Ohio jewel box bank 2
July 1, 2026 at 5:01 PM by Dr. Drang
Yesterday I visited the Home Building Association Bank in Newark, Ohio, a Louis Sullivan jewel box bank built in 1914. It’s currently owned by the Licking County Foundation (oh, grow up), which restored it at considerable cost over several years and reopened it to the public last fall.
As you can see from the photo above, the Old Home differs from the other jewel box banks in that its exterior is clad entirely in terra cotta—it’s not mostly brick with terra cotta accents. But the accents still manage to stand out.
Let’s not forget the lions, which we’ve seen before. Like the Sidney and Grinnell banks, this one has a protective lion with wings and a shield.
And like the Sidney bank, it has a couple of lion heads with pipes in their mouths to drain rainwater.
The pipes could be a little more subtle.
This is a pretty small building, so when you walk in the door on the east side, you’re put in a fairly narrow space.
Not as narrow as it used to be for visitors to the bank. Near the entrance is this photo from the early days, showing how the teller areas took up the northern half of the space:
The serpentine flooring that runs east-west along the south half of the building is original, which you can see if you compare the vein patterns in my photo and the old one.
The stenciling on the ceiling and walls is mostly original, as evidenced by the discoloration and missing paint in some areas.
The colored window panels on the south wall are original, as are the mechanisms that used to open them. The panels don’t open now because we have air conditioning, and it’s better to keep them sealed.
The benches and check-writing desks along the south wall are original and were found in the building’s basement.
I find the detail on the post highly reminiscent of Frank Lloyd Wright:
Wright worked for Sullivan early in his career but had been gone for over twenty years by the time the Old Home was designed. I don’t know if this was a typical Sullivan detail or whether he was being influenced by his former apprentice.
The basement currently has a handful of old building artifacts: pieces of broken terra cotta, original lighting fixtures, doorknobs, alarm bells, teller cage grills, and safe deposit boxes.
There’s also an odd panel with wiring (at the bottom of the second photo) that looks a lot like a printed circuit board.
Finally, in the Foundation’s office space on the second floor is this gorgeous Sullivan drawing of the building’s south elevation:
Fun fact: the original boiler room was just outside the footprint of the building, under the sidewalk that ran along the east side. Second fun fact: the locker doors shown in the Women’s Room at the west end of the basement are still in the basement but currently decorating a wall.
The building’s drawings are at the Ryerson and Burnham Library at the Art Institute. They’re digitized and available to download, but at a pretty low resolution. Too bad.
Ohio jewel box bank 1
June 29, 2026 at 9:42 PM by Dr. Drang
Last year, around Labor Day, I visited five of Louis Sullivan’s jewel box banks:
- Farmers and Merchants Union Bank in Columbus, Wisconsin
- National Farmers’ Bank in Owatonna, Minnesota
- Henry Adams Building in Algona, Iowa
- Merchant’s National Bank in Grinnell, Iowa
- People’s Savings Bank in Cedar Rapids, Iowa
These all fit in with a little driving circuit that included visiting my daughter and my younger son. This year, I headed east to pick up the last three.
This morning’s bank was the People’s Federal Savings and Loan Association in Sidney, Ohio. Despite what that Wikipedia page says, it’s now operated by F&M Bank, which bought out People’s in 2022. You can sort of tell by the large but tasteful “F&M Bank” lettering on the front (north) façade.
F&M could have used a font in which their F was a better match to the F in the original THRIFT lettering, but you can’t expect bank executives to notice things like that. At least they didn’t go with the sans serif font they use in their logo. The horizontal line of slightly damaged bricks is where the old name of the bank used to be.
The bank was built in 1917, which puts it second to last in the sequence, younger than all the other jewel boxes except the Farmers and Merchants Bank. The date of construction is prominent on the west façade.
You’ll probably need to zoom in to see the date; it’s not only small, but I was shooting into the sun, so the contrast isn’t great. The 1886 date you see at the left end is when People’s Federal Savings and Loan was founded.
While we’re on the west side, let’s check out some of the details.
The lion with the shield on top of a pilaster is at the southwest corner of the building, off the right edge of my west façade photo. You may recognize him—he’s basically the same as the entranceway lions at the Merchant’s National Bank.
Each of the lion heads that appear along the bottom of the windows has a copper pipe in its open mouth. Clearly this is to drain rainwater that collects on the sills, although I don’t know if the pipes are still working. Sullivan undoubtedly considered this a “form follows function” thing.
Most of the decorative elements on this building are organic, but there are geometric features along the cornice at the top of the building and around the arch on the north façade.
Sullivan “signed” this building in the architrave above the entrance. Not just in the little LOUIS SULLIVAN ARCHITECT in the lower left corner, but in the big stylized LSA at the center of the piece.
Just inside the entrance is the landmark designation plaque.
After seeing the lovely exterior, I have to say I was a little disappointed when I went through the foyer into the interior. It’s nice enough, but I was ready to be hit by something like the interior of the National Farmers’ Bank. No such luck. The lines are clean, there’s a good view of the west windows, and there’s a gorgeous skylight running down the center of the ceiling, but no murals or hanging lights.
One of the tellers told me there used to be stencils of some sort running along the tops of the walls, but they were painted over. An odd decision, given how well the rest of the building has been preserved, but maybe they couldn’t be saved—or weren’t original.
Another small disappointment was the lack of documentation. Other banks had small shrines to their buildings, with displays of drawings, old photographs, or even pieces of original terra cotta and brickwork. F&M had a little pamphlet and a visitors’ signature book, but that was it.
I don’t want to be too hard on this bank. It really is beautiful and in great shape. I guess my expectations for the interior were just too high after walking around and photographing the north and west façades. F&M can’t be blamed if the previous owner didn’t keep the original drawings. Also, it’s a pretty small space—no second floor or mezzanine for a shrine.
Classic
June 24, 2026 at 5:52 PM by Dr. Drang
This week’s episode of Upgrade (which I listened to on a longish drive yesterday) has a preview of Jason Snell and Myke Hurley’s upcoming Designed in California podcast. No, not the “Road to the Apple II” series they’ve been squeezing into the Upgrade feed these past few weeks. This sneak preview—with special guest John Siracusa—is about the state of the classic Mac OS in the late 90s.
In a word, the state was sorry. This was largely due to some expedient decisions made in the early 80s that were necessary to get the Mac out the door. Unfortunately, those decisions made the Mac a less and less stable computing environment as the years went on.
The instability had to do with memory and multitasking. Jason and John cover it well in the podcast, so there’s no need for me to get into it. I will say, though, that if you listen to the podcast and think Jason is exaggerating when he says that he would often have to reboot his Mac a dozen or so times per day, I can assure you that’s no exaggeration. The frustration of using a Mac back then was the reason I abandoned it for Linux at the end of 1996.
The problem with the Mac was that it had a great user interface for multitasking but a lousy infrastructure. In the mid-80s, the lousy infrastructure didn’t matter so much because computer users were used to doing one thing at a time, which the Mac handled well. But the windowing OS, the consistency of Mac applications, and the multitasking tease of desk accessories slowly got users hungry to run many apps simultaneously and switch between them at will. The infrastructure couldn’t handle that.
I want to emphasize how important the consistency was. For example, all Mac apps had cut, copy, and paste, and those commands were always in the Edit menu and they always had the ⌘X, ⌘C, and ⌘V keyboard shortcuts.1 Similarly for Save and ⌘S. DOS programs—and before Windows 95, most PC users were running DOS—didn’t have that consistency. I remember reading back in ’85 or ’86 that Mac users tended to regularly use many more applications than PC users. There were lots of PC users, especially in the workplace, who basically used one program; their computers were configured to boot into WordPerfect or Lotus 1-2-3, and that would be the only program they used until they turned off their machine at the end of the day.
Mac users weren’t like that. Because the Mac had a consistent language, users felt comfortable taking on new apps. They didn’t have to start at ground zero to learn a new set of commands. And when you’re comfortable using three, four, or more programs, you want them all running and available at a moment’s notice. MultiFinder, incorporated into the Finder itself in System 7, offered you the promise of being able to do that, but the underlying deficiencies of the OS reneged on that promise. Classic Mac OS was Lucy and you were Charlie Brown.
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OK, in the very early days, not every app had keyboard shortcuts for Cut, Copy, and Paste, but that didn’t last long. ↩
Short memories
June 19, 2026 at 12:46 PM by Dr. Drang
I’ve been thinking about 1984 lately—the year, not the novel. What got me thinking about it was the reduction in gas prices over the past few weeks,
and this article in the New York Times about Donald Trump’s declining poll numbers among white working-class voters and how that might affect November’s elections.1
Forgive me for not being especially optimistic, but one of my distinct memories from 1984 makes me think the polls are lagging.
A news story on one of the networks back in 1984 included short interviews with prospective voters. One of the voters was a young white man (he was about my age at the time) who said he was voting for Ronald Reagan. When asked why, he said “He got me my job back.”
Of course, the man had been laid off early in the Reagan administration,2 but that didn’t enter into his reasoning. The only thing that mattered was that he was working again. It was my introduction to the short memories of American voters.
via MoMA
I can’t help but think we’ll see the same thing this November. As long as the price of gas—like the unemployment rate in 1984—keeps going down, it won’t matter whether it gets back to where it had been or who caused it to go up in the first place. White working-class voters (especially men) will credit Trump with bringing gas prices down and vote Republican again, regardless of what they told pollsters recently. Only another major fuckup close to the election will get them to vote blue or just stay home in large numbers.
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If, like me, you don’t have a subscription to the Times, see if your local library gives you access to it. Mine does. ↩
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Constant Republican propaganda has people thinking the Reagan years were all about prosperity, but the recession early in his first term was the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, a distinction it held until 2008. ↩