![]() The tone of the inscriptions and the personifications of Minerva (wisdom) and Mercury (commerce) in the bright-bronze tellers’ screen suggest Sawyer’s elements of allegory and the evocation of ancient monuments, the inscriptions and the antique attributes of “Wisdom” and “Commerce.” The interior of the Greenwich Savings Bank displays a spatial allegory – a veritable temple to thrift – in limestone, sandstone and steel. In the adaptions of the Greenwich Savings Bank’s great, elliptical banking room and its accessory spaces – to the bank’s irregular four-sided site the elliptical plan is characteristic of ancient amphitheaters the Flavian amphitheater – the Coliseum – is the prime Roman example. In keeping with the American tradition of bank building, Philip Sawyer displayed his knowledge of ancient Roman prototypes. Constructed in 1922-24 as The Greenwich Savings Bank building, the imposing new headquarters was to mark this institution’s progress from its modest Greenwich Village origins to a prominent midtown location, is one of the refined examples in the impressive corpus of bank buildings from the firm of York and Sawyer, both architects, initially employed by McKim, Mead, & White.
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