Today

Since the acquisition of the Banigan building (or Grosvenor building as it later became) by AMICA, a Providence-based insurance company after whom the building is now named, the interior of the building has undergone massive rehabilitation. The first half of the 1980s was spent modernizing utilities, adding air conditioning, and painting the newly exposed southwest wall to match the taupe color of the building’s stone. The building now remains a bridge between the ornament and weighty stone of the nineteenth century and the slick glass skins of the more modern high-rises. It has been outbuilt, both in size and in style many times before and after it was erected, and it is not a building most would admire for long, compared to the Hospital Trust and other buildings around it. But the Banigan building is important, both for the obvious quality of its construction and for its role in imagining the city at the turn of the century, as the first building of its type in Providence.