The Syndicate Bank Building
At San Pablo Avenue and Adeline Street in Emeryville is a building shaped like a very smooth wedge of white cake. Its vacant ground floor and the rental apartments above give few clues to its interesting history.
Syndicate Bank
The Syndicate Bank incorporated, on July 16, 1903. Its officers included Frank C. Havens of the Realty Syndicate and Henry Bothin of Judson Steel. The bank’s location would be a newly constructed building at the gore between San Pablo Avenue and Adeline Street. Designed by the Reid Brothers (who also designed the Hotel del Coronado), the bank was in the classical style and was faced with Roman brick.
The brickwork was especially distinctive in the arches over the windows. The building’s flatiron design was dictated by the shape of the lot, a triangle formed by the intersection of an old stagecoach road—San Pablo Avenue—with a railroad right-of-way, Adeline Street. The building was to have a foundation strong enough to support a five-story structure. Only two stories were completed; the upstairs contained the offices of the Oakland Herald newspaper.
First National Bank
The Syndicate Bank changed hands on May 18, 1909 when it became the First National Bank of Emeryville, headed by F.M. (Borax) Smith. In 1911, Smith resigned and Fred J. Stoer, a prominent local businessman, bought a controlling interest. Stoer was the son of a German immigrant pioneer. Born in 1864 in St. Paul, Minnesota, he came west with his father and in 1878 settled at 38th and San Pablo Avenue, in what was to become Emeryville. After studying at the Oakland Business College, he went to Minnesota to learn the flour milling trade, and then returned to work with his father, John Stoer, in their Emeryville grain warehouse. Fred Stoer became a town trustee and later a councilman, a position he held for many years.
Streamline Moderne
In 1922, the bank was sold to the Mercantile Trust Company which merged with the American Bank in 1926 and became the American Trust Company. In 1950, the building was stripped of its ornamentation and smoothed over in a postwar version of the streamlined or “ocean liner” modern style. The columns at the entrance were removed and replaced with glass bricks. The Roman brick exterior was stuccoed over; a rough line below the parapet still indicates where the original cornice was. The bank building became a Wells Fargo branch in 1952. It finally closed on December 14, 1984, after serving various banks for eighty-one years. From 1986 to 1988, the building housed a money changing establishment of another kind-a gaming room known as the Sands Club.
This story originally published in 1996 for the Emeryville Centennial Celebration and compiled into the ‘Early Emeryville Remembered’ historical essays book.
