Identity Crisis Is in the Making for a Landmark Bank Building : History: With Security Pacific checking out, the 1925 building at Pine Avenue and 1st Street won’t house financial institution for first time.
It was not just another change of address when Security Pacific Bank picked up its money and moved its downtown office a few blocks last week to a new building.
One elderly customer cried--and the Security Bank Building at 1st Street and Pine Avenue lost its identity. For the first time since the local landmark was erected in 1925, there will be no bank within its brick and stone walls.
“The place was too big,” explained Donna Turner, manager of Security Pacific’s downtown bank. “I had three floors and I only needed one.”
Much of the work that used to be performed at the bank, such as check processing, has been centralized. It is done elsewhere, in cheaper space. So Turner and her staff left behind the stately spaces of marble and wood on Pine Avenue and moved into a corner office with pink and blue carpeting and glass walls in the new Shoreline Square building at Ocean and Long Beach boulevards.
Monday was the bank’s first day of business in its new home, and customers noticed the difference. One told Turner, “Oh, gee, this is small.” Others seemed to miss the somberness of the dark wood paneling in the original building.
Turner said a number of older customers patronize the downtown office, people who live in the area and have been going to the bank all their lives. “(They’re) so used to coming to the same location for years. Their parents brought them in.”
One elderly woman was so upset by the change that she burst into tears, recounted Turner, who worked at the old building for two years and found the move much less traumatic. “Whether it’s marble and paneling or modern doesn’t make any difference,” she said of her surroundings. “It’s serving the people.”
The large “Security Bank” signs atop the old 13-story building will come down, said Martin Ensbury, marketing vice president of Westgroup Partners of Los Angeles, the owners. But he said his company is hoping to get new tenants that will retain the bank decor, including the basement area with its large vault.
Indeed, Ensbury said that one of the prospective tenants is another bank. A restaurant owner also has looked at the space, apparently inspired by the conversion of the old First National Bank across the street into one of the city’s trendiest new restaurants, L’Opera.
The Security Bank building was named a local cultural landmark two years ago, giving it some protection against demolition. But because the interior banking hall was altered over the years, it does not have any specific historical protection, said the city’s preservation officer, Ruthann Lehrer, and could be modified without city permission.
National Bank & Savings Bank, a banking enterprise that eventually became part of the Security Pacific operation, opened its doors in a five-story building at the 1st and Pine location in 1906. The current Beaux Arts style bank building was constructed on the corner in 1925. Many of the city’s leading citizens banked there and had offices in the upper floors of the building, which is still leased as office space.
One local preservationist, who did not want to be named, said she hoped the bank hall could be adapted by a new tenant who would perhaps even restore some of its original features, such as a ceiling that was covered when air-conditioning was installed.
But without the murmur of bank transactions, she admitted, the building will never be the same. “It’s like old homes. When a new owner takes over, it’s a whole new thing.”
