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)
“the moderate Aristotelian city
Of darning and the Eight-Fifteen, where Euclid’s geometry
And Newton’s mechanics would account for our experience,
And the kitchen table exists because I scrub it.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)
“The prairies were dust. Day after day, summer after summer, the scorching winds blew the dust and the sun was brassy in a yellow sky. Crop after crop failed. Again and again the barren land must be mortgaged for taxes and food and next year’s seed. The agony of hope ended when there was not harvest and no more credit, no money to pay interest and taxes; the banker took the land. Then the bank failed.”
—Rose Wilder Lane (1886–1968)