Finance History | 550 Montgomery Street — Eight Thousand Seven Hundred Eighty Dollars After a Saloon Closed
· 1904-10
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Finance History | 550 Montgomery Street — Eight Thousand Seven Hundred Eighty Dollars After a Saloon Closed
kevin
People treat Bank of America as a Charlotte headquarters and a ticker in the Dow.
The bank that became that name opened as the Bank of Italy in San Francisco's North Beach.
On 17 October 1904 Amadeo Pietro Giannini and his associates began taking deposits in a converted saloon in a section of the Drexler Building on Montgomery Avenue, the street now called Columbus Avenue.
First-day deposits totaled 8,780 dollars in 1904.
The bank was built for the customers other San Francisco houses would not take: immigrants, small merchants, and borrowers who needed 25 dollars rather than 100.
There was no vault of its own. Specie sat in the vault of nearby Crocker National Bank.
The 1906 earthquake and fire destroyed that first room.
Giannini moved the cash out of the fire zone to San Mateo, then took deposits and made reconstruction loans from a plank across two barrels on the Washington Street wharf.
The surviving headquarters rose after the fire.
The directors paid 125,000 dollars in period money for the corner of Clay and Montgomery and opened this eight-story building to the public on 17 August 1908.
Giannini kept an open desk on the first floor.
From this block he pushed statewide branching after California's 1909 law, beginning with San Jose.
By 1918 the Bank of Italy had 24 branches, the first system of its kind in the state.
The name changed to Bank of America on 1 November 1930 after the 1928 combination with Bank of America, Los Angeles.
The national bank charter number, 13044, is the same number the Bank of Italy carried.
The building is a National Historic Landmark.
It is not the original saloon. It is the first house the bank built for itself, and the public entrance on Montgomery Street is the place a visitor can stand.
The mechanism is small deposits gathered from people the old banks ignored, then lent back into the same streets after the fire.
The later holding company sits in another city.
The marble box that carried the name Bank of Italy still stands at this corner.
Photo: Sanfranman59, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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