Suburban Expansion and Name Change
In the '70s and early '80s, the bank's expansion into the suburbs was hindered by its name as it evoked images of "drugs, crime, and general deterioration". When the bank was building a branch in Massapequa, Long Island, in 1978, the plate-glass windows had to be replaced seven times after they were shattered by bricks. Despite some investment in the Harlem name, Jerome McDougal - chairman and CEO of the bank at the time - decided that a change was needed if the bank was to survive and expand. The Apple name and logo was created by a small consulting firm, Selame Design, in 1983. Despite some feeling that the name was undignified for a financial institution, McDougal pushed it through. Within the first month of the name change, Apple Bank gained 4,943 new accounts - three times the normal rate - and $116 million in deposits, compared to a loss of $26 million during the corresponding period in 1982.
On the last day of 1986, Apple acquired the Eastern Savings Bank (established as the Bronx Savings Bank in 1905), thus obtaining three branches in the Bronx, two in Westchester, and two on Long Island. Apple now ranked 17th among the New York metropolitan area's thrift institutions, with assets of $2.7 billion.
Another acquisition came in 1989, with the purchase of Sag Harbor Savings Bank - chartered in 1860 in Sag Harbor, New York, to provide financial services for the whaling industry - for $29.5 million, bringing in five additional branches serving Suffolk County.
In the late 1990s, Apple Bank began an aggressive expansion into Brooklyn, opening 13 branches in that borough since 1997.
Read more about this topic: Apple Bank For Savings
Famous quotes containing the words suburban, expansion and/or change:
“When I consider the clouds stretched in stupendous masses across the sky, frowning with darkness or glowing with downy light, or gilded with the rays of the setting sun, like the battlements of a city in the heavens, their grandeur appears thrown away on the meanness of my employment; the drapery is altogether too rich for such poor acting. I am hardly worthy to be a suburban dweller outside those walls.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Artistic genius is an expansion of monkey imitativeness.”
—W. Winwood Reade (1838–1875)
“If love closes, the self contracts and hardens: the mind having nothing else to occupy its attention and give it that change and renewal it requires, busies itself more and more with self-feeling, which takes on narrow and disgusting forms, like avarice, arrogance and fatuity.”
—Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929)