New York Federal Reserve (New York City, New York)

 bank, interesting place, federal government

223-foot, 16-story Renaissance-revival (specifically Florentine Renaissance) reserve bank building completed in 1924. Designed by York & Sawyer, it occupies an entire, irregularly shaped block. This is the largest and most important bank in the Federal Reserve system. The building was needed to consolidate space that the Federal Reserve Bank occupied in various buildings. A design competition awarded the project to York & Sawyer, to be constructed on the block bounded by Liberty, Nassau, William, and Maiden Lane. Complementing the architectural design was the ornamental ironwork of Samuel Yellin.

Construction began in 1921, with excavation for the vaults reaching 80 feet below street level. When the excavation was completed, construction of the building began around the vaults. Preventing completion of the full scope of plans was the Montauk Building, on the eastern end of the site on William Street, whose owners were asking an extremely high price to sell the building. York and Sawyer were instructed to build around the Montauk Building while retaining long-term plans for total project completion. In September 1933, nine years after the first Federal Reserve Bank personnel moved into the new structure, the Montauk Building was bought, and the following year erection of the new building’s eastern wing was begun. The Bank was fully completed in July 1935 at a total cost of $21 million.

The building is faced with a multicolored stone façade, which combined sections of Indiana limestone with those of Ohio sandstone. Sawyer’s rationale was that such a polychromatic facing would lend character to the building’s Renaissance style and break up the monotony of its walls, which were basically void of ornamentation. The walls are heavily rusticated into rectangular blocks, with a massive 2-story base (3 levels toward the eastern end of the building, due to the slope of the site) featuring a series of enormous round-arched windows with iron grilles, topped by voussoir blocks. Smaller, squared windows with iron grilles are located above each arch. The main entrance on Liberty Street is centrally located, within a slightly recessed, double-height round-arch, with glass and black wrought-iron infill. Flanking the entrance are a pair of small rectangular windows with iron grilles, surmounted by elaborate, triple wrought-iron lamps. Above each lamp is a stone cartouche. The base is capped by a stone balcony and balustrade that wraps completely around all four facades. The elaborately wrought iron lamps flanking the main doorway on Liberty Street are the work of Samuel Yellin, the most noted artist of wrought iron of the twentieth century.

The 7-story midsection is also rusticated, but more smoothly, and with smaller stone blocks. Most of the window bays are grouped in pairs, with slightly recessed rectangular openings, except for the first floor above the base, which has round-arched windows in each pair (the few single bays have square-headed windows). A corbelled cornice separates this section from the recessed, uppermost floors, which include a round turret at the corner of Maiden Lane and William Street. The top two floors of this section feature large, double-height round-arches with deeply-set windows. A smaller corbelled cornice runs above these arches, and wraps around the top of the turret at the corner. A final, penthouse floor is set back even further, with a sloping roof covered with red Spanish quarry tile.

High above the vault and trading activity is the loggia which offers expansive views to employees of Liberty Street to the Hudson River and beyond. It is one of the many Florentine touches incorporated by the architects for the space. From 2007-2010 the interior was extensively renovated and modernized, with new electrical, telecommunication, data, cable, fire alarm, sprinkler, elevator, air conditioning and ventilation systems—some of which were necessary improvements from the antiquated systems that dated from the 1930s.

The bank maintains a vault that lies 86 feet (26 m) below sea level, resting on Manhattan bedrock. By 1927, the vault contained ten percent of the world's official gold reserves. Currently, it is reputedly the largest gold repository in the world (though this cannot be confirmed as Swiss Banks do not report their gold stocks) and holds approximately 5,000 metric tons of gold bullion ($160 billion as of March, 2008), more than Fort Knox. The triple-tiered vault system has a door weighing 90 tons. There are occasional public tours which must be booked in advance.

www.newyorkfed.org/
www.atlasobscura.com/places/new-york-federal-gold-vault
www.urbanarchive.org/sites/o4P2fkbFZk8
www.americanbuildings.org/pab/app/pj_display.cfm/671912