With the Demise of Riggs Bank, All That's Left Is Jangling Change
By David Montgomery
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 16, 2005
One last thing to say about Riggs Bank -- vanished now, after revelations of alleged money laundering, catering to dictators and lavish spending on corporate jets: It had a certain essential bankness that is almost extinct. That may have been its real problem.
Riggs was the bank as Greek Temple, the bank as Egyptian Tomb. The four-story limestone and granite facades looked like the Parthenon. Inside were thick rugs and antique furniture and quiet jazz serenading the hush. Riggs was the building that many people still believe, mistakenly, is pictured on the back of the $10 bill. (No, that view of the Treasury Building is what you see as you descend, with your hand-tooled leather business folio, from Riggs's Corcoran branch on Pennsylvania Avenue.) A Riggs branch looked like a competitor's headquarters. Fat Ionic pillars supported friezes with giant bronze letters that announced, for example, "Park Road Branch Building." Like the calligraphy on invitations to the White House, Riggs -- where Abraham Lincoln himself banked -- did not abbreviate.
Grandly as it carried itself, Riggs was also home. It was Washington's institution, one of the last local banks. It was as formal as an oil portrait -- but an oil portrait of your own ancestor.
As of this morning, Riggs is extinct, another blow to bankness and local pride. Riggs branches closed Friday and reopen today as units of PNC Bank. The name Riggs, that of a real person (George Washington Riggs, 1813-1881, born on the Fourth of July in Georgetown, of the Montgomery County Riggses, the Riggs Road Riggses), is being replaced by a corporate abstraction (PNC descends from the 1982 union of Pittsburgh National Corp. and Provident National Corp.). The Riggs corporate symbol of the eagle is being effaced by a geometric whirl that resembles a hubcap.
Where does this leave us -- Riggs customers or not -- and our money, and the eternal Bank of our imaginations?
"An out-of-town bank acquiring Riggs feels like something hollow at the center: just another bank," says Derek van Bever, a manager at a downtown research company, who has been a Riggs customer for about half his life, since his first job out of college. "To me a bank is the center of your transactional life, so it has a hometown and local feel to it. It's a place you want to feel is within arm's reach. . . . You can't acquire Riggs and acquire that association."
But listen to the Rev. Thomas Spears, 80, doing a little business last week at the Riggs branch in Anacostia, near where he lives. Spears was 12 when he cracked open his elephant-shaped bank. Spears deposited $5 in the Anacostia Bank. It felt like home. He grew up to become a bookbinder for the Government Printing Office and put his savings in the same bank. Then in 1960, Anacostia Bank was bought by National Bank of Washington. In 1990, Riggs gobbled up NBW. Now Spears is watching his bank assume its fourth name.
He shrugs at the old brick building across the street from the Riggs branch. The facade of that building, where 68 years ago he carried his $5, is still inscribed "Anacostia Bank." Today it houses a nonprofit.
"Different name . . . it don't make no difference," Spears says. "It's just a place where, if they rob your house, they won't get what little change you have."
Van Bever and Spears represent positions at either end of the spectrum of how we conceive of our relationships with our banks. There are those who feel a romantic, sentimental, gut-level affection for their banks, and those who feel no particular loyalty so long as the service is competent, more or less.
Beginning about 30 years ago, as local banks disappeared and new rules allowed out-of-town behemoths to behave less like unique institutions and more like generic financial services centers, it got really hard to hang on to the old romance.
This is what author Martin Mayer, who wrote "The Bankers: The Next Generation" (1997), has called the transformation of banks "from an institution to a business."
Banks used to be institutions; now they are just another business -- and Riggs died before it made the transition.
You can see the change in the architecture. The suburban branches of Riggs's competitors have migrated to the edges of shopping plazas, close to the road, with a sea of parking between them and the stores. They are tiny, low-slung, interspersed with fast-food restaurants, which also like being near roads. The banks seem to have borrowed their look from the restaurants. A Wachovia on Oxon Hill Road in Oxon Hill has a green roof and pale pink walls and is not so much neoclassical as neo-taco stand. A Columbia Bank branch on Old Branch Avenue in Clinton is white and silver with an overhanging roof, a look that shouts: ice cream!
Among bankers who hankered to be modern businessmen, "there was a feeling . . . that the monumental, the bank as a temple, as a vault and so forth, really wasn't the optimal thing, and was off-putting, actually," says Richard Longstreth, a professor of American studies at George Washington University who has studied bank architecture. He dates the beginning of the change as far back as the late 1930s. "It's the idea of the bank being modern and progressive and forward-looking and efficient."
These facilities have elaborate carports and multiple drive-through lanes. An Industrial Bank branch in Oxon Hill shares a parking lot entrance with a Wendy's pick-up window.
"Banking is changing along with society," says Tracey Mills, spokeswoman for the American Bankers Association. "We're a less formal, buttoned-up customer, and we're more relaxed. How do you feel walking into the Parthenon in flip-flops with your Starbucks mocha latte?"
The new model for a bank, Mills says, is "the look and feel of retail stores." The idea, she says, is "to make banking less an outside part of your life and more part of your lifestyle."
Riggs was slow to attempt to join this trend. It did not quickly exploit new rules in the 1980s allowing interstate branches. Bank analysts say it was a strategic blunder. When Riggs did venture into the suburbs, it did so primly, without losing its expensive tastes and institutional style. A Riggs customer did not smell the drumsticks frying next door at Bojangles', or mistake her bank for a hamburger joint. The Riggs in Clinton resembles a two-story brick house with pitched roof and pretty red trim; the inside looks like a living room. The Riggs in Greenbelt is a small postmodern temple.
Inside the neo-fast-food competitors last week, a greeter met you at the door and steered you promptly to your destination. That personal touch is good for business, and it deters would-be robbers. Inside the Riggses, however, no one met you at the door. You wandered into your transaction.
During their last week as Riggs customers, people pondered this evolution, even as they worried more immediately whether their PNC cash cards would work. Around them, the drama of dissolving identity was playing out like a scene change in a theater. Temporary Riggs decals covered new orange PNC signs. On the cornice of the Dupont branch, white Riggs banners flapped in the wind, ineffectively concealing glimpses of soon-to-be-unveiled giant bronze letters inscribing PNC Bank. The bronze Riggs was already gone, but the name persisted as a sooty outline.
"While the bank had problems, I've stuck with it," says Sally Watkins, a property manager in Alexandria with an account since the 1960s. "The fact that Riggs was a D.C. institution was very important to me." She was loyal even though she knew at times competitors might have provided better service or rates. Now that her bank is named PNC, it will have to work harder. "Definitely I would change my bank now" if a better option presented itself, she says, "whereas I wouldn't before because of what it was."
Riggs carried itself like an institution, but that didn't mean it was a very good bank.
"Riggs feels old, it feels solid, it feels stable," says Vincent Thomy, a psychologist who has been a customer since the 1960s, now banking at the Georgetown branch. "They seemed like everything a bank should be."
Yet the image was just a facade, he says. Over the years, Riggs took customers for granted and offered indifferent service, he says.
Serving as executor of a friend's estate, he had some dealings with Citibank. "They were so far superior," Thomy says. "It was like they were running a business. Here, it was mom and pop."
Inertia kept him from moving his account. (Bank customer inertia is endemic. Paul Nadler, a business professor emeritus at Rutgers University, likes to say a bank can get by so long as its customers are merely "sullen, but not mutinous.")
Recently, as Riggs scrambled to get back in the game, it was suddenly solicitous again. Out of the blue, Thomy got a call from a vice president, just checking up.
"PNC, it means nothing," Thomy says. "Riggs had some meaning attached to it -- whether or not it was real meaning."
But if PNC is "very service-oriented, that will be an improvement," Thomy adds. "I could not take the Riggs image to the bank. I couldn't spend it."
At the Dupont branch, LaShann Taylor, 25, says she opened her Riggs account just months ago. She says she was lured because Riggs was offering a promotional $25 bonus for new accounts, plus two free books of checks.
But now she is feeling tempted by Bank of America because its check cards carry customers' pictures. Taylor thinks this feature might mean fewer requests for her identification when she makes purchases. For her, a bank is the sum of its promotions.
In recent years Riggs created a new model for its branches, no longer the bank as temple, but the bank as Internet cafe. Examples are at Pennsylvania Avenue and 20th Street NW, where an interior glass door connects the bank to a Starbucks; and at Royal and King streets in Alexandria.
There are laptops for customers, flat-screen monitors showing CNN, copies of the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal, digital clocks keeping time in London and Los Angeles. The old Riggs facade of pillars and Parthenon pediment are reduced to decorative frames for ATMs.
The new branches pleased some Riggs customers, according to the bank, but a few said in interviews that it just wasn't the old Riggs.
Nowadays the identities of monumental institutions are changed willy-nilly. Successors crawl into the old buildings like hermit crabs. The names of the departed are inscribed on downtown cornices like headstones: National Metropolitan Bank on 15th Street NW. Farmers & Mechanic National Bank on the Riggs -- er, the PNC -- branch at Wisconsin Avenue and M Street NW. Traces of American Security Bank are left in the granite though its name was bronzed over by Bank of America on Pennsylvania Avenue NW.
After enough cycles of rise and fall, you realize the only constant is your money.
A few years ago, Spears, once the boy with $5 in an elephant bank, took a look around and uttered a heretical thought to his friends, he remembers: " 'Now that we got used to Riggs, I wonder who is going to buy Riggs out?'
"Everybody looked at me. They laughed. 'Listen to the old man trying to start something.' . . .
"Now it's PNC from Pittsburgh. Somebody will buy them out. That's progress."
