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COLUMBUS – Chicago architect Louis Sullivan was riding high when he hired young Wisconsin architect Frank Lloyd Wright in early 1888 to assist the firm of Adler & Sullivan with the gargantuan task of designing Chicago’s Auditorium Theater.
But by the time he began drawing a series of intimately scaled small-town banks, Sullivan’s high-flying career was spiraling downward.
The legendary architect’s career was a contrasting one. It’s the story of how a man often called the father of the skyscraper – with towering structures in Chicago, Buffalo, St. Louis and beyond – became best-known in some places for the eight delicate “jewel box” banks he designed in the waning years of his career and life.
One of those jewel boxes is embedded into the setting of downtown Columbus, Wisconsin, about a half-hour northeast of Madison at 159 W. James St.
The Farmers and Merchants Union Bank building, which opened in 1920 and is still used as a bank today, was the last of the jewel boxes and among the architect’s final buildings – it was his last complete building design – and it is a beauty.
It’s also a testament to how much the teacher’s influence had on his most famous pupil, who called his mentor “the master.”
The other Sullivan-designed building in Wisconsin is the 1909 Bradley-Crane House on the west side of Madison and that was is believed to have been mostly drawn by George Elmslie, "with only occasional suggestions from Sullivan."
Tantalizingly, there was talk in 1910 of a bank design for Wauwatosa, but, sadly, that did not come to pass.
Sullivan built his name and reputation out of steel and stone, erecting hulking structures like the Auditorium Building in Chicago, the Wainwright Building St. Louis and the Guaranty Building in Buffalo. He also drew homes (though he wasn’t especially enamored of these jobs), churches, factories and retail stores.
The "jewel box" banks
In 1908 he was hired to design a small bank building to occupy a prominent street corner in Owatonna, Minnesota. What he drew for the National Farmers’ Bank was a brick and ornate terra cotta gem with stained glass windows that was unlike anything any small-town main street had ever seen, and nothing at all like the classically inspired banks that were the norm.
Although he was initially reticent to take on more bank commissions, preferring instead to focus on "commercial" work, his financial situation did not agree with that approach and he did, thankfully, go on to design more.
Riffing on that first design, Sullivan went on to create unique jewel box gems for the Peoples Savings Bank in Cedar Rapids, Iowa (1912), the Henry Adams Land & Loan Office in Algona, Iowa (1913), the Merchants’ National Bank in Grinnell, Iowa (1914), the Home Building Association company in Newark, Ohio (1914), the Purdue State Bank in West Lafayette, Indiana (1914), and the People’s Federal Savings and Loan Association in Sidney, Ohio (1918).
Like each of its predecessors, Columbus' Farmers and Merchants Union Bank building was clearly part of the set, but unique within that group.
The Columbus design
Located on a prominent downtown corner, the Crawfordsville tapestry brick building is effectively a box, but one with ornament that elevates it considerably.
The entrance and the main office window are set within a trio of piers capped with mottled green terra cotta. Above that is a stunning terra cotta section that is heavily ornamented with a nameplate in marble embedded in the center.
To the left the date of the bank’s founding is inscribed and to the right is the date of the building.
Resting atop this main terra cotta section, with its classic Sullivanesque ornament that blends geometry and elements from nature, is a pair of lions, each holding a shield with the bank’s initials.
The lions rest at the meeting points of a gorgeous recessed terra cotta arched window and the panel. That terra cotta is surrounded by two levels of brick arch and then another swoop of ornamented terra cotta.
The leaded glass windows in the arch are of green, yellow and brown.
In the center of a terra cotta cornice at the top is an elaborate cartouche, inscribed with the Wisconsin state motto – Forward – and a powerful eagle spreading its wings.
“These bricks have a wide range of colors in the browns and golden yellows,” wrote architect Thomas E. Tallmadge in the July 1920 issue of "The Western Architect."
“The other principal material is glazed terra cotta; this is mottled and is green. Green is also the big slab of verd antique marble over the entrance, and variegated in greens and browns are the leaded glass windows.
“The depth of these colors and a total absence of white give the building a certain richness and a prismatic lustre.”
In a 1963 interview in Milwaukee, bank president J. Russell Wheeler recalled the laying of the brick.
"The outside walls, when that brick was delivered, Sullivan gave them instructions. He said, 'I don't want any sorting of this brick, I want to get it out of the pile just as it comes and leave it in. Don't try to match anything, just lay it. This is going to be an oriental rug'."
Along the side of the building, which has a pair of buttresses for strength but that also add visual interest, are five recessed arched windows, also in variegated opaque glass.
“The spandrels blossom into a gorgeous (terra cotta) growth that tries to burst through a thin arch of brick below and a delicate terra cotta cincture above,” wrote Tallmadge.
Each buttress is capped with a globe-like terra cotta finial.
An annex with a “women’s reception room” area – women were not expected to bank, and needed an out-of-the-way place to pass the time while their husbands transacted – outside a board room was at the back. The lower ceiling height in the annex allowed for the back wall of the main part of the building to have an arched window opening with dimensions mirroring the facade window, albeit with a staircase cut into it.
Above the back window there is another “Forward” cartouche and eagle.
Inside, there is much that ties “the master” Sullivan to his pupil Wright, including the forms, the ornamentation, the woodwork and built-in benches. Not least of these elements is the small, low foyer just inside the entrance that creates compression before the release of stepping into the double-height space of the bank’s interior.
This compression and release effect was embraced and used to great effect by Wright throughout his career.
The bank’s interior is simple and beautiful, and full of light thanks to the arched window in the facade and the matching one on the back wall. These windows and the row of colored glass windows along the side of the building can be more fully enjoyed from the building’s interior where they are backlit by the sunshine.
Just inside to the left is an office with built-in cabinets with leaded glass doors and just outside it an open space delineated by a half-wall that served as a consultation area.
The rest of the length of the space on the left contains banking windows with arched metal-bar grates affording access to tellers. This walled section only fills half the vertical space, with the area above open.
On the left wall is a space that in other jewel boxes was used for murals. Here it is bare.
“These jewel box banks are known for either having a humongous light fixture that catches your eye when you walk in, or a huge mural painting,” notes Samantha Petrie, retail supervisor at Farmers and Merchants Union Bank.
“(Sullivan) originally intended this wall here to (have) a mural, but the president at the time said, he didn't want to spend the money on that, that he was here to serve his farming community and his customers (and) they wouldn't appreciate that.”
Along the right wall are built-in benches, vintage ashtrays (now unused, of course), high-top writing desks for customers to fill out deposit and withdrawal slips, and what may be the world’s only Sullivan-designed bubbler.
“It works now,” says Petrie and I can’t resist the opportunity to drink from a Sullivan water fountain. “It didn't work for the longest time. This top (enameled) piece was broken, and when we had our 150th anniversary, we found a way to fix it. We found that little piece on eBay.”
In the back corner is a small table with a guest book bearing signatures of visitors from around the globe, and a lamp that was designed by Sullivan and given as a gift upon the bank’s completion.
In the annex we can see the window seats in the former ladies lounge, and in the vault there's a ventilator control that was added to ensure that people could breathe if they were locked in the vault during a robbery or by accident.
The conference room is especially nice, with its heavy wooden, nail-less table designed by Sullivan, fireplace, some almost Deco lighting and interesting wall covering.
“That is Chinese rice paper,” Petrie explains. “It was made in Japan and then brought here. When we did our addition in 1958, this (back wall) used to be windows. When we added on, we had to (close off) this section and we were able to find an exact replica (wall covering).”
Most everything inside the building is original, Petrie adds.
While there is a small mezzanine at the front of the bank, there is no way to access it, Petrie says. That’s not the case with the mezzanine at the back, which now houses a small museum.
Up here pieces of terra cotta, newspaper clippings, original blueprints, photographs, books and more explain the history of the unique structure and the banking business that built it.
The Farmers & Merchants Union Bank
The roots of the Farmers & Merchants Union Bank lie in the 1861 founding of the Union Bank by John R. Wheeler as a private institution inside a dry goods store. The following year, Wheeler incorporated it as a state bank, though it reverted to a private bank during the Civil War.
In 1865, Wheeler moved the bank into a building a stone’s throw from the current building. In 1873, the bank was sold to Wheeler’s brother-in-law Lester R. Rockwell, who died 11 years later, at which point, bank president A.G. Cook gave it the name it carries today.
In 1896, the founder’s son, John E. Wheeler bought the bank back and in 1903 he again oversaw its conversion to a state bank. His son J. Russell Wheeler joined the business and became active in the Banker-Farmer Movement, which attempted to break down barriers between these two groups. In 1916, he organized the first Banker-Farmer Conference in Madison.
The following year, the elder Wheeler died and J. Russell Wheeler became bank president.
How Sullivan came to Columbus
By the time Sullivan began designing the jewel box banks – his partnership with Adler long-dissolved – his career was waning. A temperamental reputation and lack of drive to find wealthy tenants for which to design residences combined with his desire to look forward in architecture rather than backward – at a time when historically referential styles were still all the rage – to cause an ebb in demand for his services.
The bank designs were sparked by the interest of Carl K. Bennett, vice president of the National Farmers’ Bank in small Owatonna, Minnesota, about an hour south of Minneapolis.
Seeking a simple but dignified building for his bank, Bennett was frustrated in his search by architects who seemed to rely only on accepted ideas of how banks were supposed to look.
Then, in 1906, he stumbled upon Sullivan’s essay “What Is Architecture?” reprinted in “The Craftsman” magazine.
The bank's officers, wrote Robert Twombly in his “Louis Sullivan: His Life and Work” book, “knew just what they wanted: a convenient, modern structure that would also represent the values and tastes of its farmer clientele, objectives Sullivan took to be the essence of democratic architecture.”
The bank had found its man and Sullivan found a niche that would provide periodic work over the next dozen or so years, with the Owatonna bank serving as something of a prototype.
Sullivan and Bennett would become friends and the architect would also later design a house for Bennett, who would, to help out Sullivan financially, purchase some of his possessions at auction.
There are diverging stories of how Wheeler connected with Sullivan.
One tale suggests that during his search for an architect for the Columbus bank, Wheeler came across a postcard showing one of the jewel box banks – likely the Merchants National Bank in Grinnell, postcards of which Sullivan was known to use as a promotional tool, according to Twombly – and to his eyes it appeared to be the work of an architect whose buildings had impressed his wife, art enthusiast Anna May Wheeler: Frank Lloyd Wright.
Twombly suggests that at least Anna May, if not her husband, was eager to hire Wright, who was away in Japan working on the Imperial Hotel.
“The Wheelers correctly recognized the connection between Wright’s work and Sullivan’s,” wrote Gary C. Meyer in a 2005 article for Wisconsin Magazine of History. “Wheeler presently invited Sullivan to Columbus to discuss the project.”
Wheeler himself, however, told a different story in the 1963 interview. He told David Thelen that Anna May actually knew Sullivan beforehand.
"My wife ... she's a former schoolteacher and kindergarten teacher, especially for the Harrison School in Chicago, which is now the Northland Educational Institution in Medicine," Wheeler said. "And she took a great liking to Sullivan and Sullivan took a great liking to her ... they were both interested in art. I was a businessman, you know, and I didn't know whether I wanted to employ him or not.
"But I went down with her and called on him in Chicago in his office, and he talked to me a while. ... I said, 'I don't think I can afford to hire you' ... and he said, 'Well, you pay my expenses up to Columbus and I'll go up and look things over and stay overnight, and then you can make the decision if you want to employ me.'
"So I did. We came back, and I showed him the lot, and I talked to him about my bank and what my ambition was and so forth. Sullivan came up and that night we had a nice ... dance and getting-together (to attend), and I didn't want to miss it. He said, 'You take your wife along, and I want to do some sketching here anyway.' And so we left him. When we got back I found the sketch that he'd drawn ... the bank. I looked at it and my wife was crazy about it right away. I said, 'I don't know if we want it or not.' She said, 'Talk with Sullivan,' and so we finally decided to have him and we got him."
According to Wheeler, the initial sketch made during that February 1919 visit was basically the bank that was built.
A self-confessed conservative-minded person, no one was more surprised than Wheeler himself that he chose Sullivan to design a new bank building.
“I was scared to death by those first drawings,” he is quoted as saying in John Szarkowski’s “The Idea of Louis Sullivan.”
“I was supposed to be a conservative man, a fairly distinguished member of a conservative profession, and I was being asked to build a building that looked to me flamboyantly radical. I was sure it would terrify the natives. I was almost ready to call the whole thing off. It was Mrs. Wheeler who smoothed my feathers and talked me into going ahead.”
Still, Twombly wrote, Wheeler did trim back a few luxuries – including a skylight, large terra cotta lions that were to flank the elevated public desks and an expensive steel vault design, as well as the mural Petrie mentioned – which he would later regret doing. However, at the time, he feared these things might intimidate “our customers ... (in) their milking clothes.
"He was going to have a statuary lion on each side of the desk opposite the tellers' windows, and they'd go up there, they'd stand between these two lions and sign their check, and I made him cut that out. I said, 'No, we can't have that. It would scare people to death'."
Wheeler recalled expressing concern to Sullivan about costs during construction.
"I said to him, 'You know, this is costing a lot of money. ... I'm going to go broke,' and he says, 'Oh no, what difference does it make? You have got the only Sullivan bank building in Wisconsin.'
"I said that to my wife and she said, 'Well, what of it, he knows what he is talking about.' He thought that I was getting something of great value because he had originality and he was a great architect, no question about that. He knew it and that's what my wife said, 'When a man is a great architect like that, he knows what he is and he has a right to think that'."
Wheeler recalled that the building cost about $60,000.
Wheeler’s reticence was not uncommon at the time, Meyer pointed out. “A local bank needed to inspire confidence in its depositors and relevance in its community in order to weather hard times. J. Russell Wheeler understood how important a role the building itself played.”
Sullivan visited Columbus multiple times and created a multiple sets of revised drawings during spring of 1919 and in April his plans were approved.
During this time he became close to the Wheelers and, Meyer wrote, made an impression on the entire family.
“The architect was a gallant and dapper man,” recalled the Wheeler’s daughter Helen, “contrary to the stories of his excesses at the time. ... He was a delightful house guest.”
Her father also respected the architect.
“Wheeler’s liking for Sullivan grew stronger as the project advanced,” Meyer noted. “He admired Sullivan’s pride and independent mind. He know that Sullivan would have been unaffordable to them had he not fallen on hard times, and he came to hope that the bank would be a big success so as to help him attract new commissions.”
During construction Sullivan visited the site, Wheeler said.
"He stayed two, three days, maybe," he recalled in 1963. "He supervised. He wanted to have it right and I think he went back to Chicago and then came back again. He didn't spend a great deal of time there. But he spent several days, but I really think what he came for was, my wife is a very keen little woman and she admired his artistic talk."
During one of these visits, the Wheelers took Sullivan to Madison for dinner and to see the capitol. There, Wheeler said, they met Frank Lloyd Wright.
"Frank Lloyd Wright said to me, 'It is wonderful for you; I don't know whether you know it, but it is a wonderful thing. The master is a great man.' He called him the master, and I began to appreciate (Sullivan)."
The bank’s construction took about a year and it opened on June 14, 1920 – Flag Day – and 5,000 people turned out to celebrate in a town with a population of about half that number.
Seeing the windows on the side of the building, "Some of the farmers wanted to know if I was building a church," Wheeler recalled in the 1963 interview.
Admiration for the building was not limited to the locals, however.
“In a sense, the bank is a memorial of its founder, and of its founding, in 1861, by the grandfather of the present incumbent, Mr. J.R. Wheeler,” wrote architect Tallmadge that July in "The Western Architect," calling it a "gem.
“Mr. Wheeler is keenly alive to the opportunity in his bank for community service and communal expression. ... We find Mr. Sullivan’s genius rising to the opportunities as fresh and as brilliant as we beheld it 30 years ago.”
Still, as Twombly pointed out, Wheeler’s hope that a beautiful result in Columbus would lead to more work for Sullivan was frustrated.
“After 1919 things got even worse.”
In 1924, Sullivan died at the age of 67, while living in a $9-a-week room at Chicago's Hotel Warner & Annex. Leaving nothing behind, his funeral and burial were paid for by Frank Lloyd Wright. Tallmadge, who had written the glowing article about the Columbus bank for "The Western Architect" designed Sullivan's headstone.
A year later, Wheeler left Columbus for Milwaukee and a VP job at the Bankers’ Joint Stock Land Bank.
The bank today
Rather amazingly, amid decades of mergers and acquisitions, the Farmers & Merchants Union Bank is still going strong and still owns and occupies its Sullivan building. And it continues its original mission.
“We focused on farming and ag back then,” says Samantha Petrie. “It's still a big part of our portfolio now. We've obviously branched off and extended into a lot of other things, but our farming community is very big here.”
Over the years, a number of changes were made to the bank’s physical footprint in the form of additions, which, thankfully, haven’t much affected Sullivan’s original design, best I can tell.
The first was a drive-thru and addition in 1960-1, timed to coincide with the institution’s 100th anniversary. In 1970, the drive-thru was remodeled as part of a second addition. Eight years later there was another addition (which was replaced in 2005-7) and in 1997-8, the Sullivan bank building facade was restored.
In 2013, the lobby got some repairs and new paint and the mezzanine was refreshed, too.
You’ll be able to see that when you visit the bank, which welcomes guests and offers free tours, as well. Don’t forget to take a sip from the Sullivan bubbler and be sure to sign the guest book next to the lamp Sullivan gifted to the bank.
Then, when you go up to the mezzanine, gaze out over the railing at the gorgeous jewel box bank that J. Russell Wheeler and Louis Sullivan gifted to Wisconsin.
Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he lived until he was 17, Bobby received his BA-Mass Communications from UWM in 1989 and has lived in Walker's Point, Bay View, Enderis Park, South Milwaukee and on the East Side.
He has published three non-fiction books in Italy – including one about an event in Milwaukee history, which was published in the U.S. in autumn 2010. Four more books, all about Milwaukee, have been published by The History Press.
With his most recent band, The Yell Leaders, Bobby released four LPs and had a songs featured in episodes of TV's "Party of Five" and "Dawson's Creek," and films in Japan, South America and the U.S. The Yell Leaders were named the best unsigned band in their region by VH-1 as part of its Rock Across America 1998 Tour. Most recently, the band contributed tracks to a UK vinyl/CD tribute to the Redskins and collaborated on a track with Italian novelist Enrico Remmert.
He's produced three installments of the "OMCD" series of local music compilations for OnMilwaukee.com and in 2007 produced a CD of Italian music and poetry.
In 2005, he was awarded the City of Asti's (Italy) Journalism Prize for his work focusing on that area. He has also won awards from the Milwaukee Press Club.
He has be heard on 88Nine Radio Milwaukee talking about his "Urban Spelunking" series of stories, in that station's most popular podcast.
