By Terence O'Hara
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 12, 2005

PNC Bank this week formed an in-house task force to find a permanent place for one of Riggs Bank's most important assets: its history.

First on the list of artifacts is arguably one of the most historic bank structures in the country: the Corcoran branch on Pennsylvania Avenue NW, down the street from the White House and facing the U.S. Treasury.

"We have no preconceived notion of what to do" with the branch, said Michael N. Harreld, Washington's regional president for PNC Bank, the Pittsburgh company that takes over Riggs tomorrow. "My undergraduate was in history, and I'm extraordinarily sensitive to Riggs history. We are determined to do the appropriate thing with it."

Harreld appointed John R. Tydings, former head of the Greater Washington Board of Trade, and retired Riggs private banking official Henry Dudley to lead a group of PNC employees to come up with recommendations by the end of the summer. The group will also recommend possible disposition of Riggs's extensive collection of historic documents and other artifacts.

For much of its history since its founding in 1836 by William W. Corcoran, Riggs has had close ties to the federal government and has served hundreds of prominent Washington citizens and political leaders, including dozens of U.S. presidents. (The bank is named after a partner who joined Corcoran in 1840, George Washington Riggs.) The bank employs a part-time professional archivist to maintain its collection, which includes handwritten account instructions from Abraham Lincoln and Richard Nixon's canceled checks.

The Corcoran building is the most public representation of Riggs's history, which includes its role in amassing $7.2 million in gold bullion for the U.S. government's purchase of Alaska. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, it is a classical-revivalist, white granite building with ionic columns, built in 1899. Its immaculately preserved interior, with a four-story vaulted center supported by marble columns, makes it more a temple to faded patrician banking power than a modern bank branch.

It's also inside the security bubble surrounding the White House, which means using it as a full-service bank branch isn't exactly economical. It has no parking, no drive-in teller. While it has a few teller windows and customer-service representatives, most of its space is unused. "It's a desert," said one Riggs executive. The room that has perhaps been the most used in recent years is the third-floor board room, considered one of the most impressive in Washington.

Harreld said he wants to "optimize" the Corcoran facility. Options would include partnering with a historical preservation group, such as a museum, to make the building a more integral part of the historic area surrounding the White House.

"We're not in the business of maintaining a house museum," Harreld said. "What we're trying to find is some medium ground, to maintain it in a way that it can be a branch, a repository for Riggs history and an entertainment facility."

One thing that is not under consideration is selling it, nor any of the other historical materials in Riggs's collection.

"Riggs is a unique institution," Harreld said. "There aren't many institutions that are in American history books, but this is one. Whatever we do, it will be thoughtful and appropriate."

Since Joe L. Allbritton bought control of the bank in 1981, Riggs has lavished money and attention on its old D.C. branches, including the Corcoran branch, its Mt. Pleasant branch on 14th Street NW and the landmark 1922 gold-leaf-domed former headquarters of Farmers & Mechanics National Bank at Wisconsin Avenue and M Street NW in Georgetown. The Corcoran branch was meticulously renovated in 1986.

The Corcoran branch is one of only two banks with an address in the 1500 block of Pennsylvania Avenue. The other is the old American Security Bank building next door, now the regional headquarters of Bank of America. Unlike the Riggs branch, however, the Bank of America facility is adjacent to the bank's main office building, and departments such as trust, private banking and wealth management use the branch to conduct transactions.

"We have the benefit of being attached to an office building," said William Couper, greater Washington president of Bank of America. "We have thought of making additional uses of the branch over time, including using it as a place to display historical items."

But Couper admitted that the corner of 15th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue is not the high-traffic area it once was. The corner was the center of Washington's financial district until the 1970s. In the 1970s, Couper was manager of the American Security branch there. "It used to be really busy, particularly on Garfinkels payday," he said.

Couper acknowledged that the bank buildings on that corner, which include the old NS&T building (now SunTrust), are as much museum pieces as bank branches.

"As you build these big [bank] chains, you just don't need that physical representation of stability like you once saw," he said.

"But we love to show it off."