Quote:
Originally Posted by The North One
How big was Ameritrust in 1991? Seems like it must have been a big bank to consider building something like this, or was the speculative office market in Cleveland really good at the time?
It does look like a very cool example of PoMo. Sad it didn't get built.
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cleveland trust, later rebranded ameritrust, was a top twenty bank for its entire existence from the 1800s until 1991. it rose as high 6th place and biggest in the midwest for awhile. it later fell off in the late 80s and was actually poking around for mergers when they finally did decide to merge with society bank and the newly built society bank tower across public square in 1991. a shame for our purposes at least because if it would have been any of the other local banks they were in early merger talks with the tower likely would have gotten built. society bank was at #25 and merged with albany's #29 key bank the next year. i believe key bank remains at or around #25 today.
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ameritrust tower is quite a loss but...
really for me and architecture buffs the real loss for cleveland was the early gehry progressive tower.
1987/860'
i dk the truth, but as i recall the scuttlebutt at the time was basically that the mayor didn't want it in that location, so progressive insurance founder walked away and built a new campus hq in the suburbs instead.
and to answer probably anyone's first questions looking at it, yes that is a newspaper on the crown and yes progressive head honcho peter lewis was a art buff and a big and early weed smoker and weed proponent. and yes this wacky and arts filled tower would definitely have happened.
aside from the out there early po-mo gehry design, the tower would have included many major new art works by donald judd and other modernist artists around the grounds. so to make it even worse for cle, peter lewis later gave the majority of his arts money to nyc, in particular moma, where clevelander agnes gund ran the show, and to houston/nyc to dia art foundation. to be fair, he did continue to fund cle arts as well, but it just wasnt the same anymore up until his death.