Williamsburgh Savings Bank Tower

The Williamsburgh Savings Bank Tower is a skyscraper located in Downtown Brooklyn, in the borough of Brooklyn, New York City. Located at 1 Hanson Place between Ashland Place and St. Felix Street, the tower is one of the borough's architectural icons. The tower was designed by Halsey, McCormack and Helmer and constructed from 1927 to 1929 as the new headquarters for the Williamsburgh Savings Bank.
Prior to 2010, when it was surpassed by the Brooklyner, the Williamsburgh Savings Bank Tower was the tallest building in Brooklyn at 37 stories and 512 feet (156 m) tall. It is among the tallest four-sided clock towers in the world, and contains clock faces that are in diameter. The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the Williamsburgh Savings Bank Tower as an official city landmark in 1994. Since 2007, the building has been converted into luxury condominium apartments under the name 1 Hanson Place.
Site.
The building is located at 1 Hanson Place, at the corner of Ashland Place, near Times Plaza – the intersection of Atlantic, Flatbush, and Fourth Avenues – and close to the Atlantic Terminal mall, Atlantic Terminal LIRR station, and the Barclays Center. Despite its name it stands in the Fort Greene/Pacific Park sections of Brooklyn, rather than in Williamsburg, where the bank's original headquarters building by George B. Post still stands.
Design.
The building was constructed in a modernized Byzantine-Romanesque style. It features a gilded copper dome; carved lions, turtles and birds on the exterior; and a marble banking hall on the ground floor with vaulted ceilings, windows and elaborate mosaics; and two abandoned public observation decks with signage describing the Battle of Brooklyn.
Form.
The building contains a balanced, though not symmetrical, vertical massing of staggered setbacks in buff-colored brick and architectural terracotta.
The architects' plan for the new building did not include the Renaissance style dome on top, but the bank considered a dome such as the one on the original building to be its signature and insisted on one being added. Chief architect Robert Helmer noted: "Dome was required by Bank over our dead protests" – with the familiar phallic result: the "AIA Guide to New York City" calls it "New York's most exuberant phallic symbol." Helmer wrote at the time of the building's opening that he wanted it "to be regarded as a cathedral dedicated to the furtherance of thrift and prosperity."
Facade.
On the exterior a highly polished shoulder-height dado, veneered with veined and colored Minnesota granite, presents a glistening variegated surface to the pedestrian passing at close distance and offers a discreet inscription near a corner:
TO OUR DEPOSITORS PAST AND PRESENT THIS BUILDING IS DEDICATED. BY THEIR INDUSTRY AND THRIFT THEY HAVE BUILT HOMES AND EDUCATED CHILDREN, OPENED THE DOOR OF OPPORTUNITY TO YOUTH AND MADE AGE COMFORTABLE INDEPENDENT AND DIGNIFIED. BY THOSE STURDY VIRTUES THEY HAVE OBTAINED THEIR AMBITIONS, SWEPT ASIDE THE PETTY DISTINCTIONS OF CLASS AND BIRTH AND SO MAINTAINED THE TRUE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY
Carved details around the windows are appealingly symbolic, in the vein of "architecture parlante", speaking of the values of thrift with beehives, squirrels that store nuts, the head of Mercury, god of Commerce, wise owls, and seated lions whose paws protect the bank's lockbox, with the bank's monogram on the lock haft. Embedded in the ashlar wall face above are square bas-reliefs, one on the right of a burglar, whom the depositor understood would be thwarted by the massive vault doors in the basement.
Interior.
Ground floor.
The low vaulted ceiling of the narthex-like vestibule is mosaiced with tesserae that vary from gray-blue to the most intense turquoise and ultramarine. Glass doors applied with wrought iron screens by René Chambellan depicting the artisan trades open to the banking hall.
The banking hall measures high and is long. It is faced with limestone and marbles, with mosaics and huge tinted windows containing silhouetted iron cutouts with vignettes of workers, students, etc. with a central nave divided from side aisles by Romanesque columns with cast-stone capitals. Friezes carved in the two-plane relief manner of Lombard Comacine masons, of foliate scrolls with animal heads, inhabited with human and animal figures, relieve the masonry walls. The ceiling vaults glitter with mosaics of tesserae of gold leaf under glass, embedded with moulded stars and showing the constellations of the Zodiac. The floor is inlaid with various colored marbles in the Cosmatesque manner. At the far end a giant mosaic panel gives a bird's-eye view of "Breuckelen" with Manhattan in the distance beyond and the Williamsburgh Savings Bank Tower illuminated in a shaft of sunlight.
Other spaces.
Above were two floors of banking offices. The remainder of the building contained rental office spaces. In 2006–2007, these were converted into 176 apartments with 138 distinct floor plans, from 295 square foot studios to 3,263 square foot full-floor four-bedroom units.
The basement had 60-ton vault doors, which stood open for inspection during banking hours.
History.
It was built from 1927 to 1929 as the new headquarters for the Williamsburgh Savings Bank by the architectural firm Halsey, McCormack and Helmer. It was then owned by the bank's parent, Republic National Bank, then, via a merger, HSBC, which has since relocated across the street to 118 Flatbush Avenue. For years the building's offices were notably dentists' offices; the "New York Daily News" once called it "The Mecca of Dentistry".
The exterior of the building was declared a New York City landmark in 1977, and the interior in 1996. Replacement of windows engendered a lawsuit from the Landmarks Preservation Commission that forced restoration of the original appearance of the windows.
In 2005, Skylight Studios One Hanson was created in conjunction with Canyon Capital Realty Advisers, as part of their massive redevelopment of the former Williamsburgh Savings Bank Building. Throughout the restoration and redevelopment of the building, the architectural prestige of its marble floors, carved teller stations, vaulted ceiling and 40-foot mosaic of New York as a Dutch colony were preserved. Simultaneously, Magic Johnson converted the building to 176 luxury loft condominiums between 2006 and 2007. In 2008 CJ Follini and Noyack Medical Partners purchased the commercial half of the landmark.
In popular culture.
Author Jonathan Ames created a "Most Phallic Building" contest which followed an article he wrote for "Slate" magazine, in which he claimed that the Tower was the most phallic building he'd ever seen. The character of the same name in his HBO show "Bored to Death" moves into the building in the third season.
The tower or its interior has been seen in the films "Prizzi's Honor," "Catch Me if You Can", "Going in Style (2017)", "John Wick", the music videos "Empire State of Mind" and "No Stylist", as well the TV shows "Pan Am", "Law & Order", "Bored to Death", "White Collar", "Gossip Girl", and "Boardwalk Empire".
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