Jarmulovsky's Bank Building 1912

Russian-Polish immigrant Sender Jarmulowsky opened his bank at 54 Canal Street in 1873. The bank quickly became a staple in the Lower East Side, catering to the neighborhood’s large Jewish community. Residents could conduct transactions in Yiddish and even buy steerage tickets for their families back home. The Lower East Side community trusted Jarmulowsky, a respected philanthropic business owner, and felt comfortable opening accounts with him.

In 1911, the original bank building at 54 Canal Street was demolished, and a new modern building of Caen stone, a type of French limestone, replaced it. Jarmulowsky chose the sophisticated stone and bronze design to show the rest of the city that the Lower East Side was not a cut-off Jewish community, but one that was integrated into the American economy.

As the new Jarmulowsky Bank was being built, the headquarters of the Jewish Daily Forward, a Yiddish newspaper, was also on its way up. When Jarmulowsky saw that the Forward building–which was located just down the street at 175 East Broadway–was going to be slightly taller than his bank, he called for a last minute addition to the roof of his building. He had a 50-foot-tall circular, dome-like structure made of columns called a tempietto added to the corner point of the bank’s roof. The ornate addition made Jarmulowsky’s Bank the tallest building in the Lower East Side. The original tempietto was destroyed during renovation in 1990.

Only three weeks after the bank’s opening, Jarmulowsky died, leaving his sons in charge of the business. By 1917, however, the bank was forced to close. When World War I broke out in 1914, the bank closed in order to keep account holders from withdrawing their money and sending it overseas to their families in Europe. According to the New York Times, 2,000 people demonstrated in front of the bank because of the shutdown. Five hundred demonstrators then stormed the house where son Meyer Jarmulowsky lived, forcing him to escape across tenement rooftops. Jarmulowsky’s sons were soon indicted for banking fraud and mismanagement, and the bank closed.

After the closure, the state took possession of the bank in the 1920s and auctioned it off. The first floor was the site of various different banks over the years, with the rest of the building housing lofts and textile companies. In 2011, DLJ Real Estate Capital Partners began restoring the building and planned to rebuild the destroyed tempietto. In 2013, the building was slated for conversion into a luxury hotel.