Provident Life & Trust Company - Demolition

Demolition

Across Chestnut Street from the Furness bank was the Second Bank of the United States (1819–24), a white-marble, Greek Revival temple by William Strickland. Planning for what is now Independence National Historical Park (INHP) began in the late-1940s, and Strickland's bank was to become an art museum housing portraits of the Founding Fathers. On the block opposite Furness's bank, every building except the Second Bank was demolished for the national park, and a re-creation of William Thornton's Library Company of Philadelphia (1790) was erected. The sedate Italianate buildings of Banker's Row were considered harmonious with the Second Bank and the re-created Library Hall; the Provident was considered jarring.

Through the 1950s, architectural historians worked to save Furness's bank, writing articles for major publications, photographing and documenting it. Charles E. Peterson, the National Park Service architect assigned to INHP, edited a column in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians and used it to call attention to the Provident. But, in the end, the Colonial Revivalists remained unswayed, and Furness's bank was demolished beginning in 1959. Samples of the Minton tiles and other architectural elements are preserved in the architecture study collection at INHP.

In essence, the brash, Look-At-Me!-quality that had won Furness the Provident commission was the very reason for the building's demolition. Architectural historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock eulogized it in 1963:

Still more original and impressive were his banks, even though they lay quite off the main line of development of commercial architecture in this period. The most extraordinary of these, and Furness's masterpiece, was the Provident Institution in Walnut Street, built as late as 1879. This was most unfortunately demolished in the Philadelphia urban renewal campaign several years ago, but the gigantic and forceful scale of the granite membering alone should have justified its respectful preservation. The interior, entirely lined with patterned tiles, was of rather later character than the facade and eventually much cluttered with later intrusions, but it was equally fine in its own way originally.

• "Bankers' Row", circa 1875, before construction of The Provident.

• Illustration from an 1886 map.

• "Bankers' Row", in 1959. The Provident is right of center.

• Demolition, December 1959. The iron trusses supported the roof and skylight.