Rising sixteen stories in 1913, your Turk's Head Building took its odd name from a ship's figurehead over a shopkeeper's store. It rose above the 1901 Union Trust Company Building to become downtown's tallest until the Providence Biltmore was completed in 1922. One of Providence's oldest skyscrapers, it stands 215 ft (66 m) tall and today ranks as the city's 11th-tallest building.
Its V-shaped form is unmistakable. Architectural historian William McKenzie Woodward notes that the architects clearly had Daniel Burnham's Flatiron Building in New York City in mind. The peculiar name reaches back to the early nineteenth century, when shopkeeper Jacob Whitman mounted a ship's figurehead from the ship Sultan—an Ottoman warrior's head—above his store, which was called "At the sign of the Turk's Head." The original figurehead was lost in a storm; a stone replica now watches from the building's third-floor façade.
In more recent memory, brothers Evan and Lloyd Granoff bought the building in 1997 for $4.2 million and invested $3 million in renovations. Notice the V-shaped silhouette, the third-floor replica of that lost figurehead, and how it stitches into the streets and skyline nearby.