Broadway Savings Bank, 682 6th Ave. between 21st & 22nd Sts. (2003)

On the Hall Bldg. at 682 6th Ave. two doors up from Wolf Paper & Twine is the faint remainder of a sign for the Broadway Savings Bank.

The Broadway Savings Bank was chartered 20 June 1851 as the Broadway Savings Institution. The name changed to Broadway Savings Bank in 1925. From the 1860s until 1948 Broadway Savings maintained a single location on Park Place in downtown New York. Then in 1948 the bank built its one and only branch in a new building at 250 West 23rd St. near 8th Ave. The new building was nearly 2 blocks west of the sign above, but the sign very likely was painted in the late 1940s to advertise the 23rd St. location.

250 W. 23rd St. carries a prominent BROADWAY / SAVINGS BANK sign incised in the facade. (Click for image.) The architect was Harold Reeve Sleeper, with associates Frederick L. Ackerman and Charles George Ramsey. (Click for image of cornerstone.) The same team designed the apartment house at 25 E. 83rd St., which is cited as the "first fully air-conditioned apartment house in New York" in Stern et. al.'s New York 1930 (1987). This is the same threesome who authored the well-known architectural technical manual: Architectural Graphic Standards (1st edition, 1932).

Within a year or two of opening its new building Broadway Savings Bank made the 23rd St. location its main bank and reduced the Park Place location to the status of a branch. In 1973 Broadway Savings acquired the Prudential Savings Bank and changed its name to Prudential Savings Bank. In 1979 Prudential Savings was acquired by the Emigrant Savings Bank. As of April 2005 Emigrant Savings Bank still operates a branch at 250 W. 23rd St.

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