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Finance History | 552 Montgomery Street, 17 August 1908 — Giannini Opened a Hall Without Cages
· 1908-8
Personal memoryBy kevin · · updated · Report an issue
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Finance History | 552 Montgomery Street, 17 August 1908 — Giannini Opened a Hall Without Cages
kevin
8/17/1908
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People treat Bank of America as a Charlotte tower that absorbed a California name.
The bank that became that name took a permanent hall here, at the Clay and Montgomery corner, on 17 August 1908.
Amadeo Peter Giannini had opened the Bank of Italy on 17 October 1904 in a converted saloon in the Drexler Building on Montgomery Avenue, now Columbus Avenue, in North Beach.
The first clients were working depositors downtown banks would not take: produce men, sailors, and immigrant households who kept coin at home.
The earthquake and fire of 18 April 1906 destroyed that room.
Giannini moved about $80,000 in 1906 coin out of the fire zone in produce wagons, then lent from a plank counter on the Washington Street wharf while hotter vaults across the city stayed sealed for weeks.
The directors bought this Clay-Montgomery lot for $125,000 from Giannini and his stepfather Lorenzo Scatena.
Frank T. Shea of Shea and Shea designed the eight-storey Second Renaissance Revival building. Giannini sat on the open first floor rather than behind a raised cage.
The hall opened on 17 August 1908 and remained headquarters until 1921, when the bank moved to 1 Powell Street.
From this floor the bank opened its first out-of-town branch in San Jose in 1909 and, by 1918, ran a statewide system of twenty-four branches.
In 1928 it merged with Bank of America, Los Angeles. In 1930 the combined firm took the Bank of America name.
The present headquarters is not this building. This National Historic Landmark is where branch banking for ordinary depositors was organized after the fire.
Photo: Sanfranman59, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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