The Wealth Bearer — Finance — Elevator Panel, Fred French Building, New York, 1927

An Architect's Obsession, A Sculptor's Mastery

Completed in 1927, the Fred French Building on Fifth Avenue contains the most complete Mesopotamian-themed decorative cycle in American Art Deco. While its stepped crown and gilded façade are widely admired, its most exceptional achievement lies within: a decorative program conceived by architect H. Douglas Ives and executed in bronze by sculptor Vincent Glinsky — a lobby conceived as a complete Mesopotamian decorative environment.

Ives documented his own obsession in writing: the Tower of Seven Planets at Babylon, the Ishtar Gate, Chaldean enameled brick. The iconographic program was not intuition — it was research translated into architecture.

The Bronze Program

Glinsky's contribution spans the building's interior in bronze throughout. Working through 1926 and into 1927, he produced entrance reliefs, elevator doors, mailboxes, door surrounds, and ornamental wall panels — a comprehensive sculptural environment, not a series of isolated commissions. Oscar Bach executed the metalwork in gilt bronze, bringing Glinsky's models into their final material form.

Elevator Doors — Eight gilded bronze panels embodying Industry, Commerce, Finance, and Building. These allegorical reliefs translate the forces driving New York's rise into sculptural form. The arrangement on the doors is graphically balanced, not thematically ordered. The eye moves across figures and ornament before resolving into program. The logic reveals itself slowly — four themes, eight figures, one coherent argument about what a city is and what sustains it.

Mailbox — Gilded bronze with American eagles and sunburst radiating patterns, combining national symbolism with ancient Near Eastern decorative vocabulary.

Entrance Reliefs and Decorations — Allegorical bronze reliefs with mythological figures and floral patterns, including spandrels decorated with symbols of architecture and industry, and lighting fixtures for the Art Deco chandeliers in the lobby.

The Polychrome Ceilings

The barrel-vaulted lobby ceilings are painted in gold, black, and bold colour, depicting Babylonian mythological figures: dragons, bulls, lions, and winged griffins drawn from the same sources that informed Glinsky's bronze. Who painted these vaults has not been confirmed in primary sources. What is certain is that whoever did so was working within a visual language already fully established by the bronze program surrounding them.

The Mesopotamian Connection

The Ishtar Gate — excavated from Babylon and reconstructed in Berlin's Pergamon Museum in the early 1900s — provided direct visual sources for the lions, dragons, and decorative borders throughout the building. Ives and Glinsky were not inventing an exotic style. They were quoting one of the oldest monumental gateways in human history, in gilded bronze, on Fifth Avenue.

Architecture and decoration supervision by H. Douglas Ives — Bronze program by Vincent Glinsky — Metalwork by Oscar Bach — Exterior faience by Leif Neandross / Rambusch Company