I got so many great photos of the vacant Washington Trust
bank vault that I keep posting pictures from this day. I am sorry if you’re getting bored of
them, I just can’t help it. I am
hoping to go back to this location at least once more to capture a few more
pictures…..
On Thursday this week, Dave Truxell and I were given the
opportunity to photograph the inside of a vacant bank. In downtown Washington PA, there is a tall building
(probably 15 stories tall….I didn’t count or look) called the Washington Trust
Building. The Washington Trust
Company built it over 100 years ago and the bank occupied the main floor. The bank (Washington Trust Company)
went out of business long ago and numerous other banks have operated in this
space over the years.
Currently, a bank is operating in the front portion of the space, but the back portion has been vacant for years. As you can imagine the entire space is build with marble, large columns, tall ceilings, etc…like you’d expect for a grand building constructed back at that time in our history. The original Washington Trust Company bank vault is still sitting there, just waiting for me to come along a take this photo.
The vault door is 21 inches thick and weighs 36 tons. It has a cool glass cover on the inside of the door allowing you to see all the gears and mechanical parts. The door is at least 8 feet tall, if not more. I can’t even imagine how they installed this vault back when we didn’t have forklifts, etc…. The inside of the vault is approximately 12 feet by 40 feet filled with brass safe deposit boxes of numerous sizes.
I captured this with a 5 exposure auto-bracketed in Aperture mode set at f11. Merged the images in Photomatix Pro to create the HDR image and completed some minor edits in Photoshop CS6.
To purchase a print, please click the picture above.
