Author Topic: Goodbye to First Pasadena State Bank. And to an era. [Opinion]  (Read 625 times)

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Online Elderberry

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Houston Chronicle by  Lisa Gray July 17, 2019

First Pasadena State Bank, the only skyscraper in Pasadena, Texas, is scheduled to implode at 7 a.m. on Sunday, July 21. That breaks my heart.

In 1963, the year it was built, a bank could be the heart of a town, something to be proud of. First Pasadena State Bank was definitely that kind of icon.

Lyndon Baines Johnson campaigned on the bank’s lawn the day before the 1964 presidential election. The building’s picture appeared on schoolkids’ report cards. In spring, the Strawberry Festival Parade marched past it. At Christmas, Santa ho-ho-hoed in the lobby. Deals were sealed with handshakes, and the bank’s president, Buddy Jones, waved hello to his customers.

A striking skyscraper in the Frank Lloyd Wright style, it was modern without being glass-box dull. At 12 stories, it towered 10 above everything else in town and marked 1001 Southmore Ave. as the peppy new pulse of Pasadena.

But it wasn’t just the town that was proud of its bank. In those days, a bank could be proud of its town, too.

Pasadena liked to bill itself as “equidistant from downtown Houston and NASA’s Manned Spaceflight Center” — which is to say, poised between two different, limitless futures. When planning the building, bank chairman James Donovan said he wanted a building that signaled the former Strawberry Capital of the World’s transition to the era of manned spaceflight.

The bank hired architecture firm MacKie and Kamrath, devotees of Frank Lloyd Wright, to design what a bank brochure later called “a fitting symbol of Space Age industry and finance.” With its cantilevered overhangs and art-glass trim, the building ran counter to the glassy orthodoxy of the day: It was thoroughly modern without being generic.

The bank’s lobby had curving glass walls and Danish modern furniture. An indoor fountain burbled.

More: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/local/gray-matters/article/Goodbye-to-First-Pasadena-State-Bank-And-to-an-14103438.php

Online Elderberry

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Offline thackney

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Re: Goodbye to First Pasadena State Bank. And to an era. [Opinion]
« Reply #2 on: July 22, 2019, 12:17:21 pm »
Very neatly done folding in on itself.
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Offline IsailedawayfromFR

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Re: Goodbye to First Pasadena State Bank. And to an era. [Opinion]
« Reply #3 on: July 22, 2019, 01:45:51 pm »
Very neatly done folding in on itself.
The people who do truly know what they are doing.

Unlike others such as
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No punishment, in my opinion, is too great, for the man who can build his greatness upon his country's ruin~  George Washington