That’s the 1904 Knickerbocker* Trust headquarters, at Fifth Avenue and 34th Street. Like most banks of the beginning of the twentieth century, it was not very big, and in this photo is dwarfed by the old Waldorf-Astoria Hotel** behind it. This may seem like an example of showing off your wealth by building small but (a) land was cheaper in midtown at that time than in the Financial District, so there was less money to be made by building a high rise and (b) the Knick is on a small lot that couldn’t take much of a skyscraper.
From this angle, you see the building as it was intended: a Neo-classical miniature. When you look at the south facade, that’s still true, but the underlying reality is a little clearer:
The text is a bit small, but it’s clear that the upper floors are rental space, so the bank was using its site in the same manner as most other Manhattan property owners. More importantly, the steel frame of the building starts to show through McKim, Mead & White’s classicism: the dark portions of the facade are metal, meaning that we have a very low ratio of masonry to wall. That’s no surprise today, but makes it clear that this is not a traditional building. The Roman buildings this facade was based on might have had free-standing colonnades at their exterior, but had solid walls*** enclosing any interior space.
In other words, MM&W were not pretending this building was constructed 1800 years before its actual completion. They were using a style – because they liked it, because the client liked it, because of the symbolism of age and solidity they felt it gave – to decorate a modern building.
* For people unfamiliar with New York history, that name has an old and odd pedigree, starting as a joke about the New Amsterdam settlers and gradually becoming a synonym for “New Yorker.”
** The old W-A site is where the Empire State Building is now.
*** With, you know, windows.
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