When the Mount Morris Bank Building was completed in 1884, it was an early showstopper in rapidly developing Harlem, which was starting its makeover from uptown suburb to part of the urban cityscape.

The Mount Morris Bank Building in the 1880s

Some Romanesque Revival, mostly Queen Anne, this six-story beauty at 125th Street and Park Avenue boasted red sandstone blocks, bold arched doorways, and terra cotta ornament on the ground floor and half-basement exterior.

The upper floor apartments looked over the railroad tracks that brought new residents and businesses to the neighborhood. These fashionable flats featured balconies, bay windows, and storybook-like stepped gables.

Now the Corn Exchange Bank, in 1934

The building underwent changes over the years: an 1890 addition doubled its size along Park Avenue, the apartments were renovated into office space at the turn of the century, and the Mount Morris bank became a branch of the Corn Exchange Bank in the 1900s (and the building took on this new name).

A building this delightful should have been celebrated and maintained through the decades.

The building in the 1980s

Instead, this brick and mortar piece of Harlem history was eventually abandoned and sealed off in the 1970s. Landmark status arrived in 1993, with the Landmarks Preservation Commission noting that the building "retains its architectural integrity to a surprisingly high degree."

With the top floors demolished in 2011

The LPC also made light of Mount Morris Bank's "historic role as the financial hub of Harlem during the 1900s building boom there," wrote Newsday.

Unfortunately, a fire on the roof and upper floors in 1997 made the deteriorating structure unsafe. The city bulldozed it down to its ground floor a decade ago, a final insult for a piece of Harlem history. "The Corn Exchange's signature masonry is at risk of falling, especially since the railroad rumbles only a few feet away," stated the New York Times in 2009.

Rebuilt and reborn, 2021

This story of deterioration and demolition has an uplifting ending. In the early 2010s, a developer bought the bank building, renovated the ground floor, and rebuilt the upper floors with red brick.

"The building is an entirely new steel-frame structure set within and rising over the 19th-century masonry base, which is all that remains of the original after years of troubles, fire, decay, and gravity," wrote David Dunlop in the New York Times in 2014.

In 2015, when the new building was completed, East 125th Street and Park Avenue got its showstopper back—a harmonious structure that evokes Harlem's architectural heritage.

[Top photo: Cornell University Library via Wikipedia; second photo: NYPL; third photo: NYC Department of Records and Information Services; fourth photo: Wikipedia]