Design

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1927
Wrought iron
Impressed to bottom rim: "SAMUEL YELLIN"
H: 42 1/2, Dia: 24 1/2 in. (approximate)

Lot Essay
The Central Savings Bank Building (at the West 73rd Street convergence of Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue in New York) is representative of Samuel Yellin’s furious creative and productive pace throughout the late 1920s. For their new uptown headquarters, Central Savings Bank engaged bank architecture masters York & Sawyer to design a Renaissance palazzo style structure that recalled the firm’s crowning achievement in the field earlier that decade, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York Building (1922-24). Yellin had been commissioned for the Federal Reserve project metalwork as well, and between 1926 and 1928 the two firms produced for Central Savings a scaled-down version of their earlier joint project.

Yellin’s metalwork commission for Central Savings Bank encompassed all the decorative and functional metal fixtures for the building: check desks, teller cages, grilles, interior and exterior doors, hardware, light fixtures, and further elements too numerous to list. A showplace for the prosperous bank, every element was custom made, however many of the designs echo similar work created a few years earlier for the Federal Reserve.

The present lot is an excellent example of this process of stylistic refinement. Yellin designed a series of massive exterior lanterns for the entrances at the Federal Reserve, each larger than an adult person in size. At Central Savings, Yellin designed and fabricated a similar, smaller series of lanterns arrayed in individual or triple configuration. Both buildings’ lanterns share a common vocabulary (Yellin was an avid historian of antique ironwork, and both buildings' lanterns have a close common ancestor in Caparra’s famous sixteenth century lanterns at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence), but the Central Savings Bank iterations are more reserved in scale and ornament.

The Central Savings Bank was a better than average steward of their building but did not hold their metalwork in particularly high regard. Midcentury photographs show Yellin’s exterior lanterns still in place on the building’s façade, but by the time the structure received exterior protection under New York’s landmark law in 1975 (interior protection of the banking hall would follow in 1993), Yellin’s lanterns had been replaced by simple cast iron stock fixtures. Despite this loss, the Central Savings Bank Building continues to display other exterior ironwork by Yellin, and the building itself remains a cherished fixture in the neighborhood; like the Ansonia and the Dakota, it functions as a gateway to the heart of the Upper West Side.

Note
The last two images accompanying the present lot are digital reproductions of original 1927 photographs of identical lanterns from the Central Savings Bank Building (shown with and without brackets), and have been graciously provided from the Samuel Yellin Collection, Architectural Archives, Stuart Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania. These photographs are not included in the sale.