The Cleveland Trust Company Building is a 1907 building designed by George B. Post and located at the intersection of East 9th Street and Euclid Avenue in downtown Cleveland's Nine-Twelve District.Burdick, R.L. & Baughman, M. L. (2010). Remembering Cleveland. Turner Publishing: Nashville. The building is a mix of Beaux-Arts, Neoclassical, and Renaissance Revival architectural styles. It features a glass-enclosed rotunda, a tympanum sculpture, and interior murals.
In 1910, the Chicago school-style, 13-story Swetland Building was built adjacent to the east of the Cleveland Trust Company Building. In 1971, the Brutalist-style, 29-story Cleveland Trust Tower was built adjacent to the south of the Cleveland Trust Company Building. The Cleveland Trust Company Building underwent a significant interior renovation from 1972 to 1973, but closed to the public in 1996. Cuyahoga County purchased all three structures as part of the "Ameritrust complex" in 2005. In 2013, the Cleveland Trust Company Building was sold to the Geis Cos., which renovated it (and part of the Swetland Building) into a grocery store. The basement area of the former bank became a bar and nightclub. Much, although not all, of the Cleveland Trust Company Building's original interior architectural and interior design elements have been retained.
The Cleveland Trust Building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1973.
Background Cleveland Trust Company was founded in 1894, and was one of the first banks in Cleveland to have branch locations. Cleveland Trust merged with the Western Reserve Trust Co. in 1903, and by 1905 had outgrown the space it rented for its headquarters. The bank decided to construct a building which would be large enough to serve as its headquarters for years to come. Bank officers also settled on the Neoclassical architectural style, a common choice for banks at the time because it gave banking an air of grandeur and prestige.
Buying the land and picking the architect In 1901, the Cleveland Trust Company had purchased two properties at the corner of Euclid Avenue and E. 9th Street as an investment. One was the First Methodist Church building and land, which it obtained in April 1901 for $500,000 ($ in dollars).; The second was the Wedge Building and land, obtained for $100,000 at the same time and as part of the First Methodist purchase. Under the terms of the purchase agreement, title to the land would not be turned over to the Cleveland Trust until 1904. The purchaser of both properties was Charles Lathrop Pack, president of the Cleveland Chamber of Commerce. But Pack was merely the agent for the Cleveland Trust Company. Pack often served as the go-between in these types of investments so that wealthy investors wouldn't be gouged once sellers knew the identity of the purchaser. By 1904, Cleveland Trust officials had decided that this land would be a good location for their new, permanent headquarters.
In 1904, the Cleveland Trust Company invited architects from around the nation to participate in a competition to design the headquarters building it intended to build on the First Methodist/Wedge land. In November of that year, the company selected New York City-based architect George B. Post to design the structure. Post was a nationally known architect whose works included the New York World Building (1890), then the world's tallest building; the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building at the World's Columbian Exposition (1893), the Bronx Borough Hall in The Bronx, New York (1897); and the New York Stock Exchange Building (1903). Post was already known in Cleveland for designing the Williamson Building (1900), an 18-story office building on Public Square.
Construction Salvage work on the existing buildings began in April 1905, and demolition of them in May. Demolition was halfway complete by June 18. By this time, Post's plans for the new bank building envisioned the bank itself taking up half the block, with an office building or trade center taking up the rest. The Cleveland Trust contracted with John Gill & Sons, a Cleveland construction firm, to build the new structure. Ground was broken on December 9, 1905, and construction was estimated to last 400 days. The estimated cost of the structure was $600,000 ($ in dollars).
Construction on the building continued throughout 1906. Several serious accidents occurred at the construction site. On January 25, 46-year-old bricklayer Steven Johnson fell from scaffolding and fractured his skull and wrist. Engineer G.A. Donsee had his left leg crushed on June 19 when a high derrick fell on him. The third accident resulted in a fatality, when workman William Crouch died after being struck in head by falling debris on August 25.
In April 1907, the builders estimated that the structure would be finished by November 1. But construction delays prevented the building from being completed until December 28, 1907. The Cleveland Trust Company occupied its new headquarters on January 1, 1908. The final cost of the structure had also risen substantially, to $1 million ($ in dollars).;
About the original building When completed, the four-story Cleveland Trust Company Building was the third largest bank building in the United States. It was also the first building ever built in downtown Cleveland exclusively for the use of a bank. The below-ground floor contained a bank vault with a door. It was the largest bank vault in Ohio at the time.
At the time of its completion, the building's architectural style was described as Renaissance Revival. The Plain Dealer architectural critic Angela Chatman agreed with that assessment in 1989, as did The Plain Dealer architecture critic Steven Litt in 2006, historian Sharon Gregor in 2010, and Crain's Cleveland Business magazine in 2015. However, in 1991 historian Jan Cigliano Hartman called the building a mix of Beaux-Arts, Neoclassical, and Renaissance Revival styles. Architect Marcel Breuer described it in 1967 as Neoclassical, and Litt described it as such in 1997. But architect Carl J. Stein said in 2010 that it was more properly Beaux-Arts. Litt changed his assessment of the structure's style to Beaux-Arts as well in 2013.
The building was widely praised, then and now, as "an ingenious solution to problems posed by an irregular site".
Exterior and superstructure
The exterior of the structure is made of white granite from the North Jay Granite Company, and quarried near Jay, Maine. The site is not square, due to the acute angle at which Euclid Avenue intersects with E. 9th Street. To accommodate the site, Post created a total of 13 bays and columns on each street-facing side of the structure. There is a bay aligned with the axis of each entrance, and with the street corner of the building. Although a portico had been planned for the main entrance, the site was too small to permit one. The Euclid Avenue columns support a tympanum which is filled with the sculpture Finance. On the Euclid Avenue side are eight Corinthian columns, behind which are five two-story windows. On the E. 9th Street side, there are six pilasters, six two-story windows, and a mostly empty tympanum featuring an eagle and shield. Massive bronze doors are featured at both the Euclid Avenue and E. 9th Street entrances. The exterior walls are solid granite, unsupported by any other structure. The corner is chamfered to provide a transition between the two planes of the building.
Thirteen steel columns, arranged in a circle in the center of the building, support the dome overhead. The columns are irregularly spaced to accommodate building's site and avoid blocking entrances. Horizontal steel beams run outward from these columns to the outer walls, supporting the upper floors. Each of the columns was coated in a thick layer of plaster, with vertical conduits and air ducts embedded and hidden in the plaster. On the first floor, the plaster-coasted columns were clad in marble, but merely painted on the second and third floors. Each of the upper floors was constructed with a concrete base, on top of which were placed brick and red tile arched supports. A wood floor was constructed atop the arched supports, and in parts of the second floor marble tile was laid atop the wood flooring. Intricate embossed bronze brackets supported the second-floor balcony. The first floor ceiling, formed by the second floor balcony, was decorated with highly detailed bronze coffers.
Exterior sculpture Some time in 1906, the Cleveland Trust Company hired sculptor Karl Bitter to design and carve an appropriate work for the triangular tympanum over the Euclid Avenue entrance. Bitter was well on his way to finishing the design in January 1907, with carving to begin in the spring. Seven assistants worked on the sculpture, with Bitter supervising the roughing out but doing the final sculpting himself.
The work was unveiled on October 8, 1907. Titled Finance, it depicted a female goddess of commerce and finance seated on a throne, while other gods bring her the products of land and sea to sell. The work was considered a turning point in Bitter's career, when he matured from an over-reliance on classicism and began developing his own style.
A sculptural work by Bitter, depicting the company's coat of arms, adorns the 9th Street tympanum.
Dome
The Cleveland Trust Company asked Post to design an interior that was simple, a concept in line with the idea that a savings bank is about economy. The interior is dominated by an high, wide concrete rotunda which illuminates three of four lower floors. The rotunda's dome has an unusual number of segments (13), due to the acute angle of the building site. Embedded in the gold gilt concrete frames of the dome are numerous panels of stained lead glass. The double-paned glass panels depict an intricate, repetitive, green and yellow floral pattern. A series of small lights, set in bronze rosettes, illuminated the dome from below at night.
Some sources claim that the stained glass was designed and manufactured by Louis Comfort Tiffany and his firm in New York City.Whelan, N. (1989). Cleveland: Shaping the Vision. Windsor: Chatsworth, California. Historians Sharon Gregor and G. E. Kidder Smith, however, say it is only in the style of Tiffany. Sandvick Architects, consultant to the Geis Cos. on the renovation, said in 2013 that there was no documentary evidence to attribute the dome to Tiffany. In 2016, historic preservationist Karl Brunjes discovered extensive evidence that the designer was Nicola D'Ascenzo, a Philadelphia-based artist whose works include stained glass at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and Riverside Church in New York City and Folger Shakespeare Library and Washington National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.;
To protect the stained glass dome, a dome of wire-mesh reinforced glass was installed above the inner dome.
Rotunda The rotunda stands above a five-sided room. Each of the walls in the room are of a different size. The interior walls of the rotunda were finished in white marble and bronze capitals, light fixtures, railings, and other elements. The floor of the rotunda was open space, with oak-panelled offices and teller windows against the walls.Karberg R. E. & Toman, J. A. (2002). Euclid Avenue: Cleveland's Sophisticated Lady: 1920-1970. Cleveland Landmark Press: Cleveland, Ohio. The interior also featured columns clad in white marble, and the drum supporting the dome was decorated with carved marble garlands, dyed in pastel colors and gilded with bronze. An elaborate molded plaster frieze depicting bags of money, attorney's seals, and keys also ran around the inside of the drum.