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Torre della Banca Reale

Montréal, Italy

Torre della Banca Reale

The Royal Bank Tower is a skyscraper at 360 Saint-Jacques Street in Montreal, Quebec. The 22-storey 121 m (397 ft) neo-classical tower was designed by the firm of York and Sawyer with the bank's chief architect Sumner Godfrey Davenport of Montreal. Upon completion in 1928, it was the tallest buildin

g in the entire British Empire, the tallest structure in all of Canada and the first building in the city that was taller than Montréal's Notre-Dame Basilica built nearly a century before. The bank's first official head office was at Hollis and George in Halifax in 1879. In 1907 the Royal Bank of Canada moved its head office from Halifax to Montreal. As its original building on Saint-Jacques Street turned out to be too small, in 1926 the board of directors of the biggest bank in Canada hired New York architects York and Sawyer to build a prestigious new building a short distance westward. Between 1920 and 1926 the bank had bought up all the property between Saint-Jacques, Saint-Pierre, Notre-Dame and Dollard Streets to demolish all the buildings there including the old Mechanics' Institute and the ten-storey Bank of Ottawa building in order to make space for the new 22-storey building. In...

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