Step 2 of five
A Bank That Serves Dinner
Built to look permanent and to be difficult to get into. Both of those are expensive to undo, which is why so many small banks end up as dining rooms rather than as demolition.
The five questions
| What it was built to do | A branch bank on a corner: banking hall, manager's office, and a vault set into the party wall. |
|---|---|
| What happens there now | A restaurant, with the hall as the dining room and the vault as a private room that everybody wants and nobody can book. |
| What you can still read off it | The plinth, the flanking pilasters and the deep reveals. The whole front is arranged to say that the money is not coming out, and none of that language is removable. |
| Where you can stand to see it | The diagonally opposite corner, in the morning, when the sun is on the front rather than behind it. |
| What has gone for good | The counter screen, the night safe on the flank, filled and patched, and the clock bracket, which left two bolt holes and a shadow. |
A bank front is an argument
It is trying to convince you of one thing: that the building is not going anywhere.
Hence the plinth, which raises the building off the sidewalk; hence the pilasters, which are usually structurally unnecessary; hence the deep reveals, which make the wall read as thick. None of it is decoration in the ordinary sense. All of it is a claim about permanence made in stone because stone is the only material that makes it credibly.
The argument outlives the bank by decades, which is why a small bank building reads as a bank long after the last teller has gone.
The vault stays
Vault walls are typically reinforced concrete a foot thick with a steel door weighing more than a car.
Removing one costs more than most conversions are worth, and cutting the door out damages the structure it is built into. So the vault stays, and the new use finds something to do with it: a private room, a wine store, a coat room, a joke.
A vault door in a dining room is the least expensive decision anybody made in that building.
The night safe
On the flank wall, at about waist height, there is often a rectangle of patched stone about a hand's width across.
That was the night depository chute. It goes through the wall to a hopper inside, and when the bank leaves, the chute is filled and the face is patched. The patch never matches, because the original stone has weathered for eighty years and the fill has not.
It is a small thing and it is the most reliable single confirmation on the whole front.
Three that survive every time
- The plinth. Structural and continuous. Nobody takes it off.
- The reveals. Reducing wall thickness at the openings is major work for no gain.
- The vault. See above.
If you have those three and a corner site, you are almost certainly looking at a bank, whatever is being served inside.
Practical
- A working restaurant. Look from the outside, and if you go in, go in as a customer.
- The corner is the view. The flank with the patched chute usually faces a side street.
- Morning light. Corner sites face two ways and one of them is always wrong.