Ancient Sites of New York City 1: A Greek Temple in the Sky

I am heading to New York City today and so for the next week I will be posting about how this great American city has appropriated ancient sites illustrating the entries on ‘Antiquity’ in Kenneth Goldsmith’s epic New York: Capital of the 20th Century. (Here is an earlier post on the same work)

Here is Goldsmith’s entry from Henry Moscow’s 1995 book The Book of New York Firsts (p. 110):

The first – and only – simulated Greek temple to adorn the city’s skyline sat anachronistically and incongruously atop 50-52 Wall Street. A penthouse of forgotten gods, the structure could best be seen from the air.

Moscow continues to describe how the building was built in 1928 for the National City Company (a forerunner of Citicorp) and how it was demolished in 1981 and with it what was, one would think, the highest Greek temple in the world!

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