The Grand Stair
Peabody & Stearns, creators of the renowned Boston Stock Exchange in 1896, designed one of Boston’s then most visited lobbies featuring one of the country’s most famous and beautiful marble staircases.
Given the surgically precise level of demolition involved prior to the erection of the original WZMH/Habib tower on the Exchange Block site in 1985, the only significant historic interior elements to survive are the State Street and Kilby Street entry lobbies, which appear to be preserved in their entirety, as well as the grand marble stairway, the main components of which were salvaged and subsequently re-erected here as an architectural sculpture in the office tower atrium.
Turning back time to the early 1890s, a visitor arriving at the Exchange Building through its principal entrance on State Street would have entered the lobby space preserved there today in what appears to be its original configuration and finish. During that time, the Exchange Building was known to have more visitors per day than any other building in New England.
Reaching the top of the short flight of marble stairs connecting the street-level entry to the building’s raised first floor, one would have had several choices on how to proceed. A visitor could have turned left to pass into the large chamber of the Massachusetts National Bank—“one of the handsomest banking rooms on State Street”—turned right to enter the somewhat smaller but still spacious quarters of the American Loan and Trust Company; or proceeded a few steps further and entered one of the elevators ascending to the floors of offices above. According to a description published around the time construction had just begun, office occupants would enjoy the amenities of “steam heat, open fire-places, electric lights” and “six fast- running elevators” to carry them up and down.
If the visitor instead chose to stay on the first floor and kept walking straight ahead, they would have passed in- to the Exchange Building’s central interior circulation space—now the location of the current tower atrium. If one could digitally superimpose the current modern lobby-level plan on the undated but probably early twentieth-century plan, it would demonstrate that the core of the modern atrium stands in the same location as its historic predecessor and provides a similar function in terms of traffic flow. This overlay would also show that the present atrium’s reassembled marble stairway, while it fulfills no real circulatory function, is in essentially the same place and orientation as it was in 1891. This large main staircase was described as “one of the handsomest in the country” and was featured in the 1891 Boston Daily Globe article covering the opening of the Stock Exchange.
Standing in the atrium space, the 1890s visitor would again have been presented with several choices about which way to proceed. They could have climbed the great stair to visit the spacious second story offices of banker-brokers like Hodges & Doane and Legg, Hobbs & Company; they could have walked a few steps further to enter one of the cars in the building’s second elevator bank; or they could have continued straight ahead to pass into the Boston Stock Exchange trading room, although as a visitor they could not have ventured out onto the trading floor proper. The trading room was “the crowning feature of this immense building.” The great chamber of the Exchange is 115 feet long, 50 feet wide, 35 feet high, and was one of the most complete stock chambers in the country. The interior decorations were clad in white and yellow, with dignified Corinthian pillars around the walls of the room.
The 1891 Boston Globe report noted that the “style of finish and adornment of the Exchange Room itself is of the Italian renaissance order” and singled out for comment the “dado of Italian marble,” the “richly carved capitals [of the] white fluted pilasters,” and the coffered ceiling “intricately rich in stuccoed designs.”
After having fully absorbed this architectural splendor, our visitor could exit the building by retracing their steps to the building’s atrium. From there, they could have de- parted the premises via the State Street lobby, or have turned into a transverse corridor leading out to secondary lobbies communicating with Post Office Avenue on the west and Kilby Street on the east.
Today, the stair remains the center feature of one of Boston’s tallest and largest office lobby atriums and is still preserved to be a dreamlike reminder of Boston’s Victorian Era and the Gilded Age’s opulence and dazzle.
