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Transit Nightclub (Northern Savings Fund Society)

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Northern Savings Fund Society
1871–1872, Furness and Hewitt; 1888 altered, Frank Watson; 1903, George T. Pearson. Spring Garden and N. 6th sts.
  • (Photo by Andrew Hope)

Spring Garden Street was the principal boulevard of the districts north of the original city of Philadelphia. Its added width attracted a cluster of interesting buildings that gives it the character of a village main street mixing commercial, institutional, and residential buildings, including this early bank by Frank Furness. The site was broad and shallow, causing him to overlay a conventional tripartite bank facade on the long Spring Garden street front, anticipating Robert Venturi's use of the conventional as an identifying image. It is one of Furness's purest Néo-Grec essays, with its abstracted triglyphs on the expressed pilasters and blank metope-like panels on the walls between the piers. In the 1970s, its owners proposed to demolish it to create a Venturiesque car-centered sign as bank, but preservationists used federal regulations to prevent its demolition. In the 1990s the bank was adapted for use as a nightclub.

Writing Credits

Author: 
George E. Thomas
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Citation

George E. Thomas, "Transit Nightclub (Northern Savings Fund Society)", [Philadelphia, Pennsylvania], SAH Archipedia, eds. Gabrielle Esperdy and Karen Kingsley, Charlottesville: UVaP, 2012—, http://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/PA-02-PH192.

Print Source

Cover: Buildings of PA vol 2

Buildings of Pennsylvania: Philadelphia and Eastern Pennsylvania, George E. Thomas, with Patricia Likos Ricci, Richard J. Webster, Lawrence M. Newman, Robert Janosov, and Bruce Thomas. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012, 156-156.

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