Cipriani Club Residences

 condominium, Romanesque (architecture), Greek Revival (architecture), 1840s construction, movie / film / TV location, 1910_construction

8-story residential building originally completed in 1842 as the Merchant's Exchange, a 4-story Greek-revival bank building with an enormous colonnade and a cupola on top, designed by Isaiah Rogers. After the Merchant's Exchange closed in the 1860s, the building was occupied by the Port of New York customs collection. In 1907 it was modified by McKim, Mead & White for the First National City Bank. The cupola was removed and a second set of four stories rose in its place. 55 Wall Street served as Citibank's global headquarters from 1908 to 1961, when it moved to the newly completed 399 Park Avenue.

The building is clad in limestone. The original structure (the lower four floors) have masonry bearing walls, while the additional floors are supported by a steel frame. The base is rusticated, with recessed openings. In the center three bays, the ground floor gives way to an open-air, deeply-recessed arcade behind a colonnade of enormous fluted Ionic columns, which rises above the ground floor. Twelve columns front the colonnade along Wall Street, with planters in between each one. Behind them, the stone wall of the building has square-headed windows on the sides, and a grand central entrance in the middle, flanked by four additional rear columns. The bronze door is topped by an entablature and a large, carved medallion. The dentiled cornice that originally capped the lower colonnade now forms an entablature separating the lower colonnade from the upper.

The remaining three facades have recessed, square-headed window openings in stone enframements, with heavier rustication on the ground floor. Stone piers with carved capitals separate the bays of the 2nd-3rd floors on the Exchange Place facade. All three of these facades has a double-height, triple-window round-arch in the center of the 2nd-3rd floor. Small attic windows run just below the cornice capping the lower section.

The upper floors have similar piers all on three secondary facades, but separating bays with paired, recessed windows instead of the enframed single windows found below. On the main Wall Street facade, the upper colonnade of fluted columns have Corinthian capitals. Above a short attic story, there is a dentiled cornice at the roof line with a masonry parapet above.

The building was converted in 1998 to The Regent Wall Street Hotel, which closed in 2003 due to lack of business after 9/11. In 2005, the building was converted to condominiums by the Cipriani Group. The ballroom was the filming location for the finale of the remake of "The Manchurian Candidate". It was originally the main banking hall, cruciform in plan with offices hidden in each of the corners. The ballroom has a 60-foot-high central dome, with monumental Corinthian columns which support an elegant entablature encircling the space. The vast scale of the intersecting barrel vaults and tall, arched windows is juxtaposed by elegant design details such as the luxurious grey marble floors and walls, coffered ceiling, and delicate mezzanine railings.

www.ciprianiresidences.com/