History

Walker & Gillette was a prominent New York architectural firm with a strong Art Deco portfolio in the late 1920s; the firm also designed the Fuller Building (1929) on 57th Street in Manhattan. The Industrial Trust Company commissioned a tower befitting its ambitions as the leading financial institution in Rhode Island, and the resulting 26-story structure established Providence’s skyline for decades. The bank changed hands repeatedly through the twentieth century — Industrial Trust became Industrial National Bank, then Fleet Financial Group (1988), then FleetBoston Financial (1999), and after the Bank of America merger in 2004, the building became a Citizens Bank facility. When Citizens Bank vacated in 2013, the building emptied entirely and has remained so.

The nickname “Superman Building” attached itself in popular usage during the 1970s–1980s, when reruns of the 1950s Adventures of Superman television series made the Daily Planet tower — which the Industrial Trust Building closely resembles in its silhouette — familiar to a new generation of viewers. The name has since become the building’s de facto identity in Providence. Since 2013, developers, city officials, and state government have worked to negotiate a viable residential conversion, complicated by the cost of bringing the long-vacant structure to modern building standards.