This beautiful Corinthian bank has found another use, so we hope the building will be preserved now that things are looking up in Homestead.
Think how invitingly bright the banking hall must have been when those lofty windows were open to the light.
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Monongahela Trust Co., Homestead
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Forbes National Bank, Oakland
This is one of the few designs by Edward Mellon that amounted to anything. In spite of boosting by his absurdly rich and powerful Mellon uncles, architect Edward Mellon played mostly second-banana roles in the architecture business. He was local architect of record on the Gulf Building, but the designing was done by Trowbridge & Livingston. He was paid for designs for the massive Mellon-financed Pitt construction that would ultimately become the Cathedral of Learning, but Pitt’s chancellor just tossed the drawings in a filing cabinet and hired Charles Z. Klauder to do something different.
This 1930 bank, however, is all Mellon’s, and it would be hard to fault it. As an architectural message it is unambiguous: your money will be safe here. As an ornament to the streetscape it is welcome: it holds down a prominent corner and seems to cap off the block. If Edward Mellon had never accomplished anything else, he could still have been proud to point to this bank and say, “I imagined that into being.”
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Mellon Bank, Lawrenceville
In the 1960s, Mellon Bank built a number of modernist bank branches that reinterpreted traditional bank architecture in modern forms. Here the classical colonnade is simplified to a schematic.
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St. Clair Savings & Trust Co., Knoxville
An Art Deco interpretation of traditional Doric bank architecture, with the added interest of an unusual shape: the lot forces the structure into a triangle. This substantial building from 1931 was abandoned for a while; then it was briefly the Iglesia de Cristo León de Judá, before that congregation took over an old church a few blocks away; then it was abandoned again. Now it is a store with the delightfully appropriate name “Candy Safe Market.” The exterior is a feast of artistic details.
The name comes from St. Clair Township, which originally included much of Allegheny County south of the Monongahela. Today the building is in the Knoxville neighborhood of Pittsburgh, right on the border with Mount Oliver borough.
This pair of griffins over the entrance ought to be guarding a clock, and perhaps they were at some point; but the bronze decoration where the clock should be is fairly old, if it is not original. The banner with the name of the store is hanging over this sculpture, which is why we have to look at it from this angle: old Pa Pitt thought it would be discourteous to take down the banner just to get a better picture.
One of the points of the triangle.
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Round Bank in Squirrel Hill
From the “form follows function” era of the middle twentieth century comes this round bank. Round is probably the most impractical and anti-functional shape you could come up with for a bank, but modernism sacrificed function for a striking effect much more often than Victorian classicism did. This was built in 1965 for Mellon Bank. It now belongs to Citizens Bank, which bought Mellon’s retail branches when Mellon merged with Bank of New York and decided not to deal with grubby working-class people anymore.
Addendum: The architect was Pittsburgh-based Harry Lefkowitz.
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Homewood People’s Bank
Here is another small bank that gets the architectural message exactly right, as we said a few days ago about the Carnegie National Bank. How could your money not be safe in a bank that looks like this? Imagine, too, how bright and cheerful the banking hall must have been before those tall windows along the side were filled in.
Winged chimeras guard the cartouche at the top of the great front arch.
Addendum: The bank was built in about 1924; the architects were Simons, Britton & English.1
- Source: The American Contractor, October 20, 1923: “Bank Bldg.: $80,000. 1 sty. 618 Homewood av. Archt. Simons, Britton & English, Magee bldg. Owner The Homewood People [sic] Bank, W. B. McFall, 618 Homewood av. Brk. & stone. Finishing revised plans & specs.” ↩︎
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Carnegie National Bank
Architecture is a kind of message that we instinctively read. When we see a bank that looks like this, we think without even articulating the thought, “That bank is stable and respectable.” The richness of the materials tells us that the bank has plenty of money; the traditional classical design tells us that it is not some fly-by-night institution that somehow swindled its way into a few bucks and will be gone as soon as its trendy design is passé. This bank on Main Street in the borough of Carnegie hits all the right notes with perfect pitch. We have forgotten how to send these architectural messages, but curiously enough we have not forgotten how to read them.
Addendum: The architect was Greensburg-based Paul A. Bartholomew; the bank was built in 1926.
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Arsenal Bank Building
We saw the 1884 Arsenal Bank earlier from across Butler Street. Here is the 43rd Street side of the building, which we can see clearly thanks to the disappearance years ago of the neighboring buildings.
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First National Bank, Castle Shannon
You might pass this little building by without a second glance as you walked along Poplar Street, if you ever did walk along Poplar Street (a very pleasant street) in Castle Shannon. But if you did pause, you might notice the tall Corinthian columns and sturdy-looking quoins (those patterns in the bricks that are meant to look like cut stone) and think, “I wonder whether that used to be a bank.”
Then you would look up at the pediment, and all doubt would be removed.
The electric vault alarm still sits prominently in the pediment where a richer bank might have had an allegorical figure of Commerce.
To judge by old maps, this bank was built between 1890 and 1906.
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Peoples Trust Company of Pittsburgh, South Side
This modest but tastefully classical bank was built in 1902. Notice how the front composition of larger arch flanked by two smaller arches is rhythmically repeated on the side.
