a rusticated wall and capped by an elaborate stone frieze of "grotteschi", an ornamental pattern including mythological beasts. Within each arch is an elaborate iron screen topped with Renaissance-inspired ornament, including small-scale versions of figures from Michelangelo's Medici Tombs in Florence. The 2nd & 3rd floors, also rusticated, are organized as a colonnade of double-height Corinthian pilasters. Each bay has a taller round-arched window, with an ornamental stone lunette, at the 2nd floor, and a shorter square-headed windows at the 3rd. The pilasters support a projecting cornice, which includes the inscribed names of several of the United State mints.

The 1950s addition begins with the 4th floor, designed to form a transition between the original facade and the rather plain shaft rising above. At this floor, the line of the pilasters in the lower portion is continued by plain, squat piers flanking piers of simple, rectangular windows and supporting a cornice. Above rises an 8-story shaft, with simple rectangular windows set between plain, uninterrupted stone piers rising to the roof line. The top floor is recessed on bay back from the Wall Street elevation.

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