60 Monroe Center St NW
A century on the corner
The story of the Grand Rapids Savings Bank Building—later the People’s Building, the Select Bank Building, and home to Cityview.
Cityview occupies one of downtown Grand Rapids’ most recognizable towers: a thirteen-story Classical Revival bank built in 1916 at the northeast corner of Monroe Center and Ionia Avenue. For most of a century it was a financial landmark. In the early 2000s the upper floors became condominiums, and the Cityview Association took on the care of a building that had already outlived several names.
1836–1915
Before the tower
Local accounts printed in the Grand Rapids Herald in 1923 place a barn on this corner as early as 1836, used as a schoolhouse for pioneer children. After the Civil War a three-story brick building rose here. From 1871 to 1882 it housed the Grand Rapids Police Department. In 1901 the same structure was remodeled for the Grand Rapids Savings Bank, which had been organized in 1870 and was already one of the city’s established institutions.
In 1913 U.S. Senator William Alden Smith—the Grand Rapids newspaperman and railroad lawyer who had chaired the Senate inquiry into the sinking of the Titanic—became president of the bank. Two years later he announced a new headquarters on the same site: thirteen stories, the tallest building in Grand Rapids.
1916
A bank built to last
The Grand Rapids firm Osgood & Osgood designed the tower. Sidney J. Osgood, a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, had practiced in the city since 1876; his son S. Eugene Osgood, trained at Cornell, joined the partnership in 1904. The National Register listing also credits Owen-Ames-Kimball, the Grand Rapids contractors who shaped so much of downtown. Construction was finished in 1916. The bank moved into its new home the following year.
The building is a steel-frame commercial tower with a mix of Classical Revival and Beaux-Arts detail. Pale grey granite wraps the first floor and mezzanine. Buff brick rises through the office floors. A large terra-cotta cornice crowns the roof. The Monroe Center front is five bays wide; the three center bays hold a two-story recessed entrance framed by four Doric granite columns. At about 180 feet it was the tallest building in Grand Rapids until the sixteen-story National Bank building surpassed it in 1926. Superstition about the number thirteen was still strong enough that the tower was often described as twelve stories.
November 29, 1916
Houdini over Monroe
The tower was barely finished when Harry Houdini used it as a stage. Appearing that week at the Empress Theatre, he promised to hang head-down from a scaffold on the new bank, bound in a police straitjacket and handcuffs. On Tuesday he tested the rigging. On Wednesday, November 29, at 12:15 p.m., a crowd jammed Monroe and Ionia for two blocks.
Houdini was hoisted to about the fifth floor—more than forty feet above the pavement. In one minute and fifty-five seconds he worked free of the cuffs and the jacket. The straitjacket fell to the street and the crowd cheered. The Herald called it one of the largest downtown gatherings the city had ever seen, and a thriller that had “never been excelled” here.
1917–1932
Offices above a banking hall
The bank kept the granite hall. Upper floors were leased to tenants who wanted a Monroe Center address. Among them were lumberman John W. Blodgett; Arthur H. Vandenberg, then editor of the Grand Rapids Herald and later a United States senator; and World War II correspondent Alfred D. Rathbone IV.
The institution itself grew with the building. It purchased the Michigan Exchange Bank in 1917 and the South Grand Rapids State Bank in 1924. By 1926 William Alden Smith chaired the board, the bank claimed fifteen city branches and two outside the city, and a 1920s street view shows the tower still standing above most of its neighbors, a streetcar turning at the corner.
1933–1990
From Savings Bank to People’s Building
The Depression ended the first chapter. In 1933 Grand Rapids’ two largest banks failed: the Grand Rapids National Bank and the Grand Rapids Savings Bank. The city lost payroll and savings with them. People’s National Bank took over this building that same year and stayed until 1958, when it merged with Old Kent Bank and Old Kent continued the downtown offices. For decades after, residents simply called the tower the People’s Building.
The banking hall changed hands again in later years, but the exterior Osgood designed in 1916 remained. On December 28, 1990, the Grand Rapids Savings Bank Building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places (No. 90001956) for its architecture and its place in the city’s commercial history.
Early 2000s
Cityview
By 2002 the thirteen-story building was about seventy-five percent vacant. Parkland Properties of Michigan acquired it and began a mixed-use reuse: keep the historic banking hall, sell most of the tower as residences, and bring a smaller bank back to the corner. Select Bank, a Harbor Springs boutique bank, moved from Bridgewater Place into the granite hall in 2003.
The upper floors became Cityview Condominiums—twenty-five residences, including a 3,800-square-foot penthouse on the top two floors. Nine-foot ceilings, the original window pattern, and views over Monroe Center replaced rows of vacant offices. The association that now stewards the building took its name from that conversion. The People’s Building had become a home.
Sources
Further reading
- National Register of Historic Places listing 90001956, Grand Rapids Savings Bank Building (listed December 28, 1990); nomination by Carolyn J. Barthel, July 1990.
- William J. Etten, A Citizens’ History of Grand Rapids, Michigan (1926), “Banks, Old and New.”
- Grand Rapids Herald, November 29–30, 1916 (Houdini); June 17, 1923 (site history, as compiled by Kent County MIGenWeb).
- History Grand Rapids / Grand Rapids Public Library, “Grand Rapids Savings Bank” and “People’s Building.”
- Crain’s Grand Rapids Business, April 12, 2024; MLive, November 26, 2012 (Select Bank occupancy, 2003).