The very impressive Apple Bank for Savings building that occupies the trapezoidal block between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenues and 73rd and 74th Streets is now completely enclosed in construction shrouds.

The landmark building was built in 1928 for the Central Savings Bank that formerly was located at 14th Street and Fourth Avenue. It was designed by York & Sawyer in the same monumental, Italian Renaissance-palazzo style the architects employed at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York Building in Lower Manhattan. The bank was founded in 1859 as the German Savings Bank in the City of New York and changed its name to the Central Savings Bank during World War I and subsequently it became the Apple Bank.

The bank continues to operate within the building's vast and spectacular vaulted banking hall - one of the city's most impressive interior spaces - but in recent months numerous commercial tenants have moved out of the several floors above the banking hall.

The main entrance to the bank is at 2100 Broadway on 73rd Street across from the new 72nd Street subway station and Verdi Square redesigned in recent years by Gruzen Samton and Richard Dattner.

There are four floors above the banking hall and the entrance to the upper floors at 2112 Broadway, across the boulevard from the Ansonia apartment building, was busy with construction activity today and one of the workers said that the upper floors were being converted to condominium apartments, but had no further details.

The building is clad in rusticated limestone and has delightful cast-iron donkeys sculpted by Samuel Yellin Studio at the base of the huge arched windows of the banking hall, which has a central "cage" for 30 tellers and a richly colored marble floor. At the north end of the banking hall, the words "Industry," "Thrift," and "Prosperity" are inscribed in marble beneath a clock, not far from a wall plaque that indicates that Dwight D. Eisenhower was a trustee of the Central Savings Bank from 1949 to 1951.

The building commands one of the few prominent "key" sites in Manhattan at the intersection of two avenues such as the Flatiron Building at 23rd Street and the former site of the Herald Tribune at 35th Street between Broadway and The Avenue of the Americas and the former Times Tower at 43rd Street between Broadway and Seventh Avenue.

The building was described by Elliot Willensky and Norval White in "The A.I.A. Guide to New York City Architecture, Fourth Edition," (Three Rivers Press, 2000), as "one of the area's noblest and most imposing edifices."

The imposing building is at the geographic "heart" of the Upper West Side.