HISTORICAL

In 1920, Banco Español de Crédito, purchased the building from the insurance company, of American capital, La Equitativa.

It was commissioned to the architect, Joaquín Saldana, the elimination of the niche where, on the facade of the angle between the streets Alcalá and Sevilla, stood a statue of a midwife who represented the company. The allegory stretched its mantle as a protection about a widow that holds a child in her arms and an orphan, as advertised on the company's activity.

The statue, designed by the German Knipp, was evicted from its location and donated to the Madrid City Hall and stood in the traditional square Nuevo Mundo, close to El Rastro market. At the end of the Civil War, was withdrawn from the site, and in 2002, a reworking of the square returned it to its place, where we can see it at present.

Today design technology enables us to know how it would be the chamfer on the streets of Ancha de los Peligros, Hita and Los Bodegones, if the statue wasn’t removed from its location. But we are not able to guess the impressions the statue made on the events that it lived from its privileged position: the attack of the Civil Governor of Madrid, Alberto Aguilera who raided the building in 1898, to pull out the shield of the United States, when this country had declared war on Spain in the topic of the sinking of the Maine.

The comings and goings of the members of the Casino de Madrid, which took up the whole first floor; and the subsequent rent of the plant to Japan ambassador and the arrival of members of the Círculo de Bellas Artes, years later, until they moved to its headquarters at Alcalá. And now, today, it can see the building become in, possibly, the best and most expensive apartments building in the XXI-century’s Madrid.

At the chamfer of this building, by the architect Grases Riera, there are preserved two sculptures made in copper gold, which scatter sunlight as it affects so brushed material. One of them represents Time, with a watch in its hands; and the other one, holding the wheel of fortune, the Future. Between the two of them there is a big clock and, on the whole picture, a Templete crowned with a small dome also done in the brushed material of the allegories’.