Indiana jewel box bank
July 2, 2026 at 7:50 PM by Dr. Drang
I visited my eighth and final Louis Sullivan jewel box bank yesterday morning. The Purdue State Bank (now a Chase branch) is in West Lafayette, Indiana. As a graduate of the University of Illinois, I have thoughts about Purdue University and its substandard engineering program, but I will keep those thoughts to myself and focus on the bank.
This is the north side of the bank. The thoroughly incompatible stone addition to the building was (according to Wikipedia) built in the 50s, but I must say the original brick and terra cotta portion of the building is in excellent shape. I don’t know when Chase took over, but they’ve done a great job with the old exterior.
A fun thing about the bank is that it’s wedge-shaped. Here’s an aerial view I pulled from Apple Maps:
The narrow west side of the building used to be the entrance, but it’s now an ATM.
You may be surprised to learn that I don’t find this sacrilegious. It’s a reasonable reuse of a part of the building that wouldn’t make sense as an entrance anymore, and they’ve preserved the glazed terra cotta around it. The signage, though, is awful. Maybe Chase felt the big empty space above the old entrance—which presumably had “Purdue State Bank” removed long ago—didn’t look right without its branding. Wrong.
There are some very nice details around and above the windows. Here’s a closer look at the north side:
And here are essentially the same details on the south side, where the sun didn’t create such harsh shadows:
The shade on the south side also allowed a decent view of the sides of the pillars between the windows.
I have no photos of the interior because it was terribly disappointing. I knew the east half of the building would be generic, but I thought they might have preserved something of the original in the west half. But as I turned right after going through the doors, I saw that wasn’t the case. The entire interior is just white painted drywall and LED lighting. The only thing that sets it apart from any other Chase branch is that the offices in the west half are noticeably squeezed together.
Given the care taken to preserve the exterior, I suspect the interior had been defiled before Chase took over, and there was nothing left in there to care for. That’s a shame, and it was an unfortunate way to end my visits. But the exterior was really nice and certainly worth the trip.
One last thing: Are you surprised to see the Sun hitting the north side of the building? I confess I was. But after thinking about it, it made sense. First, my visit was on July 1, less than two weeks after the summer solstice, which means the Sun rises pretty far north of due east. Second, we’re in Daylight Saving Time, which means the bank’s opening time of 9:00 AM is closer to sunrise than it would be if we were on Standard Time. Finally, West Lafayette is just east of the boundary between the Eastern and Central time zones, and I live just west of the boundary. I’m used to sunrise happening nearly an hour earlier (in local time) than it happens in West Lafayette.
Of course I couldn’t leave it at that. I fired up Mathematica and used its SunPosition function to figure out where the Sun was in the sky when I took that photo (9:22 AM EDT) of the north side of the bank:
As you can see, the Sun’s azimuth, the first item of the result, was about 85°, making it slightly north of east. The same calculation (with the same result) can be made on the web using the NOAA Solar Calculator.