Looking at the five-story bank on the southwest corner of Fifth Avenue and 43d Street today, it is hard to imagine that 15,000 people visited it the first week it opened, in October of 1954. But 50 years ago this bank was a revelation to the public.
For the past 150 years, banks had essentially been classically inspired stone fortresses. No one in New York had ever seen a design like this.
The seminal modernist bank of the post-World War II era was undeniably the Fifth Avenue branch of Manufacturers Trust, designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. With its glass curtain walls and exposed structural system, it marked the complete shift of bank design to the International Style, a new modernist approach which spurned past historical styles, favoring instead unadorned concrete and steel construction.
Banks built since the end of the war had used glass to open up facades, but no one had used it as completely and boldly. It was a watershed for modernism, which now had the imprimatur of the most conservative of all businesses.
The building's construction and opening were given heavy press coverage, not only by architectural publications but the banking industry and the New York newspapers, Life magazine, and even newsreels. After the branch opened in 1954, banks across America readily adopted the style.
The initial concept for the bank actually came out of an in-house weekend competition to give young architects in the firm an opportunity to design. The original design was refined by Gordon Bunshaft, a senior designer who was responsible for New York City's first International Style skyscraper, Lever House, in 1952.
The bank settled on a site owned by Mutual Life Co., but wartime restrictions on building materials and rent control laws that prevented evictions from the existing building delayed the project until 1951. Then the Korean War imposed new restrictions on steel, and it was not until 1953 that plans were completed.
The final design was a five-story building that was a total departure from any previous bank architecture - a luminous glass box instead of a stronghold of stone.
Both facades were clad in curtain walls of clear glass supported by polished aluminum mullions attached to the edges of the cantilevered concrete slab. The second-floor slab was pulled back from the glass to give the impression the banking room was contained in one space, with the glass panels running uninterrupted 32 feet to the third floor. Black spandrel panels concealed the edge of the slabs.
What gave the building its ethereal quality was its lighting. Using a totally luminous ceiling instead of a typical suspended acoustical ceiling, the floor slabs seemed to have a weightless quality. The large amount of interior light tended to counteract the reflectivity of the glass, giving the passerby an unhindered view of the inside of the bank.
The construction superintendent described the bank as "more like jewelry than a building." The entrance was asymmetrically placed at the corner on 43d Street, with no extraneous design features.
The building's most radical departure from traditional bank design was the placement of the vault. Instead of being tucked behind the work area, the stainless steel and polished bronze Mosler vault door was the main architectural feature of the bank, on the first floor, only 10 feet from the sidewalk on Fifth Avenue.
The 30-ton, seven-foot-diameter door was designed by the famed industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss. The vault was the cutting edge in security of the time, with four anti-concussion time locks and two combination locks, each with a 100 million possible combination changes.
"A safecracker," explained the bank's press release, "spinning a new combination every minute would have 380 years of uninterrupted work ahead of him."
The 2 million-pound vault was 60 feet long, 22 feet wide, and 11 feet high, with 18-inch-thick concrete walls. But its most dramatic security feature was its location, allowing any passerby, day or night, to keep on an eye out for safecrackers.
The vault was now just a piece of stagecraft. It did not mean anything anymore, reported Architectural Forum in its review of the bank. "Banks used to sell security. But now, with their deposits federally insured, they are selling service."
Bank president Horace C. Flanigan had also likened banking to selling a service, comparable to department and specialty stores. He emphasized the point in 1954 at the bank's opening.
"These walls give the bank a wide-open, inviting look and turn it day and night into a giant showcase. ... The building will be its own best salesman, a merchandising concept new in banking and one that we believe pioneers the way to better customer service."
The first floor was devoted to regular customer transactions while an escalator led to the main banking room, on the second floor, which was dedicated to commercial banking and the bank's foreign and trust departments.
The third and fourth floors were used for clerical and support space. The penthouse, which was set back from the perimeter, housed the president's office, bank officers' spaces, lounge and dining facilities, and a community room.
The first floor had 16 teller positions at open counters completely free of any grillwork, with the flexibility for extra tellers to help during rush hours using cash carts.
Even before completion, the bank was a sensation. The New York Times said, "The idea is to let the public in on the entire workings of what to most of us used to be a mysterious business, and to put on a show to match."
The size of the glass panels fascinated the public and the press; 22 pieces of 10-foot-by-22-foot sheets of half-inch-thick glass, each weighing 1,500 pounds. Bank News urged members to go visit the new "House of Glass" and praised Flanigan's vision for commissioning such a design, saying he "deliberately employed an architectural firm which had never done a bank building before, in the hope of getting away from the conventional in bank design."
Flanigan did just that. His Manufacturers Trust changed the way banks look forever.
