This large cubistic building was one of the most controversial additions to the city’s architectural collection. Designed as the corporate headquarters for Old Stone Bank by Edward Larrabee Barnes, a well-established architect of slick corporate buildings, it was originally proposed as two three-story, mirror-image, stepped-back brick buildings aligned along an axis extending west from the front door of Old Stone Bank. This proposal prompted tremendous opposition from every quarter – especially from the preservation community, which held as sacrosanct the open space south of College Street between South Main and South Water Streets, citing the historic view it allowed. This view developed only after 1950, however, following the demolition for surface parking of the historic warehouses that served the Port of Providence throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. So much for historical accuracy!
To address community concerns, and because federal financial subsidies supported the project, Mayor Vincent A. Cianci, Jr, appointed a blue-ribbon committee that included historians, architects, preservationists, and bank representatives. At their direction, Barnes went back to the drawing board and produced a second design, which kept the building’s overall plan but fragmented its massing in a manner reminiscent of the nearby Court House. The plan received greater public approval but elicited a lawsuit from the corporate owner of a building in the financial district across the river, because it blocked their own building’s view of historic South Main Street. At that point, the discussions became private between the two corporate entities.
In the end, Old Stone Bank agreed to abandon federal subsidies, to build only on the south side of their parcel, to create a park on the north half of the parcel, and to retain exclusive design review. Thus Providence gained this egotistical corporate-image building (certainly more appropriate an image for Ralston-Purina and definitely better suited to St. Louis than here) for a bank that closed its doors only a few years after this was completed. Its virtues include interest as an object, although it is too big an object and was built at a time when such an attitude was becoming wearying, and the craft with which it was assembled, an attribute found in most of Barnes’s building. After twenty years it continues to startle the urban observer, even one who views it daily. Immediately to the north, however, the effect is softened by the park designed by William H. Whyte and intentionally commissioned by the bank for that very effect.
– 2003 Guide to Providence Architecture
Old Stone Square is an eleven-story, steel-frame office building asymmetrically massed with a large, recessed entrance porch on the northeast and a large terrace carved out of the upper stories on the northwest. The building is sheathed in two shades and textures of granite arranged in a checker board pattern—a variation of the Old Stone Bank’s logo—and tinted glass. Developed principally by Old Stone Bank and Dimeo Construction Company, this building sparked a community-wide controversy because of its scale and design; originally conceived as two, stepped-back, mirror-image buildings facing each other across a plaza centered on the Old Stone Bank at 86 South Main Street, the scheme was revised by a committee organized by Major Vincent A. Cianci, Jr. and including the architect, the developers, and several local experts on design. The second scheme, brick-clad like the first, was abandoned after litigation threatened timely completion. As part of the compromise reached among the involved litigants, the developers abandoned building on the northern part of the parcel—thereby preserving something of the vista of historic buildings on South Main Street—in exchange for complete control over the design of the building. This, the product of that compromise, is in some ways an interesting building, the only one in the state by nationally prominent architect Edward Larrabee Barnes. It is nevertheless vastly different in scale, proportion, and massing from nearby structures—including the large, Georgian Revival courthouse.
Bibliography:
Providence: A Citywide Survey, p. 224
–Providence’s Recent Past (2010), a PPS map by Ned Connors.
Last edited March 27, 2025 by Elisabeth Brown
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