Cipriani 42nd Street

Cipriani 42nd Street, formerly known as the Bowery Savings Bank, is a national landmark conveniently located adjacent to Grand Central Station. Built-in 1921 in the spirit of the Italian Renaissance, Louis Ayres, of the distinguished architectural firm York & Sawyer, created “easily the most sumptuous of its kind in the country, departing sharply from the old architectural idea of a modified Greek temple as the proper model for a savings bank.” Cipriani 42nd Street features a four-story banquet room with exquisite marble columns extending to ceiling heights reaching 65 feet. The random use of marbles of many colors inhabits nearly every architectural element and detail of the room and its furnishings. The entire banking room floor is of polychrome marble cosmato work laid in geometric patterns with broad borders of ‘traneville’ cream marble. Three patterns – hexagon, lozenge/star, and lozenge/square – alternate in the marble floor within the five arched bays that compose the banking room’s east and west walls.