S. Jarmulowsky Bank Building

History and architecture

Called “the first strictly high-class tall bank and office building” on the Lower East Side, with a design “equal in every respect [to] the highest grade banking buildings throughout the city,” the S. Jarmulowsky Bank Building was completed in 1912 as the architectural showpiece of one of the neighborhood’s most prominent bankers. Born in 1841 in what was then the Russian province of Lomza, its owner, Sender Jarmulowsky, established his business on the Lower East Side in 1873 and was operating at this location by 1878.

Known for his honesty and conservative financial approach, Jarmulowsky grew wealthy over the following three decades providing steamship tickets and banking services to the immigrants of the surrounding neighborhood, which was unrivaled as the world’s largest Jewish community. He was also one of the Lower East Side’s leading philanthropists, playing an instrumental role in the construction of the Eldridge Street Synagogue, and serving as its first president.

In 1911, the firm of Rouse & Goldstone filed plans for this twelve-story building, which towered over the tenements of the Lower East Side when it was completed the following year. A pioneer in introducing the prevailing skyscraper aesthetic of New York’s major office districts to the neighborhood, the S. Jarmulowsky Bank Building was executed in the “modern Renaissance style” and the tripartite configuration that was standard for tall buildings of the time.

Accessed through a classical corner entrance, Jarmulowsky’s banking hall and offices were housed in the building’s rusticated stone base; manufacturing lofts occupied the rest of the building, including its ornate terra-cotta crown. Sender Jarmulowsky died shortly after the building’s opening, and his bank failed in 1917. The building was then sold by his sons, and continued to house a variety of industrial tenants into the twenty-first century.

Today, the richly decorated S. Jarmulowsky Bank Building remains one of the area’s tallest and most distinctive buildings, and one of a handful of structures that “encapsulate the Jewish immigrant experience” on the Lower East Side.