Now a lavish restaurant and event space, the original Bowery Savings Bank building is a neoclassical fortress with a Beaux-Arts interior, one of the few features of real permanence in the extremely transient neighborhoods – Chinatown, the Lower East Side – which lay claim to it. The building was designed and built in 1905 by American renaissance architect supreme Stanford White (his other local credits include the memorial Washington Square Arch). When the Bank abandoned this station and moved uptown, it built for itself the yet more opulent Bowery Savings Bank on 42nd street, now also abandoned and the home of the upscale transnational Italian restaurant Cipriani.