Official
Memorial tower in Hamacho Park
The photo above shows the pre-war Hamacho Park. A large tower stands at the end of the central passage from the front entrance of the park. This tower is a memorial tower in memory of the work of British architect Josaiah Condor, and was built in conjunction with the construction of Hamacho Park after the Great Kanto Earthquake. This time, I would like to talk about the relationship between this monument and the former Bank of Japan head office located on the side of Eitai Bridge.
Earlier, when I introduced a new road nickname "Hakozaki Kita Niihori-dori" in my blog, I mentioned a little about "the monument of the Bank's founding".
First, I would like to talk about the Bank of Japan's main office.
"Bank of Japan's founding monument" along "Hakozaki Kita-Niihori Street". In 1882, the Bank of Japan opened using the building of the Hokkaido Kaitaku Envoy Product Sales Office, which was located at the side of the former Eitai Bridge.
This building was an elegant building in the Venetian Gothic style, designed by Josaiah Condor, a British architect who taught Western architecture to Japan as an architect of the Meiji government.
The picture below is part of the blueprint.
From the blueprint, you can see that the building was a beautiful red brick building. At the bottom right there is a sign of the designer Josaiah Condor. The attention is the sign at the lower left, and it is written as "K. Tatsuno". It is a sign of Kingo Tatsuno, who later designed the current main building of the Bank of Japan Main Store (Nihonbashi Honishicho). It seems that Kingo Tatsuno, a student of Condor at the Institute of Technology, also participated in the design of this building.
Tatsuno's signature is "1878" (1878), which is the time when Kingo Tatsuno was studying architecture under Condor, who was appointed as a teacher at the Institute of Technology School of Engineering (currently the Faculty of Engineering, the University of Tokyo).
The Bank of Japan will move to its current location (Nihonbashi Honishi-cho) in 1896. Even after the relocation, this building was used as a meeting place, but it was damaged by the Great Kanto Earthquake and became unusable.
On the other hand, Hamacho Park was built as an earthquake reconstruction park in 1929 after the Great Kanto Earthquake. In the park, a memorial tower was built to remember the achievements of Josaiah Condor, which I mentioned at the beginning.
The photo below is the memorial tower of Condor. The first photo shows in a newspaper article that the Condor Memorial Tower was built by collecting bricks that collapsed due to the earthquake at the Bank of Japan meetinghouse on the shores of Eitai Bridge.
It was a little surprising, but this tower was built by reusing a part of the building of the former Bank of Japan headquarters that was damaged by the earthquake. If you look closely at the photos, you can see that the arch shape inside the memorial tower is the same as the arch window on the second floor of the former Bank of Japan head office, and that the arch windows of the damaged building are used for the memorial tower.
It is difficult to understand the size of the tower in this photo, but if you look at the second photo, you can see that it was a larger tower than the person next to the memorial tower.
The memorial tower was designated by the city of Tokyo as a memorial building for the reconstruction of the Imperial City, but unfortunately it was burned down by the Great Tokyo Air Raid.
As mentioned above, I talked about the Josaiah Condor Memorial Tower in Hamacho Park and the former Bank of Japan head office.