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:
“The first man, who after enclosing a piece of ground, took it into his head to say, this is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society.”
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778)
“No: until I want the protection of Massachusetts to be extended to me in some distant Southern port, where my liberty is endangered, or until I am bent solely on building up an estate at home by peaceful enterprise, I can afford to refuse allegiance to Massachusetts, and her right to my property and life. It costs me less in every sense to incur the penalty of disobedience to the State than it would to obey. I should feel as if I were worth less in that case.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)