When I was a kid, my parents stored their money in a magical palace. They called it "the bank."
Others called it the grandest of Louis Sullivan's jewel boxes. Built in 1908, the National Farmers' Bank of Owatonna was the first of eight small-town banks in the Midwest designed by the Chicago architect after his tonier commissions fell off because he was no longer in style.
Banker Carl Bennett took a bold step for a turn-of-the-20th-century, practically rural community that had an impressive courthouse but wasn't exactly a hotbed of design. He raised a jaw-dropping $125,000 (equal to about $25 million today) for the project, only to lose the bank 20 years later when it failed.
Sullivan designed the building as a cube, to signify security, then went all out on dressing it up. Now occupied by Wells Fargo, the bank's nonmonetary assets include a brick exterior adorned with cartouches and tile and terra cotta details. Inside, two huge murals of rural scenes by painter Oskar Gross mirror the bank's most striking feature, its massive twin stained-glass arched windows.
I was always drawn first to Gross' painting of placid cows below a blue, cloud-spotted sky. I didn't know that Sullivan had demanded a "color symphony" from the stained-glass windows. I just liked how, on sunny days, the light coming through the glass cast a greenish-gold tinge on the oblivious faces of customers.
These days, shops come and go in Owatonna's downtown, but the Sullivan bank remains on its corner, a reminder of the heights to which small-town dreamers can aspire.
