>> The Sullivan bank facing the courthouse square in Sidney, Ohio,
>> astonished even my not-very-architecturally-observant wife and
>> daughter recently. Larry

> The bank staff were almost as amazing as the beautiful building 
> when I visited. They happily posed for pictures to give scale, 
> loved to point out details and recite the history, and the manger 
> insisted on showing his office and giving a souvenir to take away.

Well, we've heard from Larry, now I have to go on a bit. Except his post
was about his today, my post is about my nostalgia.

The first four years of my career after college were rewardingly spent
in Sidney. Started as a CETA worker with the River Corridor Project (had
to travel out west for 15 weeks to get myself chronically unemployed
after graduating from the community design studio helping the project so
I could continue the work) doing architectural survey; 1.5 years later I
was directing the program, which dropped into my lap when the previous
director dropped out in scandal. We were the Shelby County branch of a
two county effort to promote recreation, conservation, and preservation
along that stretch of the Great Miami River. Tremendous environmental
and cultural resources, including the southern portion of the remarkable
engineering feat of the 33-mile long level of the Loramie Summit of the
Miami-Erie Canal, still very much evident in the remains of the canal
locks, towpath, and viaducts. More stories there, but I digress.

Met my wife when she applied for the Environmental Coordinator position
for the summer YCC program we also ran. That was a good hire.

Ohio is rich with small, architecturally-diverse farming communities; it
is incredible, really. Sidney also had a manufacturing economy; first in
foundries (the Slusser Steel Scraper was a bucket dragged by mules or
oxen that basically scraped out the roads; Wagner Ware cast iron
cookware was still being made there in my day). So it had the kind of
strong economy that needed banking, and Courthouse Square reflected that
wealth. 

I was responsible for putting the project together to list the square on
the National Register; I'd done the survey earlier, and raised the money
to hire someone to do the nomination. We then designed a logo and
published a little booklet to raise awareness of this fantastic
collection of buildings.

I can't recall the citation where I read in some retrospective of
Sullivan's work that Sullivan considered the Sidney bank the best of his
midwestern series. It doesn't have the over-the-top ornament of the
Owatonna building, but it is in my opinion, and Larry alludes to this in
his family's response, much more powerful in its balance of elements,
proportion, color, rhythm, and space, inside and out. It presents the
most mature culmination of his explorations in decorating and punching
holes in the simplicity of a rectangular cube.

It was completed in 1917; two years after the neo-Classical Revival Bank
building across the square was built. After the 1893 Columbian
Exposition sparked the classical revival that reduced Sullivan's career
from rebuilding Chicago to drinking heavily in small midwestern farm
towns, I firmly believe that the magnificent Sidney bank was sparked by
his inner rage and the prospect of one-upmanship.

So I got to spend a lot of time with the People's Federal Savings and
Loan Building...you may correctly surmise that I had an account there.
It truly provided an object lesson of Sullivan's design gifts in so many
ways. Particularly striking to me was the relationship of the bank
building to the building behind it on the side street (the bank sits on
a corner). The height, proportions, rhythm of the fenestration,
horizontal banding of Sullivan's bank -- all of it was drawn in context
from the lines of the adjacent simple 1882 building. The common wall of
the earlier building had a stepped parapet that truncated the building's
hip roof; when viewing the ensemble in perspective from the right
station point on the sidestreet sidewalk cattycorner from the front of
the bank (see the anecdote on page six of the PDF I've posted at
PigHabit, link below), the horizontal cornice of Sullivan's building,
the sloping stepped parapet, and the horizontal eave of the rear
building merged to form a perfectly straight line to the vanishing
point. It was at that point you could see that the rhythm of solid to
void in the window pattern of the earlier building was repeated in the
connector of Sullivan's design; the height of the paired horizontal
terra cotta bands encasing the tile panel above the great south-facing
stained glass window that fills the interior with glorious light aligned
with the top and bottom of the row of third floor windows; it was an
amazing thing to behold. 

I say all that in the past tense because the building behind was
demolished a couple years after my departure and replaced with a Butler
metal building. The strength of Sullivan's work is lessened with its
loss. (_Architecture_ magazine actually ran an excoriating brief
reporting on the deplorable decision to site a metal building adjacent
to Sullivan's masterpiece.)

I knew there was a threat to the adjacent building when I was in Sidney,
and actually went to the trouble of putting a little aside in our
booklet to draw attention to the importance it lent to the Sullivan bank
building. It has a sketch of the relationship. Here's a link to a PDF
I've posted at PigHabit with pages illustrating the bank building for
those of you that are interested. It includes a monograph on the
building published by the bank upon the building's 95th anniversary: 

<http://f1.grp.yahoofs.com/v1/UFrxRfIgPVGNHiQysM_P6LoASZ5-5hcL8htoYVBLLY
Xnp_kQgmdDqs9PXnd8gI8Hl8llvDU1DRmxIKo6iB4/Sidney_Sullivan.pdf>

(paste link in browser if it doesn't automagically take you to the
file...if you're on dial-up, be careful, it's big: 2 MB).

OK, I typed more words than Larry, I'm done now.

_____________________________________
Dan Becker, Division Manager
City & Regional Planning Division  
Raleigh Department of City Planning 
919/516-2632  


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