Finance History | Bank of America — Eight Thousand Seven Hundred Eighty Dollars in a Converted Saloon

People treat Bank of America as the glass towers in Charlotte that always ran a consumer branch and a trading book from an S and P 500 listing.

The first book was a North Beach bank for people other houses would not take.

On 17 October 1904 Amadeo Pietro Giannini opened the Bank of Italy in a converted saloon in San Francisco's Jackson Square.

Deposits on the first day totaled $8,780 in 1904 dollars.

Giannini had left the board of an older Italian bank after the directors refused to lend to working immigrants.

He walked the street and argued that coin under a mattress earned nothing and was not safer than a vault.

Within a year deposits passed $700,000.

The mechanism showed itself after the earthquake of 18 April 1906.

Before the fire reached the Drexler Building on what is now Columbus Avenue, the cash was hauled out of the city, hidden under garbage, to San Mateo.

Giannini set up a plank desk on the Washington Street wharf and made reconstruction loans on a handshake while larger banks waited for their vaults to cool.

The surviving headquarters that can still be photographed is 552 Montgomery Street, the eight-story Clay-Montgomery building that opened on 17 August 1908 and held the bank until 1921.

Statewide branches began in San Jose in 1909.

By 1918 the Bank of Italy ran twenty-four offices, the first statewide branch system in the country.

A 1928 combination with Bank of America, Los Angeles, and a 1930 name change put the present title on the book.

The Charlotte holding company and the NationsBank merger are later still.

Branch banking for households that had never held an account is the split the 1904 saloon made possible.

Photo: Bank of Italy Building at 552 Montgomery Street, San Francisco, Sanfranman59, CC BY-SA, via Wikimedia Commons.