A stone bank building in the Italianate manner at the southwest corner of Second and Pine. Pictorial St. Louis drew it in 1875 with four floors of windows above an arched ground story and a pedimented entrance on the corner. Its lower two stories, all that stood when it was photographed during demolition about 1940, had an open arcade of tall openings between columns banded with carved drums, one bay closed by a round arch, with stone balustrades set low between the columns. Above it, tall round-headed windows sat in heavy molded frames, one crowned by a pediment on carved brackets, under a cornice studded with carved ornaments. A plain rusticated pier turned the corner onto Second Street.
The Mechanics’ Bank opened in 1857, the year of a national financial panic. An 1859 guide to St. Louis still listed it at Third and Chestnut, but by the 1860 city directory it was in this stone building at the southwest corner of Second and Pine, in the old business district near the levee, with the Home Mutual Insurance Company in offices upstairs. The building appears in Compton and Dry’s Pictorial St. Louis of 1875. Whether it was built for the bank or adapted for it has not been established. Its architect is unknown. The bank stayed at Second and Pine for nearly thirty years. In 1885 it followed other banks west to Fourth and Pine. It became the Mechanics National Bank in 1901 and merged with the American Exchange National Bank in 1905 to form the Mechanics-American National Bank, later housed at Broadway and Locust. That bank was folded into the First National Bank in St. Louis in 1919. The old bank building stood until the clearance of the riverfront for the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial. It was photographed partly razed about 1940, its stone front still standing with the rest of the building gone behind it.
