Louis Sullivan’s Merchants National Bank
By Bill Menner; 2007; 72 pp.; Hardcover, $18.95; Pomegranate Communications

Historian Bill Menner has long watched tourists make
the trek to his small hometown of Grinnell, Iowa, 50 miles east of Des Moines, to ogle Louis Sullivan’s jewel-box 1915 bank. What most captivates the visitors, he reports, is “the stark juxtaposition of this simple brick box and its unparalleled ornament.” The bank opened the same year as two other Sullivan jewel-box banks off the beaten track, one in Newark, Ohio, and one in West Lafayette, Indiana. In Sullivan’s life that year, only work was going well; his wife Margaret had left him, and to pay the bills he’d auctioned off his furniture and paintings collections. He lucked into the Grinnell job: a banker there had long been a client of architect Walter Burley Griffin, but Griffin had just moved to Australia to mastermind the building of its new capital, Canberra. Although Sullivan was the bank’s second choice, he immediately impressed board members with a design in partial homage to local architecture, proposing a cathedral-like rose window over the bank’s doorway, facing the 1877 Congregational church built
by town founder Josiah B. Grinnell. The community enthusiastically took to the completed bank, Menner notes; they praised its symbolism of “strength, security and wealth” and its high-tech interior features “ranging from access to public telephones and restrooms to the ventilation system.” The building, now home to the region’s chamber of commerce, still looks much as it did in Sullivan’s day, minus only the bronze teller grilles. Town officials remain so proud of the avant-garde design, in fact, that they’ve had intersections downtown paved with bricks in a circle-in-squares pattern modeled after the bank’s rose window. Menner ably summarizes the jewel box’s history and compares it to seven related banks that Sullivan scattered across the Midwest.