Diagonally opposite the old Hospital Trust Building on Westminster Street is another relic of the scale of Providence banking of an earlier day. This and the Bank of North America (
PR19) introduced the Italianate palace as a popular mid-nineteenth-century image for commercial buildings, and the two remain the only pre–Civil War downtown survivors of a commercial type destined to have prolonged effect. At six stories, the Merchants Bank Building was long the tallest building in the city and the first to be retrofitted with an elevator. Like Thomas Tefft before them, Morse and Hall graduated the treatment of their features from ground floor to roof. Turk's Head nicely responds to its wedge shape as an opposed wedge. One creates a funnel into the plaza hub; the other, one out of it. And, like the Exchange Bank Building (
PR25), this also demonstrates the urbanistic value of the pigmy building among giants.