Old Economy Fixtures Remain Strong

Mainstays Like First Virginia Bank Keep Regional Economy Growing in Tech Shakeout

First Virginia Bank Inc.'s headquarters complex at the corner of routes 50 and 7 in Falls Church could be stuck in time.

A pair of office towers, white concrete with long windows, stand next to a stucco Italian restaurant and a small Giant grocery built around the same time, in the early 1970s.

Inside the main building's marble lobby hangs a U.S. flag, a Virginia flag and a flag emblazoned with the blocky red, white and black logo of the area's second-largest bank.

Gold and black stenciled letters, some peeling slightly, read "International Services" and "Commercial Department." Behind the glass doors, women with tidy hair and men in ties and suit jackets stand to greet customers from the neatly lined rows of desks.

First Virginia is, in many ways, a Washington anachronism. Slow-moving and big, it isn't known for breaking new ground or grabbing headlines like so many of the high-tech firms with which it shares Northern Virginia. As the technology industry transformed the region's economy, First Virginia remained remarkably immutable.

"We spent two years deciding if we should add a check card," said Raymond E. Brann Jr., an executive vice president at First Virginia.

Microsoft Corp. founder Bill Gates once called banks "dinosaurs." Yet First Virginia is in a place few hot-shot tech firms could ever dream of touching. It employs more people in the Washington region than, for example, Nextel Communications Inc., the largest locally based tech company. First Virginia delves deep into the commercial life of the region, having financed countless businesses in its 50 years. It makes thousands of car loans every year and its branches adorn nearly every major commercial center in Northern Virginia.

First Virginia, led by longtime chief executive Barry J. Fitzpatrick, is like a boulder on a beach, letting the waves and the sand roll by, even during the worst storms.

"We don't jump on trends," Fitzpatrick said from his oversized dark brown leather chair in the penthouse office with a view of Tysons Corner and the Blue Ridge Mountains in the distance. "We wait. We watch."

From his perch, Fitzpatrick, 61, has watched the region's economy go through shakeout after shakeout. Banks got caught up in the real estate boom of the 1980s and then it crashed, taking many of his competitors with it. The federal government then cut back its workforce, while a wave of technology companies swept in and added employees. But now that bubble of overhyped stock prices for dot-coms and telecommunications companies with no profits has burst, too.