The handsome three-story commercial structure at 738 Seneca, now vacant but secured, was the longtime home of the Hydraulics branch of the Marine Trust Bank, which occupied the building in 1919. The building, constructed in 1900 to house Henry Schaefer’s grocery, was designed by architect Joseph J. W. Bradney. Architecture firm Mann & Cook headed up the building’s expansion in 1919 when Marine Trust moved to into its first story, and in 1954 the storefront was re-clad in polished stone and a bay window on the second story was removed. For years, a billboard Marine Trust installed in 1927 on top of the building was a landmark of its own accord.

The branch’s establishment at 738 Seneca in 1919 was no coincidence. John D. Larkin, president and founder of the Larkin Company, was also on the board of Marine Trust Bank and almost certainly had a hand in this choice of location to provide an amenity for factory workers and shoppers at the famed Larkin Store. The bank was a fixture in the neighborhood into the 1990s, though under different names. Marine Trust became Marine Midland in the 1960s and then became HSBC in the 1990s.

The former bank branch, no longer serving a large factory and residential base in the neighborhood, was one of the last remaining community amenities to disappear in the 1990s. Forty years earlier the four-block strip of Seneca was filled with taverns, restaurants, groceries, barber shops, drug stores, even a movie theater and a bowling alley. Though not one remains, many of the character buildings that housed them do – establishing conditions for a future revival.

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The joint conceptual and design element of the handball hall and the Zamet Centre are ‘ribbons’ stretching in a north-south direction, simultaneously functioning as an architectural design element of the objects and as a zoning element which forms a public square and a link between the north – park-school and the south – the street. One third of the hall’s volume is built into the terrain, and the building with its public and service facilities has been completely integrated into the terrain, i.e. it creates it with its ‘ribbons’.

The public space on the roof is not only a feature of the building in the business part of the centre, but the roof of the hall is also used as a kind of an extension of the park situated to the north of the hall. The hall has been designed for major international sports competitions, in compliance with state-of-the-art world sports standards. The design of the hall has been conceived as a very flexible space.

The auditorium has been designed as a system with telescopic stands, which open and adapt to the kind of competition and the number of spectators; at major competitions 2100 spectators have seating places by opening all the stands. The architecture of public facilities, the shopping centre, the library and the local authority stands out in the topography of the terrain, connecting the square in front of the hall and in front of the school and tries to integrate into the overall existing context of western Zamet.

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