The Federal Reserve Bank of New York on Liberty Street, a Florentine palazzo of rusticated limestone and sandstone with wrought iron lanterns at its door, and the strangest basement in the city eighty feet below it, resting on the bedrock of Manhattan. You come in off the street through the banking hall, take the elevator down, and walk the corridor to a steel cylinder that turns to open the way into the cages of stacked bars. The New Yorkers hang in the hall, in the corridor and in the scale room, never on the cages.
York and Sawyer designed the Federal Reserve Bank of New York Building, erected from 1919 to 1924 with an eastward extension in 1935: a front of limestone and sandstone over a steel frame in the manner of early Italian Renaissance palaces such as the Palazzo Strozzi and Palazzo Vecchio, fourteen storeys above ground and five basement levels, filling the block between Liberty, William and Nassau Streets and Maiden Lane, with ironwork by Samuel Yellin of Philadelphia weighing a collective 200 short tons; it joined the National Register of Historic Places in 1980. The bank's own page on the vault says it rests on the bedrock of Manhattan 80 feet below street level and 50 feet below sea level, was built during the construction of the building in the early 1920s, and is entered through a 90 ton steel cylinder set in a 140 ton steel and concrete frame; bars go into one of 122 compartments, each weighs approximately 27 pounds, the scale weighs up to 640 pounds and down to one hundredth of an ounce, holdings peaked in 1973 at over 12,000 tons, and in 2024 the vault housed approximately 507,000 bars, about 6,331 metric tons.
Source · The Gold Vault, Federal Reserve Bank of New York ↗
The rusticated stone front with its round arched windows and iron grilles, Yellin's iron lanterns at the entrance, the banking hall with its stone piers and iron screen, the elevator that takes you down when you stand in it, the concrete corridor, the ninety ton steel cylinder turning in its frame, the scale room with its great balance, the cages of gold bars behind bars and mesh, the hand cart rolled through by two figures, and Liberty Street traffic with a steam stack outside. Mood: bedrock, steel, and a door that turns. Everything is procedural geometry with painted surfaces; nothing is a scan or a photograph. The room is an interpretation, and it hangs the New Yorkers the census recorded at this place first.