Transit Nightclub (Northern Savings Fund Society)

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.