Mural Support

Lobby at One Wall Street Granted Legally Protected Status as Rare ‘Interior Landmark’

Lower Manhattan has a brand new landmark: The lobby of the former Irving Trust Building (opened in 1931 as a bank headquarters and converted in recent years to residential condominiums) has been designated by the City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) as an interior landmark. The outside of the building, designed by legendary architect Ralph Walker and known as One Wall Street, was named an exterior landmark in 2001.

Popularly known as “the Red Room,” for the murals by artist Hildreth Meière (whose work also appears in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, St. Bartholomew’s Church, Temple Emanu-el, and Radio City Music Hall), the space was originally a reception room and banking hall for the Irving Trust.

At its June 25 meeting, the LPC voted to protect the Red Room, noting that its “walls, ceiling, and columns sparkle with mosaic tile in warm colors that fade from red to orange across the ceiling, and gilded tiles create web-like designs that glitter on the red background and draw the eye up.”

LPC chair Sarah Carroll called the Red Room “one of New York City’s architectural gems from the height of the Art Deco era,” and predicted, “after a thoughtful restoration, the dazzling beauty of the “Red Room” will once again be open for the public to experience and enjoy.” This was a reference to plans by French luxury department store Printemps to open in the space later this year.

The preservation of the Red Room represents a partial victory for the Lower Manhattan community. Almost a decade ago, as the conversion of One Wall Street to apartments was beginning, Community Board 1 enacted a resolution calling for interior landmark status for both the Red Room and the former Observation Lounge at the building’s 49th floor. While LPC took eight years to act on CB1’s recommendation about the Red Room, they ignored entirely calls to protect the latter space, which has since been altered and absorbed into a penthouse apartment occupying several floors at the building’s peak, meaning that it is forever lost to the public.

Also ignored by the LPC (and apparently also lost to the public) is a mural that once adjoined the Red Room, “the Pursuit of Wealth,” by artist Kimon Nicolaides, which was partially destroyed by the installation of an air conditioning duct in 1965, with the remainder being covered over since. CB1’s 2016 resolution notes that this mural’s copper and gold inlays on a surface of pure silver was “one of the most costly and beautiful pieces of mural decoration ever attempted in the United States.”

Although the LPC has conferred various kind of legal protection on more than 38,000 buildings and sites throughout the five boroughs, designation of an interior space as a landmark is relatively rare, having been granted only 123 times. Among these are more than a dozen sites in Lower Manhattan, such as the inside of the Woolworth Building, the Battery Maritime Building, and the Cunard Building, along with a trio of local architectural gems that were, like One Wall Street, designed by Ralph Walker—32 Avenue of the Americas, 60 Hudson Street, and the Barclay–Vesey Building.