Farmers and Mechanics Savings Bank (1891)

The 1891 Farmers and Mechanics Savings Bank building in Minneapolis, Minnesota is a Beaux-Arts style building that formerly served as the headquarters of Farmers and Mechanics Savings Bank. In 1942, the bank moved to a new location at 88 S. 6th St. at the corner of Sixth and Marquette.

The building was designed by the locally prominent firm of Long and Kees as a one-story building. Long and Kees usually preferred the then-popular Richardsonian Romanesque style for their buildings, but deviated from this style for the bank. In 1908, architect William Kenyon designed a second-story addition that enlarged the façade while retaining the Beaux-Arts style. The exterior is faced with white limestone, with five piers of rusticated stone supporting fluted Corinthian pilasters. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1984

The building is now home to The Downtown Cabaret, a strip club. Architecture critic Larry Millett writes, "If you step inside for a view of the, ahem, scenery, you'll discover a glass dome that once illuminated a 'ladies banking lobby' but is now the scene of activities not everyone would consider ladylike."

Famous quotes containing the words farmers, mechanics and/or bank:

    “Boys finding for the first time their loins filled with heart’s
    blood
    Widowed farmers whose hands float under light covers to find
    themselves
    Arisen at sunrise”
    —James Dickey (b. 1923)

    “It is only the impossible that is possible for God. He has given over the possible to the mechanics of matter and the autonomy of his creatures.”
    —Simone Weil (1909–1943)

    “A self is, by its very essence, a being with a past. One must look lengthwise backwards in the stream of time in order to see the self, or its shadow, now moving with the stream, now eddying in the currents from bank to bank of its channel, and now strenuously straining onwards in the pursuit of its chosen good.”
    —Josiah Royce (1855–1916)