The Bank of Italy tower: A standout on San Jose’s skyline ...Middle East

The newspaper headline shouted “Landmarks Scraped to Make Way for Skyscraper,” and the story was an obituary of sorts for historic buildings that were being demolished in downtown San Jose in the name of progress.

Longtime residents quoted in the article talked about the histories of two buildings being torn down — one a huge bank and the other a former theater that was later occupied by a shoe store building and then an art store. They no doubt believed the modern structure set to rise over the rubble could never equal the character or charm of those old buildings.

But this wasn’t a recent story about preservationists or NIMBYs.

The year was 1925. The new “skyscraper” getting all the buzz was the planned Bank of Italy tower, which became an enduring landmark that has defined downtown San Jose’s skyline for the past century.

After more than a year of construction, the 13-story building on the corner of Santa Clara and First streets opened to tremendous fanfare in January of 1927. San Francisco architect Henry A. Minton designed it in a style that’s been described as Italian Renaissance, Classical Revival and Mediterranean Revival. Whatever it was called, it was the “house style” preferred by A.P. Giannini, the San Jose native who founded the Bank of Italy (which changed its name to Bank of America in 1930), and Minton designed similar though smaller branches in Santa Cruz, Merced and Salinas.

Both Giannini and Minton’s lives were impacted by the San Francisco earthquake and fire in 1906. Because Giannini had secured $80,000 from his bank following the devastating earthquake, he was able to make loans for weeks while bigger banks remained closed, their cash trapped in their blazing-hot metal vaults.

Giannini cemented his reputation as a banker who looked out for “the little fellow,” and Bank of Italy grew into a financial powerhouse. Its first branch outside San Francisco was in Giannini’s hometown of San Jose, and that bank was one of the buildings torn down to make way for the tower.

Minton was born in Boston and studied architecture at Harvard. But only a year after his 1905 graduation, he pulled up stakes and headed west to San Francisco, where the earthquake had created a market for young architects needed to rebuild.

He worked for the City of San Francisco for a few years before striking out on his own, according to records held by the Pacific Coast Architecture Database. His primary client in the mid-1920s was Giannini and the rapidly growing Bank of Italy, which was adding branches throughout Northern California.

While he collaborated on several significant buildings in the Bay Area, the Bank of Italy building in San Jose was the towering achievement for Minton, who died in 1948. It was hailed as the tallest building between San Francisco and Los Angeles from its opening until 1970, when it was overtaken by the Pruneyard tower in Campbell.

The building’s lower floors and tower were faced with beige terra cotta, while the middle seven floors provided a contrast by utilizing darker ruffled bricks. It was capped by a copper “lantern” and a bronze flagpole that brought its total height to 300 feet. A dozen fluted, two-story columns flanked the original bronze entry doors, topped by a detailed frieze that wrapped around the building on the First and Santa Clara Street sides and was decorated with alternating seals of the County of Santa Clara and Bank of America.

The spacious ground-floor banking room boasted a 30-foot ceiling, with brass fittings and gold-leaf details, counters and a floor made of marble and windows that nearly spanned floor to ceiling.

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The Bank of Italy building was a beacon for downtown in both a figurative and literal sense — in 1929, Bank of Italy President James Bacigalupi activated a switch that turned on two 1,000-watt lamps. One pointed north toward Oakland’s airport to guide planes, the other swept the horizon at the speed of two revolutions a minute. The crown was also topped by vertical electric lights sheathed in green that were visible from miles away.

Sal Caruso, a Santa Clara-based architect and designer, has a personal understanding of the building’s significance — his father worked there when Caruso was growing up and took him up to the rooftop tower where he could see the valley laid out before him.

“It’s what first inspired me to be an architect,” Caruso said.

Known as the Bank of America building for most of its existence, the tower was a focal point in San Jose’s small but bustling downtown during the mid-20th century, providing offices for dentists, jewelers, X-ray technicians and other professionals and small businesses for decades. It continued to stand as the downtown around it grew and then entered a period of decline starting in the early 1960s.

By the early 1970s, the Valley of the Heart’s Delight had begun its transformation into Silicon Valley. Downtown redevelopment lured Bank of America into a new building at nearby Park Center Plaza on Market Street, with the old location continuing as a bank branch for a few more years. The ground floor retail spaces continued to house small businesses well into the 2010s, including a pawn shop and jewelry store and a deli, and the old banking room was converted into a dance club on weekend nights.

As redevelopment money began flowing downtown starting in the 1980s, residential towers, office buildings, hotels and a new City Hall may have eclipsed the Bank of Italy in stature, but not in status. San Jose’s original skyscraper was designated a city landmark in 1984 and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

And it is now poised to make a comeback in its second century. Developers Urban Community and Westbank partnered to purchase the building in 2019, partnering with global design and architecture firm Bjarke Ingels Group to reimagine the tower while maintaining its historical integrity. The latest plan is to convert the individual office spaces into residential, with more than 100 units, along with some public spaces on the lower floors.

Who can say what downtown San Jose will be like a century from now? But it seems likely that the Bank of Italy tower will continue to be its most recognizable landmark.

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