Advertising Art

From 1922, preserved in a scrapbook at the New York Public Library, a romantic view of the Bankers Trust Building at Wall and Nassau Streets. (The angle is a little funny – see below.)

I cropped the image – at the lower right there was a little extension:

This could be a real-estate ad to rent space in the building, but I think more likely it was an ad for the banking services provided by the Bankers Trust organization. I suspect the part that was cropped out by the scrapbooker was text about banking, the Paris reference is an address for a Paris office, and there was a third address to the right of “Downtown Office.” Using the image of the company’s ten-year-old skyscraper headquarters as “a tower of strength” sounds about right for a bank ad and the sensibilities of that era.

One of the odder problems with the early skyscrapers in lower Manhattan is that they were so jammed in together that it was hard to find an angle where you could see them properly to appreciate them. In this case, we’re looking east down Rector Street from between Greenwich Street and Trinity Place – the el in the foreground ran over Trinity – towards Broadway and Wall. The tall, dark, and skinny building in front of Bankers Trust is the “Chimney Building” at One Wall Street, and the building just to its left is Two Wall. Both have since been replaced. What appears to be an empty lot behind and below the el and in front of Two Wall is the south end of the Trinity Church graveyard. This strange diagonal view is one of the few angles from which the stepped pyramid at the top of the building could be seen in all its glory.