The posting from "lostnewyorkcity" was a puzzle to me.
Can anyone explain it to me?  There is a lot of garbage
on the Pinheads list, but I haven't noticed any
coming from Christopher.

Back to the Louis Sullivan banks.
Ralph asked about Ottumwa & I said, no, Owatonna,
and "see also Grinnell"; then Dan said Sidney, Ohio.

In the spring of 1972 I was sitting in on a course here at UIC
on Adler & Sullivan, given by the late Fred Koeper.
Fred got the idea of doing a tour of the "western"
Sullivan banks (i.e. west of Chicago) on the Memorial Day
weekend, but not a single one of his undergrad students 
was interested.  I was!  and the trip was made
with five of us: Fred, me, Nory Miller,
and two other architecture buffs whose
names you probably wouldn't recognize.
We went to Clinton, Iowa (LHS dept store),
Grinnell (wonderful bank), Cedar Rapids
(LHS bank and church), Marshalltown (FLW house), 
Mason City (Rock Crest/Rock Glen, a remarkable grouping
of Prairie School houses, perched on crags (!),
and some muddled FLW commercial buildings),
Algona, Iowa (tiny LHS building),
Owatonna; three small towns with Purcell & Elmslie banks
(Adams, Leroy, Grand Meadow), and Winona
(the greatest P&E bank and some other good stuff),
then into Wisconsin for LaCrosse (Prairie houses),
Tomah (a public library that looks like the Winslow House),
and Columbus (LHS's last bank, you must all go find
Szarkowski's book The Idea of Louis Sullivan).
(We missed the big LHS house in Madison.)

During the course, Fred often said that, after 1900
when he couldn't get architectural work, Sullivan
had a lot of pent-up energy which he poured onto
these little banks, so that they were overloaded
and bursting with too-exuberant decoration.
But when we got out of the car in Grinnell
and stood, stupefied, in front of the bank,
he said, "Marty, you can say all you want
about too much energy and all that,
but this is one of the great things of architecture."

Later I was the leader of a bus full of landmarks buffs
that more or less repeated the tour, five Memorial Days
later on.  In between, I visited the three "Eastern"
banks: West Lafayette, Sidney, and Newark, Ohio,
while driving from Chicago to England for my honeymoon.

When Sidney was put on the National Register,
as Dan told us (quoted below), the National Park
Service had heard about me, and bought my slides
of the Sidney bank for the archive.  It is not easy
to get good pictures of Sidney because the front
faces north; I didn't find any on the Web just now.  
But for great photos you need to look at the books.
There is a book by Lauren Weingarden about the banks,
and there is a book about the Owatonna bank
by Larry Millett (and several good photos 
have made it out of the book and onto the Web).

Dan is not the only one who thinks that
Sidney has the best bank.  I prefer Owatonna.
I mentioned Grinnell because it is in the same
part of the world as Owatonna.  It is maybe 3rd best.
But they are all worth the trip (except maybe W Lafayette).
Algona is just a dusty street on the prairie,
but you will be glad that you drove the hundred
extra miles to see that little jewel box.

Dan, you must have had the privilege of getting acquainted
with the Sidney man who was an office boy or something
when Sullivan was sitting across the street from the site
of the proposed bank, making sketches, and who was
later a vice president.  I missed him.  That is (I believe)
the source of the observation that Sullivan brought
the bank in on budget even though a war had started.

Anyway, Dan, it is nice to know that we both
helped with that wonderful building, long before
the first garbage began to appear on the Pinheads list.

On March 9 Dan wrote:

>>> 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. 
> (snip)
>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.

(snipping the rest, some good stuff about the context of the bank on the Sidney streets)


Martin C. Tangora
University of Illinois at Chicago
[log in to unmask]

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