The Art Deco masterpiece One Wall Street, at Wall Street and Broadway in the Financial District, was designed by Ralph Walker and built between 1929 and 1931. First the headquarters of Irving Trust, and later Bank of New York and BNY Mellon, it was sold for residential development in 2015 and converted to condominiums between 2018 and 2023. Commercial space on the lower floors now hosts a Whole Foods, fitness center, and as of late March of 2025, an outpost of famed Parisian department store Printemps.
Printemps is a celebrated French department store chain (with 21 stores in France as well as one in Doha), and its flagship store on Boulevard Haussman in the 9th arrondissement in Paris is an Art Nouveau masterpiece. Sitting next to rival Galeries Lafayette, near the Palais Garnier, it was built in 1865, and was the first public building in Paris to have electrical power installed. For its only store in the United States, it would be important for any Printemps here to be in a building similarly important and beautiful, so One Wall Street was an ideal location.
There are two entrances, but I highly recommend for your first visit to enter on Broadway rather than the side entrance on Wall Street (you will see why later). The NYC Printemps is much smaller than the Haussman flagship, but every design detail is exquisite.
Every item you find as you stroll through the store is French, unique, and presented in a beautiful way.
On the ground floor just to the left as you enter off Broadway, there is a lovely cafe with seating.
The dressing rooms are lushly and immersively decorated.
There are multiple bars within the space, this one is just on the second level above the entrance on Broadway.
Continuing along on the second level, there is a passageway to get to the part of the store that faces Wall Street. It is set up as the beauty section, including some treatment areas, and a champagne bar.
Near the beauty area, you can find the bathrooms. I have never been in such beautiful public bathrooms! Who needs a Maurizio Cattelan golden toilet when you can just visit Printemps?
Past the bathrooms, you find a grand staircase to lead down to the most incredible area of Printemps NYC – the famed Red Room.
The Red Room, the interior of which is now a New York City Historic Landmark (in addition to the entire exterior of One Wall Street), was once a reception area for the Irving Trust customers. Because this was a private bank, most people would not have been able to enter, and the room was designed to impress its wealthy customers. There would have been no tellers, just some chairs and desks. The Red Room has ceiling heights varying from 30 to 37 feet, and the entire room is 100 by 40 feet. Walker and his associate Perry Coke Smith planned the decor of the room, with artist Hildreth Meière hired as a color consultant. The floor is covered in red terrazzo tiles created in Berlin under the supervision of Walker and Smith. The color scheme of the wall mosaic is red-on-blue which gradually gets lighter as it goes up to draw the eye to the gold-on-black on the ceiling.
The Red Room at Printemps is a functioning shoe store, and I dare you to find a more extraordinary one. Photographs truly don’t do it justice. If you entered Printemps NYC from Wall Street and experienced the Red Room first, the rest of the store – while gorgeous – would be anticlimactic after such opulence. If you visit on a weekend or later in the day, you might actually have to wait on a line to get in and you will see plenty of people taking photos and posing in the entire store, but particularly in the Red Room. My recommendation, if you possibly can, is to get there very soon after opening (hours are 10am-7pm daily) on a week day to avoid crowds. If you go early, it will be easier to enjoy the cafe as well (the cafe opens earlier most days, at 8am). Going later in the day would be an alternate plan, and enjoy a drink at one of the bars for the most elegant happy hour. The Red Room bar is open later, until 11:00pm, and the restaurant Maison Passerelle is open 5pm-10:30pm.
As anyone who has been to Paris knows, there is a particular quality to walking through the city – every turn seems to bring another view more charming than the one before. I found wandering Printemps NYC to be a similar experience – an immersive escape to Paris just off the bustling streets of my beloved NYC.
Julie Brannan, NYC residential real estate 