Industry sign banking rhode island pdf safe
this film clip from Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow shows in all of its glory the Hindenburg docking at the Empire State Building it looks realistic but that's Hollywood's magic this is a total fantasy but it's indicative of a really long standing desire to connect airships and skyscrapers for a very long time lighter than air travel was considered the best possible option we had for crossing the ocean for getting from one continent to the other quickly and we forget because of the disastrous end of the Hindenburg that this was a wildly successful technology the Hindenburg alone which was the last of many airships completed 63 flights in 1936 alone seventeen round trips across the Atlantic to the United States and to Brazil and a record atlantic double crossing in just five days and 20 hours in the 1936 season in the Hindenburg flew almost 200,000 miles carried almost 3,000 passengers and transported 160 tons of freight and Mail and then flew seven more flights in 1937 before it's famous crash as a result of that crash we only think now of lighter-than-air travel as a stupid idea in truth two days to Europe is a pretty compelling success story when you consider that steamships the only other option could take as much as a week or two weeks to cross the Atlantic so two days was pretty exciting this is a cutaway view to show you where passengers would have stayed in the Hindenburg and the subject of airships and architecture is one of fantasy there are many many images of airships docked to huge architectural mooring stations there's a tiny handful of realities in those fantasies where there was some architecture planned for that to happen and there are a whole number of undiscovered truths behind all of this the Empire State Building isn't the only building with a romantic image fiction suggesting a relationship between airships architecture almost every city with a spire like building an Art Deco tower or any other kind of skyscraper that's tall has an image of an airship right near it or right next to it suggesting that it might attach will return to this one later which is from Providence Rhode Island there are other talks on my youtube-channel about the history of lighter-than-air flight if you want a more complete investigation but this time I'm going to talk about the industrial trust building in Providence Rhode Island it's a building that's currently in flux it isn't occupied it doesn't have a very bright future and I hope that understanding a little bit more about its really glory past might help shed some light on improving its chances of a better future since its arrival in 1928 the industrial trust building has been the piece of architecture most responsible for defining the Providence skyline even with the addition of the modern movement and the postmodern movement the Art Deco tower in downtown Providence and its beauty is the proudest and most iconic part of what we call down city let's go back to 1928 when this new building arrived and completely transformed Providence from a quaint New England backwards looking port city into a bustling hub of business activity really charging forward into the modern world the Industrial trust-building changed the views everywhere Providence is a city of hills and from all of those hills the lantern became the most highly visible thing we had in the state so what a church spire had done in Providence for two centuries this building was also doing but in a much bigger way on a much grander scale at a much greater height in 1928 the future suggested faith not in the God of a church but in this new god of business and commerce as it collected in downtown Providence the industrial trust building was located across exchange terrace from our train station which is no longer there but at the time was and so it also is a major part of the experience of traveling either to Providence or through Providence as you saw appear on the horizon and grow ever larger and scale the industrial Trust Bank was started in 1886 also downtown but on Custom House Street and at the time it was a bank with $60,000 worth of holdings it pretty quickly moved to a nine story building on exchange Street in 1894 at that point it was a six million dollar bank so this was a really fast growing successful business and when the new building was conceived its centralized operations from four separate buildings at that time in 1927 the bank had 100 million dollars in holdings and almost 500 employees the old industrial trust building wasn't exactly shabby it was a pretty swanky affair but it wasn't really modern and by 1928 this aesthetic was hopelessly old-fashioned when the new building premiered an entire section of the Providence Journal was published as a pullout sort of magazine about this new building and it told the public all about the building and also the world that ushered it into existence it's interesting that in that same year in 1928 a number of prominent pieces of Providence's architecture arrived on the scene the Loews theater which is now the Providence Performing Arts Center but Allen school designs college building were all new and really remarkable structures but no one really cared because this industrial trust building was so much more exciting the building is 26 stories tall 428 feet and it changed the skyline in such a dramatic way that it's very hard to imagine it was the tallest thing by far in downtown Providence at the time it was the tallest building in the state and it is still the tallest building in the state it also was the third tallest building in New England both of these pictures of the building being constructed show the steel frame construction on the interior that structural grid of steel the pictures in this pullout section of the Providence Journal really help us understand how unlike everything else this building was it was a real beacon not just of tall architecture and not just of light out of the lantern at the top but of the future the building is sheathed in Indiana limestone with Deer Island granite at its base it's unusual in that it has two facades there's one facing Exchange Street and one on the other side of the building facing Westminster Street they're both the same but it's a little unusual to have a building that has two different entrances the building has six separate parts organized around a central tower it was designed by a New York architects Walker and Gillette who used the stepped massing that was really common in New York City skyscrapers and was developed to satisfy zoning regulations there but we didn't have zoning regulations in providence and yet that that massing structure created a really appealing shape for our skyline the pullout section in the Providence Journal does a nice job of talking about the exterior details which are very easy to ignore as you walk past the building so I have some pictures to show you the carb freezes and explain the program that they support there are four different seals too for the city and two for the state two on each side of the building the exchange Street facade has five card panels there's one with two stonemasons one with Indian women pounding corn there's Roger Williams at the spring with canonicus and man - no me signing the deed and then there's Roger Williams bringing the Charter of Rhode Island and finally preaching to the Indians along the alley on the archein Street side there are six panels that show hunting ironworking fishing trapping shipping and farming and then on the Westminster Street end there are five panels showing early Rhode Islanders make me a cannon primitive grist mill the first steamboat the first locomotive and Rhode Island women's spinning so this seems like a random mishmash of different ideas and for many years I looked at them from the Westminster street side first so I saw the modern world of steam ships and trains and then worked my way around towards people pounding horn and it was just a confusion but if you read it from exchange Street through Arcade Street and to Westminster Street it is a story of empire it's a story of colonialism it's taking over the natural resources of this country both natural resources and native resources right it's the Native Americans and all the horn and stone and turning them into industry and pave the way for the future so it's a really ugly story of imperialism but it is also the story of how a bank like the industrial trust Bank would have grown out of the wealth that America produced architectural forum published a very lovely essay about this building in May of 1929 and part of the text says the architects were fortunate in one respect they did not have to bring a towering weight of stone to rest on a foundation of glass shop fronts as is the case with most of the great hotels and commercial buildings in New York throughout the building there is evident the lavish and successful use of materials on entering the main banking room this fact undoubtedly contributes to the reassuring consciousness one has of ease and well-being the interior features freezes of medallions of famous Rhode Islanders Roger Williams William Coddington who was the first governor of the colony general Nathanael Greene Commodore Perry John Brown Samuel Slater Gilbert Stewart and Stephen Hopkins architectural forum does the blending of traditional and modern is so skillful it is hard to say where one leaves off and the other begins one might say it is Empire with a difference to me this picture looks very old-fashioned it's 1928 trying to look backwards and look more antique and yet architectural forum is pointing out that it's charging forward into the modern age but in a comfortable way so it's very hard to remember when looking at this building that it was modern at the top of all the columns are huge buffalo nickels to remind us that we're in a bank the Providence Journal wrote no visitor to the room is unimpressed by the simplicity and effectiveness of the coloring there are three domes in the ceiling that show the days of the week the four winds and four seasons in the center and then the zodiac and the months and they're beautifully painted in a really subtle but beautiful color palette they're also in great shape they look very much today as they did in 1928 architectural forum writes four of the 16 columns are slightly engaged in a partition and though one regrets this necessity the best has been made of the difficulty I love old-fashioned journalism the hilarity of having to apologize for columns being engaged in a space where they're otherwise independent is something no newspaper would do today the lanterns have been replaced the lanterns that are currently in the building are very persuasive it's a good upgrade but the original lanterns which are long gone were designed to bring the skyscraper motif and the massing and the verticality inside they were enormous pendant chandeliers there's a detail about this building that's difficult to show in pictures when you come in at either facade there is a small vestibule and you have the choice of going upstairs into the main banquet hall or downstairs into a lesser banking Hall which was the savings department this floor was much less impressive this was designed for the more serious business of your future and banking and as a result many of the architectural motifs from upstairs are reduced in formed they're they're abstracted ionic column capitals on square Kear's the hanging lamps reference the larger ones upstairs but in a much simpler way none of the downstairs decor has survived that's all been long removed and the only time I've seen pictures of it is in this architectural forum article in our excitement to fall in love with the architecture of this building it's easy to forget that there were technological marvels used to make this building work it was not only a triumph of architecture it was a triumph of technology and modernity the Providence Journal pullout section has ads placed by every company that worked on this building and those ads give a wealth of information about what an accomplishment the building was there were 14 elevators 8 went to the floors above the bank 2 were for bank customers within the bank and 2 were for the bank employees there were also two freight elevators the elevators went 800 feet per minute at the World Trade Center in New York City the elevators went 1,600 feet per minute and that was many decades later 800 feet per minute was a remarkable achievement for 1928 you'll notice in the picture on the left that the two elevators that go all the way to the top are the only way to reach the top of the building and those were for private use by the bank president's office and there are only two that went up there so the plan of the building is that the bank occupies the lower four floors and the top floor and in between were office rental spaces the bank featured 40 tellers windows with over 21,000 square feet of banking in that main hall and this was the first bank in Rhode Island where you could use any window to do your banking before that banks were segregated by alphabet you had to go to your alphabet zone of the bank and this required a completely new system of thinking about technology and connectivity so that any teller could find your account from any station 1877 saw the first commercially available telephones in the United States and we didn't have coast-to-coast telephone lines until 1915 the Providence Journal wrote the first telephone central office in Providence was located on the site now occupied by the industrial trust building I think it's interesting to note that in 1880 that office that first phone office in Providence served the 616 Providence telephone customers this building alone on that same spot in 1928 featured 32 switchboards organizing the calls of 673 telephones just in that one building and the safe door which you can see on the picture on the right weighs 17 tons before the building was even finished it was a source of pride and also a source of promotion there are so many ads in the 1928 Providence Journal boasting a connection to the construction of this building Gorham made the bronze work furnishings and woodwork steel structure plaster and contractors anyone who worked on it put a picture of it in their ads even the security company and the company that helped people move in use the building in their ads some of the claims are pretty thin this ad shows a company that provided the furniture for the barber shop and beauty salon so they didn't have a whole lot to do with that building but they were going to claim its connection anyway once the building was finished the challenge was as it still seems to be figuring out how to rent the rest of the building the Providence Journal was full of ads for many months advertising space in the building and it's interesting to look at these ads and see what information they have in them the ad on the Left says the lantern is a nightly advertisement for your business it's visible for 40 miles these ads say your name appearing on the office directory of the new industrial trust building takes on a new significance to be identified with the tenants of the city's finest building is to be numbered among the business leaders of the community and then also every day thousands of people pass through the doorway and up to the offices of the farsighted firms which have already located their offices here one of these ads is for the barber shop and another one is an ad for an attractive to man office which makes me wonder what happens if your office is full of unattractive men the ad on the right is very interesting on his recent visit mr. Henry Ford commented with enthusiasm on the great building he mentioned particularly the effective space layout and the smoothness of the elevator service it's fascinating to think of Henry Ford visiting this building and think about that crazy mashup of mr. Model T and Rhode Island's future meeting and then just one year after the building opened those ads were gone and the listings were relegated to the classified section in the back these images were printed in the same Providence Journal issue that announced the industrial trust building to Providence and if you're a careful observer you'll not
ce that that is New York City's Chrysler Building it had just been announced and it was still uncertain what the top of that building would look like so here are different versions to show the top of the building I think it's interesting to note not only that Providence had its great Art Deco skyscraper well before New York got its most famous ones and our building also had some unresolved issues about the top so some of the renderings produced before the building was finished show a very different Lantern at the top there is a lot going on at the top of this building that had to get reconciled the furnaces are in the basement of the building and through the center of the building is an enormous chimney that goes right up into the top of the lantern so it's a tube chimney with a lantern surface around that housed in a sort of square cupola as a result there's not a lot of structure up there it's essentially a lantern with a vent through the middle the final design of the top ended up looking very different it was created with four 500-pound limestone eagles that supported a metal globe and all of that set over the top of the lantern to hide the chimney so the chimney vented through the metal globe it's very difficult to find satisfying pictures of that original Lantern top this is a much reproduced and unsatisfying copy of the blueprint on the left and then a very old photograph from microfilm and this is the best I can offer you to show you the Eagles supporting the globe this is an article from 1932 describing how that original design ran afoul of Mother Nature the building was an obvious target for lightning and every time a storm hit the city another chunk of those Eagles would fall to the street so right from the very beginning within the first four years the building was open it became apparent that the Eagles were going to be a problem this is a picture of the fragments that landed across the street next to the providence arcade the article is worth reading if you feel like going and looking at micro films because it subtly points out that the two men who are in their car at something like 4:00 in the morning we're terribly surprised when these huge pieces of Eagle fell down next to their car which leaves me wondering why two men were sitting in a car at 4:00 in the morning across the street in the alley the solution in 1932 was to rebuild the missing pieces and repair the top of the building but the problems didn't stop and by 1950 it became apparent that the problem would continue and needed a more radical solution this is an article from the Providence Journal which uses extremely colorful language to describe the inevitable dismantling of the limestone eagles the article says there they stood with wings spread and rapacious beaks in a menacing attitude a symbol perhaps not of banks but of something now they have been beheaded down to the wishbone giving an effect and possibly a moral similar to the trunkless legs of Ozymandias as reported years ago to Percy Shelley by an anonymous traveler some people will resent the decapitating of these rare creatures but not Theron s Curtis a vice president the bank mr. Curtiss a brisk man with a pipe in his mouth said the other morning they were something the architects wanted up they're supposed to look like a flowerpot or something you couldn't tell from the street a crazy idea in my opinion that's enough to show you the crazy tone of voice this article had but the pictures are really although poorly reproduced still pretty compelling evidence of how brutal a solution to a problem can be the Eagles were jack-hammered off the building and wheeled away in wheelbarrows there it is the crown and glory of Providence's iconic skyline for maimed bird carcasses and a missing fear there's one other part of this building that we need to talk about it's very easily visible from College Hill but once you get closer to the building it's out of view way up on the top roof it's mysterious and that mystery has created a number of popular urban myths that are as colorful and wonderful and inspiring as they are impractical and ridiculous this happens to be a photoshopped image that I made to promote a talk at the Providence Preservation Society about this building and it wound up being yet another image that people just assumed is is real and supports something that really happened so I'd like to offer a discussion about that little room on top to clear up some thinking and the only way to really have authority about something is to look at primary source things and preferably to look with your own eyes so I've recorded a trip up to that room not only so that you can see it if you don't have the good fortune to get up there but sort of to help you understand what this building is on the left is a picture from the outside and on the right is a video going through the door into the building to show you what the inside of that space looks like the building is a twenty six story building and the top floor was the bank president's office it had lovely wooden paneling and was a really elegant space accessible only by private elevators to get to this little room on the roof you have to get to the president's office in the private elevator go out the back door of the office into the fire stairwell and go up two more flights through the lower part of the top tower of the building when you get to this door which says twenty ninth level penthouse you go out and take a left and then you're presented with a door that looks like a porthole perhaps that makes it look like a ship perhaps the porthole is there because it's a much easier shape to cut into the exterior wall of the building after the construction was already finished and you enter this room this is a photograph from the Providence Journal from the 1980s when the room had been restored and was in relatively good shape with no secondary method of egress it wasn't safe to use and the public couldn't access this room so it remained vacant and has deteriorated to an alarming extent this is a picture of the room now where you can see on the far side a door out to what's left of the roof there's very little of the roof left once this building got plopped on top there's about two feet around it and that door is a pretty difficult door to get up and out of so it really was just for people to go out and consider the really remarkable view on either side of the entrance door are two closets one has a wet bar which is accessible from the hallway you can load food in without going into the room and on the other side is a beautiful liquor cabinet remember that the building was built in 1928 and prohibition in America lasted from 1919 to 1933 if you're the president of the industrial Trust Bank of Rhode Island during Prohibition it would be unseemly for you to be known to be someone who went out drinking but if you had a private place you could drink and no one knew about it you'd be in pretty good shape so what is this thing on the roof some people say it looks like a gondola on a airship some people say it looks like a boat some people say it looks like a diner I would agree that it looks like all of those things because all of those structures are prefabricated components they're their own structure independent of needing support from the outside this was essentially a gift from Walker and Gillette the architects to the president of the industrial Trust Bank after the building was designed and while it was being constructed they manufactured this extra component and erected it on the roof so it may look like a gondola it may look like a boat it may look like a submarine it may look like a diner it also looks like a really lovely private Clubhouse on the roof for you to retire to after work or at lunchtime with nobody knowing what's going on inside it's currently used by the Audubon Society of Rhode Island to monitor the progress of the eggs and the hatchlings from the peregrine falcons that live on the next building over and you can visit the website that has a falcon cam and watch what's happening there there's another famous building with a very similar urban myth it seems like a detour perhaps but it adds another layer of importance to our own Providence skyscraper in 1928 in Rhode Island there were only two news stories one was the industrial trust building and it's progress and how remarkable it was and the other was the arrival of the Graf Zeppelin for on its first transatlantic trip from Germany to Lakehurst New Jersey every single bit of space in the newspaper shows an enthusiasm for these true stories so just as there were ads claiming connection to the industrial trust building there were ads claiming a connection to airships car manufacturers car dealers motor oil companies engine companies anybody with a mechanism that went tried to claim that their mechanism had something to do with the success of lighter-than-air travel as well another interesting local connection is that the American airship the shenandoah spent some time in Narragansett Bay off the old Island more to the USS Patoka which must have been a remarkable site as a result there was a real passion for lighter than air travel in Rhode Island Al Smith who was the former governor of New York in 1928 was the Democratic candidate for president you might notice the strangeness of this pin which says vote for Al Smith and make your wet dreams come true in 1928 that was not an untoward reference that was a reference to repealing prohibition Al Smith came to Rhode Island on his campaign tour in an amazingly successful visit that featured a sort of crazy northern motorcade spectacular that ended right in the shadow of our newly opened industrial trust-building Smith won only 40 percent of the popular vote and only eight states in the electoral vote but Rhode Island was one that he took easily and his reception here was one of the high points of his campaign and one that he treasured the Providence Journal reported in Providence that frenzy of mobs was almost too much for the determined energy of police who fought with their fists and formed human chains to keep the narrowest of lanes open that the governor's cavalcade might not be halted and swamped as it was the departure from Providence was delayed because of the slowness with which progress had necessarily been made through the packed streets and the highways 40,000 people came to exchange place to watch al Smith come through that's far more people than had turned out to see Lindberg when he was here the language in the newspaper is very colorful it talks of prancing horses and plunging humanity it says in front of Union Station all semblance of order was destroyed as thousands rushed the station so in spite of the fact that he lost and ran a failed campaign Al Smith went on to be an important connection point in this story he became president of the Empire State Corporation which was overseeing the construction of the Empire State Building this is the only building that can claim not only the idea of an airship mooring to it but can go one tiny step farther towards the reality than any other building it's interesting to remember that the building as designed was a modernist rectangle it was flat on top it did not have any kind of spire the problem was that it was 1,050 feet high as designed and the Chrysler Building was 925 feet tall that's only a hundred and 25 feet taller not enough if you were trying to be the tallest building in the world for a long period of time when the Chrysler Building added its fire it got up to 1048 feet so it was only two feet shorter than the Empire State Building granted that spire didn't have occupied space the Empire State Building had much more usable space at the top but still if math is going to be the banner you wave when you're claiming you're the tallest that's not great math so Al Smith's big contribution in addition to being governor in addition to being presidential candidate was to give the Empire State Building a hat the best way you could make sure it was going to be taller for a long period of time was to add more real estate to the top the only way to make that not seem like you were just grasping at better statistics was to make that top tie into the enthusiasms of the time and seem like progress so Al Smith proposed adding 200 more feet to the building and increasing the height of the Empire State Building from 1,050 feet to 1,250 feet the top of the Empire State Building was modeled on English High mooring masts in America we moored our airships to the ground we tied them right to the ground but in England they tied them up to mooring masts and here you can see a diagram and a photograph of people using the entrance hatch from the mooring mast to get in and out of an airship this was 170 feet off the ground so it's pretty high up but it's not 1,300 feet up in the air the new plan for the Empire State Building brought it up to 103 floors the passenger handling was meant to happen on the hundred and second one hundred and third floor but the winches and the equipment were never installed the mooring masks with passenger decks that were built in England were built to service one particular ship so there was an exact location of exit the Empire State Building was just a generic all-purpose airship docking station so it was designed for any old ship that landed there I don't know how you would control where the hatches lined up with the building the plan was you go up to the hundred and second floor which you can still do and there was a in mast observatory and then from there you'd go up a tiny level flight of stairs to the hundred and third floor which is now full of building equipment but at the time was more open and then you go out a tiny little aluminum hatch door onto a 3-foot wide platform with a very low retaining wall around it the carding Tanai morning mass had a 14 foot wide platform this one's three feet so how you would get off an airship onto it how you would take luggage onto it how any of the hundreds of tons of mail would be unloaded onto this tiny platform I have no idea did it work of course it worked did it work absolutely not plenty of people want to tell you that this was a real scheme and I want to give you the details so you can decide for yourself the picture on the left is a navy dirigible aj4 hired by a newsreel company to just flirt with that unfinished mass in 1930 it wasn't ever intended as a mooring it was just a stunt to get a great picture to get people excited about this that dirigible was only 196 feet long so it wasn't very big and on the right is the energetic shoe companies for passenger 138 foot long airship it tried to dock in 1931 there were three men on the building desperately trying to catch the mooring rope and hold on which they did but they were not able to pull the blimp in and they ended up giving up because there was no winching system installed on September 28th of 1931 the Goodyear blimp Columbia took the evening journal from its printing plant on South Street to the Empire State Building and tried to deliver them to the landing platform the winds almost flipped the blimp over because the updraft on the side of the building are extreme it did eventually managed to land the newspapers on the parapet and then the next day they tried again with New York Times but it was a similarly hilarious mishap one important thing to remember is that for an airship to go up it needs to get lighter and the best way to do that is to loose ballast which is water that water dropped from 1,300 feet up in the air will drench pedestrians for many blocks around the building getting something to this building was one part of the challenge getting it away created all sorts of other problems another situation is that the back end of an airship needs to be secured we learned that lesson in 1927 with the u.s. Los Angeles when only the front was attached to a mooring stand and a gust of wind picked the ship up and flipped it over imagine that happening 1,300 feet in the air this is a movie of the Hindenburg which is tied to the ground in Lakehurst New Jersey on terra firma and it shows how difficult it is to get off this ship even in the best of circumstances the steps are being wheeled forward for
every single passenger to make sure they have somewhere to step on to so the dream was real the architecture was almost complete but it was a very short-lived impossible situation on December 22nd of 1931 RCA rented half of the otherwise vacant 85th floor and set up a laboratory to begin experimenting with TV broadcasting and they used the tower for mounting and tonight that's what this tower has done ever since nevertheless we continued to attach airships to tall buildings especially to the Empire State Building I started with an image of sky captain in the World of Tomorrow which is full of beautifully created digital images of this happening and on the left is a wonderful illustration showing all the great tall buildings of the world in comparison to the newly announced palace of the Soviets which did not end up getting finished but I like that even in this illustration when they show the Empire State Building they show it with a dirigible attached to it so if we come back to Providence to get a sense of scale our industrial trust building is 428 feet tall on the left there the Empire State Building on the right is twelve hundred and fifty feet tall and there are some other important buildings in between just to show you how that looks if we take the Hindenburg which was eight hundred and four feet long that's a sense of its scale so if we put it at the top of these buildings it's a pretty radical proposal it might visually make more sense on the Empire State Building the scales a little bit better but that airship required the strength to withstand a horizontal pull of 50 tons and transfer those stresses from the single connection point through the building to the foundation where it would dress the structure of the building neither of these buildings was built with that kind of interior mooring structure so the photoshopped fantasy I produced is actually pretty inaccurate and scale this is what the Hindenburg would actually look like attached to the industrial trust building I hope you agree that that's a pretty ridiculous relationship if we use a satellite image of downtown and put for fun I put the Hindenburg and the Shenandoah 800 three feet or 680 feet on that building you could see that they prohibit any further tall building construction in any part of downtown pictures of the building being constructed show the structure at the top and although the main part of the building has a pretty rigid grid of Steel when you get up to the top where it has the lantern and the chimney for the building there's very little structure empirically rationally logically completely impossible at the same time we shouldn't despair because the idea of air travel is so compelling it's so sexy the desire to dock an airship at a tall building is not only visually exciting but it's inspiring as a possibility it just continues to be a presence in our visual culture that's the real take away even though it didn't happen even though it wasn't possible it keeps us getting out of bed every day it's an exciting future that we don't want to let go of and I like that because of the direct connection between our Superman building and Al Smith and his experience in Providence right when Zeppelin fever had its fiercest hold on people's brains we may not be able to take credit for airships and architecture having a relationship but I believe we can take credit for inspiring one of the world's favorite icons while I'm debunking myths here I just called the industrial trust building our Superman building that's what locals call it there's also an urban myth that our building was the inspiration for the Superman building just as an FYI totally wasn't in 1940 Superman co-creator Joe Shuster named the Daily Star which later became the Daily Planet after the Toronto Daily Star newspaper where he had worked as a newsboy but if you go to any city in the country they have an Art Deco building that they call their Superman building and they believe it was the inspiration for the Superman building and if you look at any generation of Superman cartoons comic strips animated series or movies different buildings were the model for those Superman buildings so all of these buildings have served as a model for some Superman building and ours was actually used not only in the Family Guy opening credits but as the building for the underdog live-action movie let go your hold of calling it Superman building you can if you want but there are many other buildings that deserve that title today tragically the building is falling on really hard times Bank of America moved out in March of 2013 and the building has been empty ever since in 2014 a Providence real estate group Scotty and associates filed a report that determined that the building had an official value of no value last winter a mobile furnace was hooked up outside the building and connected with a network of exterior heat pipes presumably to save fuel because the furnaces in the building are original to 1928 and use an extraordinary amount of crude oil but also presumably to allow heating of parts of the building that need to stay warm and leaving the rest unheated most distressingly you noticed scaffolding in the last slide and that's been put up because a waterproofing was apparently applied to the exterior of the building which in addition to preventing water from getting into the limestone is preventing moisture from traveling out through the limestone and that's causing the steel connecting pins between the blocks to rust and they expand which creates spalling so chunks of limestone are being forced off the building now and the surface is becoming increasingly disfigured as a result what's going to happen to the Providence industrial Trust building what is its future will it survive every person who's ever seen it or visited Providence or been in it certainly hope so what began its life is a bold statement of modern technology and progress may look old-fashioned to our eyes in 2015 but it is inarguably just as impressive just as imposing and just as inviting as it was when it arrived on the skyline in 1928 although we do not know what its future is I hope that knowing a little bit more about its past will inspire people to focus more attention on it and perhaps get more involved in trying to work together to find a way to keep this building as an active part not just of our skyline but of the day-to-day fabric of what we do here in Providence
