The Royal Bank Tower is a skyscraper at 360 Saint-Jacques Street in Montreal, Quebec. The 22-storey 121 m (397 ft) neo-classical tower was designed by the firm of York and Sawyer with the bank's chief architect Sumner Godfrey Davenport of Montreal.[4] Upon completion in 1928,[5] it was the tallest building in the entire British Empire, the tallest structure in all of Canada and the first building in the city that was taller than Montréal's Notre-Dame Basilica built nearly a century before.
The bank's first official head office was at Hollis and George in Halifax in 1879.[6] In 1907 the Royal Bank of Canada moved its head office from Halifax to Montreal. As its original building on Saint-Jacques Street turned out to be too small, in 1926 the board of directors of the biggest bank in Canada hired New York architects York and Sawyer to build a prestigious new building a short distance westward. Between 1920 and 1926 the bank had bought up all the property between Saint-Jacques, Saint-Pierre, Notre-Dame and Dollard Streets to demolish all the buildings there including the old Mechanics' Institute and the ten-storey Bank of Ottawa building in order to make space for the new 22-storey building.
In 1962, the Royal Bank moved its main office to another famous Montreal building, Place Ville-Marie, however kept a branch in the impressive main hall of the old building, situated in Old Montreal. That branch relocated to the nearby Tour de la Bourse in July 2012.[7]
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