A brick bank building on the corner of Hempstead Turnpike and James Street, on Long Island, put up in 1929 for a bank chartered three years earlier and enlarged four times before 1955. It is on the National Register of Historic Places, and it is still a bank: a branch of Chase occupies it.
At a glance
The nomination held by the National Park Service places the building at 925 Hempstead Turnpike, in an unincorporated village in the Town of Hempstead, Nassau County. It was listed under two criteria, one for the commerce of Franklin Square and one for a single banker, Arthur T. Roth, whose career ran through this building. The register gives the styles as Colonial Revival and Modern Movement, which is what happens when a one-storey bank of 1929 is extended three times by 1955.
Key facts
- Bank chartered: 13 October 1926, as the Franklin Square National Bank
- Opened for business: 1 November 1926, with capital of $50,000, in a rented storefront at 334 Hempstead Turnpike
- Cornerstone of this building: 19 September 1929, a month before the crash
- Built in stages: 1929, 1939, 1946–47 and 1955
- Architect: not identified in the register nomination
- Address: 925 Hempstead Turnpike, Franklin Square, New York
- National Register: reference 15000776, record dated 10 November 2015
- GPS: 40.70710, -73.67465 · Open in Google Maps
History
Franklin Square had no bank before 1926. A blacksmith, a merchant and two builders were among the shareholders who put up the capital, and the federal charter came on 13 October of that year. The bank opened on 1 November in a storefront sixteen feet by sixty, several doors west of Franklin Street, with three employees and $50,000. It did well enough that by March 1928 the directors were looking for a site of their own; they bought the lot at the corner of James Street and Hempstead Turnpike and laid the cornerstone on 19 September 1929. The stock market crashed a month later.
Arthur T. Roth arrived in 1934 as a cashier, at a moment when deposits were shrinking. He was the son of Bavarian immigrants and had spent eleven years at a New York City bank. Under him Franklin Square took up the new federal mortgage programme, and the building was extended westward in 1939, given a second floor, a pediment and a cupola in 1946–47, and a four-storey rear wing with a drive-through teller in 1955. The register credits the bank with the first bank-owned car park, the first outdoor teller and the first bank credit card. It was the head office until 1960.
Roth was pushed out of the leadership in 1968. On 8 October 1974 the bank, by then Franklin National, was declared insolvent in what was at the time the largest bank failure in American history. The branch here reopened under the European-American Bank, which had bought what was left.
The building
What went up in 1929 was one storey of brick in the Colonial Revival manner: two bays facing Hempstead Turnpike, four facing James Street, limestone at the corners and at the window keystones, a low balustrade along the roofline and a large arched window in every bay. The entrance was set across the corner, under a clock fixed to the wall. No architect is named in the nomination, which observes only that the design and the materials were chosen to make a young bank look settled.
The 1939 work carried the same design west and south-west and moved the main door from the corner to the Hempstead Turnpike front, under a broken pediment. The campaign of 1946–47 added the second floor, the pediment, a partial hipped roof, the cupola, a rear block of four storeys and a banking hall of two. The last stage, in 1955, put another four-storey office wing at the back and a drive-through teller. The register calls the result Colonial Revival and Modern Movement, which is fair to both halves.
What is here now
A Chase branch. The 1929 building survives inside the north-east corner of what stands today, and the initials FSNB can still be made out in the middle of the front gable, in the shadow of a carved cartouche.
Sources & resources
- National Park Service — National Register of Historic Places registration form, Franklin Square Bank (reference 15000776): the address, the 1926 charter, the building phases, Arthur T. Roth, the 1974 insolvency, the FSNB cartouche
- National Park Service — register record 15000776: criteria, architectural styles, period of significance 1925–1974, record dated 10 November 2015
- TIME — on the collapse of 8 October 1974
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