Union-Easton Trust Company Building

A two-story neighborhood bank in the classical manner, fifty feet wide, its stone front now painted tan. Four Ionic columns stand between plain end piers and frame three tall bays for the banking room. The windows are set over paneled spandrels, and the center bay holds the entrance. Above the door, an eagle in a shield-shaped cartouche spreads a pair of carved scrolls along the lintel. A plain entablature carries the lettering NEIGHBORHOOD OUTREACH CENTER 5325 across the front. A narrow door in the right-hand pier once led to the upstairs offices. The second story has five plain rectangular windows under a molded cornice. The parapet carries a running frieze of carved vine scrollwork, with fan-shaped palmettes rising at its ends. The long side walls are buff brick, with tall round-arched openings at ground level, now grilled over, and a chimney stack partway back. The far side wall is painted to match the front. A cell tower rises from the roof behind the parapet.

The Union-Easton Trust Company was organized in 1924 by neighborhood businessmen at Easton Avenue and Union Boulevard, after some 75 local merchants agreed to back a single bank for the district rather than two. Its president was the lawyer Arthur F. C. Blase. Klingensmith, Rice and Wilkins designed the building, announced in June 1924 as a fireproof two-story bank with a basement and a fifty-foot front on Easton Avenue, in a classical style with Greek ornament and a stone exterior. The trust company and its banking and real estate business took the first floor, and the second floor held eighteen offices with their own entrance. The bank opened on June 6, 1925. It lasted less than five years. On March 29, 1930, after the state ordered its directors to replace $135,000 in bad loans and a run on deposits, the Union-Easton Trust Company closed its doors, tying up the accounts of some 6,000 depositors. State examiners found that Blase had used the bank's funds to support his Provident Loan and Investment Institution. By 1937 depositors had recovered 36 cents on the dollar. Easton Avenue was renamed Dr. Martin Luther King Drive in 1972. The building now houses the Neighborhood Outreach Center, a church and community center.