The Turk's Head Building is a 16-story office high-rise in Providence, Rhode Island. Completed in 1913, the building is one of the oldest skyscrapers in Providence. Standing 215 ft (66 m) tall, it is currently the 11th-tallest building in Providence. When completed in the 1913, the Turk's Head Building surpassed the 1901 Union Trust building to become the tallest building in downtown. It retained that title until 1922, when the Providence Biltmore was completed.
The building is designed in a V-shape, and architectural historian McKenzie Woodword asserts that the architects of the building "clearly had in mind Daniel Burnham's Flatiron Building" (in New York City). The skyscraper's peculiar name dates back to the early nineteenth century, when shopkeeper Jacob Whitman mounted a ship's figurehead above his store. The figurehead, which came from the ship Sultan, depicted the head of an Ottoman warrior. Whitman's store was called "At the sign of the Turk's Head". The figurehead vanished in a storm and today a granite replica of the original Turk head is found on the building's 3rd floor façade.
After buying the building in 1997 for $4.2 million and spending $3 million renovating it, Brothers Evan and Lloyd Granoff sold the building in 2008 for $17.55 million to FB Capital Partners. The Granoffs had not been actively trying to sell the building — the Granoff's attorney advisor said the Granoffs allowed the deal because the sum offered was well over the worth of the building.
Notably, this building was also featured in one of the scenes from the Disney movie Underdog.
Famous quotes containing the words head and/or building:
“Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing—to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Our civilization is characterized by the word “progress.” Progress is its form rather than making progress being one of its features. Typically it constructs. It is occupied with building an ever more complicated structure. And even clarity is sought only as a means to this end, not as an end in itself. For me on the contrary clarity, perspicuity are valuable in themselves.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)