United States Branch Bank, Wall Street

Charles W. Burton

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Thompson was a leading exponent of Greek Revival--style architecture in New York during the first half of the nineteenth century. Here, however, in his earliest known design, the Greek influence is minimal. The two-story, seven-bay façade of the Branch Bank of the United States, its projecting center section capped by a pediment, directly follows in the mid-eighteenth-century English Palladian tradition. Only the Ionic capitals and some of the cornice moldings are of Greek inspiration. The building was located on the north side of Wall Street, between Nassau and William streets, and in the 1850s, it was converted into the United States Assay Office. It was demolished in 1915, but the façade was saved and reconstructed as the front of the Museum’s American Wing in 1924.

The American Wing

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The American Wing's ever-evolving collection comprises some 20,000 works of art by African American, Euro American, Latin American, and Native American men and women. Ranging from the colonial to early-modern periods, the holdings include painting, sculpture, works on paper, and decorative arts—including furniture, textiles, ceramics, glass, silver, metalwork, jewelry, basketry, quill and bead embroidery—as well as historical interiors and architectural fragments.

Metropolitan Museum of Art