4/24/2023 0 Comments Chicago 1930 history![]() The two primary reasons for this heterogeneous abundance are restrictive state laws forbidding branch banking and the explosive real estate boom that occurred between the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition and the 1933 Century of Progress Exposition. Each differed, if slightly, in design and layout. 3, Heritage-Pullman Bank, 111th Street & I-94, 1974.Īlthough less than seventy remain today, there were 337 banks operating outside of Chicago’s Loop by 1929. By the time new bank buildings were being constructed in the mid-1940s, a clean stylistic break had been made (fig. Even though many Modern Classical banks were built throughout the country during the 1930s, West Town was the last bank built in Chicago with any resemblance of Classicism. The Modern Classical style used in the bank’s design was an intermediate compromise between Classical Revival and Modernism, and was employed frequently in the 1930s and 1940s by conservative institutions. Interestingly, Mundie & Jensen was the successor firm of William Le Baron Jenney, the architect of the Home Insurance Building, arguably the first skyscraper, as well as the Horticulture Building at the World’s Columbian Exposition. Madison, Mundie & Jensen, 1929.ĭesigned by Mundie & Jensen, West Town was the last tall outlying bank built within city limits until Heritage-Pullman in 1974 (fig. Left: Illinois Historic Preservation Agency. The Great Depression did not create an absolute cessation in all new construction, however, no new outlying bank buildings were built in Chicago until around 1945. For example, after opening the new building in May 1930, West Town State Bank failed little over a year later in June 1931. The effects of the crash were not felt by most banking institutions until 1931. Like many other building projects completed early in 1930, the West Town building was planned, financed, and begun before the 1929 stock market crash. The new building was last of its kind in a number of ways, marking the end of an era of Classical decadence in local bank architecture. 1), the company re-opened in a new nine story “office bank” across Western Avenue (fig. ![]() That day, after spending seventeen years in a two story building on West Madison Street (fig. Harper, president of the West Town State Bank, opened for business on the morning of May 24th, 1930, he could not have known it would be the last such opening for some time.
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