Knickerbocker Trust Company Building

 office building, bank

194-foot, 14-story Beaux-Arts office building originally completed as a 5-story building in 1904, with an additional nine floors completed in 1921, and a separate 12-story building at 362 Fifth Avenue completed in 1901. The northern building was designed by Augustus D. Shepard, Jr., and the southern one by McKim, Mead & White. The two were joined together with a common 5-story base in 1958. McKim, Mead & White's original Roman temple-style design is now completely lost to a smooth, non-ornamented base.

The Knickerbocker Trust Company bank was chartered in 1884 by Frederick G. Eldridge, a friend and classmate of financier J.P. Morgan. In 1907, its funds were being used by then-president Charles T. Barney in a plan to drive up the cost of copper by cornering the market. This gamble came undone due to the dumping of millions of dollars in copper into the market to stop a hostile takeover in an unrelated organization. This became public, and on October 21, 1907 the National Bank of Commerce announced that it would no longer accept checks for the Knickerbocker Trust Company, triggering a run of depositors demanding their funds back. Charles Barney requested a meeting with J.P. Morgan to discuss financial assistance for the bank, but was rejected. Shortly after, he shot himself on November 14, 1907. The resulting Panic of 1907 exacerbated an ongoing decline in the stock market that saw the Dow Jones Industrial Average lose 48% of its value from January 1906 to November 1907. The banking crisis is also seen as the final straw that led Congress to form the Federal Reserve System in 1913.

The company reopened some weeks after its forced closing and paid off all depositors in full with interest. In 1912, its assets were acquired by the Columbia Trust Company, forming the Columbia-Knickerbocker Trust Company. This entity was acquired by the Irving Trust Corporation in 1923, which was in turn acquired by the Bank of New York in 1989.

The 2-story, slightly-projecting base is clad in polished black granite with large display windows. It is six bays wide, with a double-height entrance at the north bay on 5th Avenue. The west bay on 34th Street has another entrance, with an ornamental metal grille above it on the 2nd floor. The next three floors, rebuilt in 1958, are clad in grey stone. There are five bays of paired windows on the south facade; the east facade has three bays of paired windows at the taller south building, and the north building has four bays of single-windows with fluted metal spandrels at the 4th & 5th floors, with wider double-windows (and a triple-window in the center) at the 3rd floor, set higher than the rest. A simple band course caps the base.

The 6th-11th floors on the 1921 building are faced in stone, with paired windows, and a serrated southeast corner. Above a rounded band course, the top three floors have the paired windows grouped into separate 3-story units joined by metal spandrels. Both facades are crowned by a projecting, pale green roof cornice with patterned soffits above a carved stone frieze.

The 6th-10th floors of the northern 1901 building are clad in grey stone, with three bays; the center bay has three windows, and the other two bays have two windows each. The 10th floor is set off by a corbelled cornice at the bottom and another cornice at the top, with carved panels on the piers. The top two floors are clad in lighter-colored stone. There are carved spandrels between the two floors. At the top of the 12th floor, the piers have grey stone capitals, and the windows are topped by carved, rounded pediments. This facade is crowned by a beige modillioned roof cornice. The ground floor is occupied by a Bank of America branch, and a CVS pharmacy.

lostnewengland.com/2016/06/waldorf-astoria-knickerbocke...
archive.org/details/isbn_9780486281469/page/32/mode/1up
hdl.handle.net/2027/gri.ark:/13960/t7mp9b322?urlappend=...
digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/76e89930-5103-0134-4e...
digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/76b9aa10-5103-0134-e6...