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“Me, I just stroll the streets of Little Rock, pausing now and then to study the iron grillwork over an old cemetery, to commune with the graves, to gaze at the scrollwork adorning the top of an old building visible from my office window.” –Paul Greenberg, Oct. 22, 1995.
The scrollwork is still there. I walk beneath it almost every day. It’s on the Exchange National Bank Building at the northeast corner of Capitol Avenue and Main Street in Little Rock.
Built in 1921, the yellow brick building makes me wonder if there is a finer example of commercial architecture in all of North America. Charles Thompson’s drawings for the building are a marvel of detail, full of ornament: scrollwork, ionic columns, festooned lion heads; yet not an ornament is original.
Humans were making such things millenia before 1921. Thompson knew how to borrow, and so did the various partners with whom he designed and built a large portion of the most beautiful and enduring architecture in our state.
They used scrollwork and lion heads and columns to add to the beauty of the Exchange Bank Building, but what really makes it so fine is proportion: Its rectangles are in proportion to one another, its size is proportionate to its site, and its height feels proportionate to a human being who happens to be walking by.
At five stories with a footprint of about 1/10 of an acre, it’s impressive and solid, but its message of power is quiet. Its power reassures, it does not overwhelm.
The Exchange Bank Building is more beautiful than the Masonic Temple, which stood here from 1892 until 1919. It, too, housed the Exchange Bank, which incorporated in 1882 and received a national charter in 1885.
It was one of Arkansas’ second generation of banks. The state chartered two in 1836, the State Bank and the Real Estate Bank, but one failed and then the other, so the state constitution was amended to prohibit the incorporation of any more banks, and no more were incorporated until Reconstruction.
Freemasonry seems to have gained a better foothold in antebellum Arkansas than banking did; in Little Rock, Freemasons established a public library (1853) and St. John’s College (1859; its campus is now somewhere in the speed-print of Interstate 30).
Fraternal organizations formed an enormous subset of the American “moral and intellectual associations” that Alexis de Toqueville considered most worthy of the attention of students of the American scene; in Arkansas, Freemasons alone had 442 lodges by 1900. How does that compare to the number of banks, churches, and post offices at the time?
In an 1899 survey of “Secret Societies” (subtitle: “Every Other Man in Little Rock a Lodge Member”), the Arkansas Gazette declared the Masonic Temple to be “the only real sky-scraping building in Little Rock.” The “magnificent pressed-brick building with marble columns” had seven stories and a dome.
Its builders laid the cornerstone on March 4, 1891; by May 15, 1892, Fay Hempstead, as agent, could advertise offices for rent, and the Gazette reported that Mrs. B. Gans was moving “her elegant stock of dry goods and millinery” to the ground floor. (I hope to return later to the contributions of the Gans family to religion, architecture, and retail; for now, please note that during the 1890s, Mrs. Gans made at least one buying trip to Paris, and please hold that as a point of contrast to Arkansas”https://news.google.com/__i/rss/rd/articles/”remote” image.)
The Gans establishment moved south on Main Street after 1900, and the ground floor of the Masonic Temple was occupied by “The Dollar Store” (the Gazette put it in quotation marks) in 1910, when the Exchange National Bank leased it for 15 years.
That lease was cut short on the morning of Aug. 27, 1919, when the Masonic Temple caught fire. By 5 p.m., a wrecking crew was at work trying to tear down the ruins. The crew considered dynamite but deemed it too dangerous, and finally used ladders to scale the walls and hook up ropes and pulleys to tear everything down.
The Gazette’s reporter said it called to mind the “human fly stunt.” Flying bricks from the collapsing walls crashed through the roofs of the Hollenberg Music Company’s retail building at 415 Main and F.B.T. Hollenberg’s office building at 112 East Capitol (to the north and east of the burned building, respectively). The latter building housed Draughon’s Business School, where bricks fell into the typewriter room and “several machines were wrecked.”
The Exchange National Bank temporarily relocated, and postponed opening its vaults for fear of spontaneous combustion (from admitting oxygen into a sealed but extremely hot environment). The Masonic Temple sold the lot at Capitol and Main to the Exchange National Bank Building Company, which was incorporated as a separate entity from the bank itself because of a federal law that prohibited banks from investing more than their capital stock in their buildings.
And that’s when Charles Thompson came in, possibly with the help of others in his firm, and drew the building with the scrollwork that Paul Greenberg gazed upon in his open imitation of the story “Borges and I.” Charles Thompson knew how to borrow, and so did Paul Greenberg. We have no duty to be original, only careful in borrowing what we can from the past for the sake of posterity.
In Wallace Stegner’s novel “Angle of Repose,” a young assistant looks at photographs of the narrator’s grandmother (also the novel’s protagonist) and says, “Gee! Same hairdo all her life!”
“Yes, Miss Morrow,” thinks the narrator. “Same old hairdo. Classic knot and bangs. Anything good was worth sticking with.”
Tom Dillard started an Arkansas history column in these pages on Aug. 25, 2002. After 1,003 columns, he retired from writing it Dec. 25, 2022.
As an archivist, he collected and preserved the records that Arkansas people have left, down to scraps of correspondence. As a founder of the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, he offered a hand to the future, an enormous help. It is impossible to estimate the value of his work as a link between Arkansas people past, present, and future. Thank you, Tom.
Brooke Greenberg lives in Little Rock.
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