Security Trust Company

735 Griswold – Security Trust Company – Steel-frame seven-story bank building faced in limestone (1925), with 1964 alterations. Albert Kahn, Inc., architects. Corrado G. Parducci, sculptor. This bank building was constructed between the Dime Building’s alley to the south and the First State Bank to the north. Its Romanesque-inspired front is faced in grey Indiana limestone. Rising above a gray granite base, the front displays three four-story tall side-by-side arches. The broad vertical openings are outlined by four-story engaged columns with spiral-patterned shafts and foliated capitals. The columns and their capitals and the arches are finished in limestone elaborately carved with representations of animal and human forms and other motifs. Among the details carved in the voussoir blocks above the arches are squirrel and beehive forms – suggestive of saving for the future – are recognizable. A now glassed-in central entry displays a limestone surround carved with vines and foliage, griffons and pelicans, human figures from classical antiquity, and other motifs, including more beehives. In 1964 a low gable that topped the façade was removed and replaced by a two-story flat-roof addition faced in white cast concrete panels, with a band of black at the roofline. Light enters through six banks of narrow upper and lower windows separated by aluminum spandrels on the addition’s Griswold front. At the same time the 1925 building’s original front windows were replaced with aluminum-trim windows separated by aluminum spandrels and the building’s center entrance converted to a window and two new entrances created in the north and south archways. Since the last bank use, the building has housed Olde Discount Corp. stock brokerage, the Lawton School, a private business school, and later the Detroit Public Schools’ Jessie C. Kennedy Downtown Adult Education Center.