92. Former Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank

A.K.A.: New York City Parking Violations Bureau
Location: 51 Chambers Street
Built: 1909-1912
Architect: Raymond F. Almirall
National Register Number: 82003375
Listed: February 25, 1982
Visited: April 13, 2008; November 15 and 21, 2008; December 3, 2008



Go to the Emigrant website and this is what it'll say about its history:

Emigrant Bank was founded by Irish emigrants as a mutual savings bank in 1850. By the 1920s it had grown to become the largest savings bank in the nation.

Terse! Most (or all, depending on the source) of those Irish emigrants were members of the Irish Emigrant Society, a charitable organization that greeted the immigrants deposited at Castle Clinton, this to discourage thiefs from taking advantage. Encouraged by Archibishop John J. Hughes (who deposited $25 in bank account #9), the eighteen trustees "chipped in $200 each to buy pencils and chairs (as Sora Song puts it). Largely catering to the swelling populations of Irish New York, it only seven years, it became the city's seventh-largest savings bank, and in seventy-five years, the largest savings bank in the nation.



The bank's third headquarters at 51 Chambers Street were built when architects were still casting around for sensible ways to build big: it is shaped very much like the behemoth Equitable Building, built only a few years later, with an H plan and no setbacks. It's so much more attractive, as it's scaled a little smaller and its shafts are much more generous, filled with column-like bays that soak up the sunlight. Like sooo many former bank interiors in this ding-dong city, the main floor is apparently hot stuff but off-limits to mere mortals like myself.

And like the A.T. Stewart & Co. Building, 51 Chambers was purchased by the city in 1965 in anticipation of an ambitious Civic Center redevelopment that would've torn the building down. It appears that none of the models for the plan I'm seeing in New York 1960 are available anywhere on the web--and that's a good thing, because they're hideous. My God, it's as if the 60's Establishment, for all its surface-level terror of youth culture, were as grossed out by old things as a tween at a family reunion.