Finance History | 550 Montgomery Street — The Bank That Reopened After the Fire

People treat Bank of America as a Charlotte tower that always took national deposits.

The first book was a converted saloon in North Beach.

On 17 October 1904 Amadeo Peter Giannini opened the Bank of Italy in a former bar in the Drexler Building on Montgomery Avenue, now Columbus Avenue, in San Francisco's Italian neighborhood.

First-day deposits were US$8,780.

The bank was built for working depositors other houses would not take.

On 18 April 1906 the earthquake and fire destroyed the Drexler rooms.

Giannini moved specie out of the fire zone and, within days, took deposits and made loans from a plank across two barrels on the Washington Street wharf.

The loans were handshake credits to rebuild shops and houses.

The surviving headquarters is this building.

The bank bought the Clay and Montgomery corner for US$125,000 and opened the eight-story Clay-Montgomery Building to the public on 17 August 1908.

P.T. Shea was the architect.

Giannini kept an open desk on the first floor.

From these rooms the bank began a branch system that other California banks had not attempted at statewide scale.

San Jose opened in 1909.

By 1918 the Bank of Italy listed 24 branches.

Headquarters left this building for 1 Powell Street in 1921.

In 1928 the Bank of Italy merged with Bank of America, Los Angeles.

In 1930 Giannini changed the surviving name to Bank of America.

The 1908 building was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1978.

The first saloon is gone.

The marble hall at 550 Montgomery Street is the place a visitor can still stand.

Photo: Sanfranman59, Bank of Italy Building, San Francisco, 2 March 2008, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.