Rhode Island Hospital Trust Building

About this property

The Rhode Island Hospital Trust Building is a historic commercial building in downtown Providence, Rhode Island, United States, designed by York & Sawyer and completed in 1920. Since 2006 the building has housed dormitories and the Fleet Library of the Rhode Island School of Design. The Rhode Island Hospital Trust Company was a banking institution founded in 1867 to manage the financial affairs of Rhode Island Hospital, founded in 1863. It was the first trust company to be organized in New England. As originally constituted, the bank paid a certain percentage of its profits to the hospital; this ended in 1880 once the hospital found other means of fundraising. The bank's original building on this site was a Richardsonian Romanesque building designed by Anglo-American architect Robert W. Gibson and completed in 1891. It was expanded in 1903 from designs by Peabody & Stearns, who matched the original style with the addition of a fifth floor and a more elaborate entrance. Over the next decade the bank grew to be the largest in Rhode Island and outgrew its building. Plans were made for a replacement in 1916 and construction began in 1917; the latter date is inscribed on the building in several locations. It was designed by York & Sawyer and built by the George A. Fuller Company, both of New York City. Wartime restrictions on the civilian use of construction materials meant that construction was delayed during World War I. It was built in two phases: a first, completed in 1919, which was built around the original building, and a second, completed in 1920, which replaced that building. It was designed in the form of Renaissance palazzo, stretched eleven stories high. The Providence Magazine described it as "a modern adaptation of the English conception of the Italian Renaissance." The focus of the interior is the former banking hall, which occupies most of the ground floor. Like the exterior it was designed in the Renaissance style and has a vaulted ceiling supported by twenty-four Corinthian columns. The building is steel-framed and is faced with marble on the two lower levels and with limestone elsewhere. In 1927 an addition was completed on the southwestern side of the building, comprising the section beyond the Westminster and Fulton Street entrances. It was designed by the original architects, York & Sawyer, to match their original building In 1933 the bank formed a national bank, the Rhode Island Hospital National Bank, to take over its commercial business. The new bank, opened in the building in 1934, was organized in reaction to the directors' fears of bank nationalization after the banking panic and the Emergency Banking Act of 1933. The national bank was merged back into the trust company in 1951 and in 1969 the trust company was reorganized as a new national bank, the Rhode Island Hospital Trust National Bank. In 1973 it completed the adjacent One Financial Plaza and occupied both buildings. The bank acquired a dozen Rhode Island banks over the twentieth century and in 1985 was itself acquired by the Bank of Boston. The Bank of Boston, renamed BankBoston in 1996, continued to use the Hospital Trust name until 1998, a year before it merged with Fleet Financial Group to form FleetBoston Financial. Fleet was the successor to the Industrial Trust Company, later the Industrial National Bank, Hospital Trust's largest local competitor.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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