Turns out my friend Denise worked here for Merabank as a teller. It was her first real job. She described the main circular banking floor as laid with white marble, drenched in sunlight, cool and quiet and secure and formal. Potted plants and Sputnik-style light fixtures. As a nervous young woman she felt on display, out on stage in this round building with no corners to hide in. And she half-remembered a colorful mural ("please tell me I'm not crazy").

Another former employee, Lisa, described that same humming quiet. Their customer demographic skewed elderly and rich, dressed for proper old-fashioned banking, clutching their deposit slips and clipping across that white marble in high heels. One of her male bosses taught her how to hypnotize herself in this bank, simply to pass the time, and to this day Lisa can evoke that disorienting circular all-white bank interior as a mental borderland between altered consciousness and terrible boredom.

Which is too bad.

It was built as a branch of First Federal Savings & Loan in 1964. The architect was Edward Varney. By 1964 Varney had built in Phoenix for over twenty years with the original Sun Devil Stadium, the old Federal Courthouse, and the old Valley Ho Resort in Scottsdale under his belt, among many other landmarks.

Through an accident of history, because of dry air and benign ignorance, Phoenix is blessed with a series of beautiful mid-Century branch banks and square miles of crisp mid-Century housing stock. This is our architectural legacy. Boston has Copley Square; we have this. These banks were constructed during the Phoenician boom, their outlandish signs and playful shapes competing to be noticed through windshields. This circular plan provided a good profile from multiple directions.

So First Federal morphed into Merabank in the 1980s. Lisa's experiments in altered Merabank consciousness came to an end in 1990, when she was fired along with everybody else. Merabank was one of the biggest S&L failures in the country, and its assets were seized by the Resolution Trust Corporation. The building was used as the Washburn Piano showroom for a few years, which is how many Phoenicians know it. The pianos rolled out in 2005. It's now sealed by the city and standing empty.

And yes, there was once a mural.

When Washburn Piano vacated, somebody called an art historian called Donna Reiner to have a look at the mural. She identified it as the work of Jay Datus, an important Arizona artist and teacher. (She is his biographer, so she ought to know.) When asked about Datus's distinguishing characteristic as an artist, Reiner paused and said, "Accuracy." His murals in the Arizona State Library, for instance, are comparable to WPA stuff, and the product of three or four years of exhaustive research into Native American history and culture and wardrobe and symbolism.

To her credit Reiner paid to have the mural photographed, convinced the Texan developer to cooperate with removing it, found it a home, and invited Hopi representatives down to judge its historical accuracy. They gave it an examination and said, oh yes, it's powerfully accurate, so accurate we'd prefer you not show it to anybody, especially children. It refers to a historic event that the Hopi don't like to dwell on, and refers to a location, up towards Four Corners, that's been taken off the map.

Speaking of being wiped off the map, at some point in the near future this little bank is going to be violently shoved over by a bulldozer, its curvatures folded and snapped, dismembered, and hauled away in pieces. I wonder if they're going to remove the light fixtures and the white marble. They say it might be replaced with a bank. Yeah, it's a good corner for a bank.

So this is how the mezzanine worked with the main floor space. There's no doubt that the mural dominates the central space and would have (in the bank days) probably stood behind the tellers.

The shadows, of course, are painted on, producing a trompe l'oeil effect, an immediacy, and a sort of self-referential meta thing going on which clearly attributes the work to Native Americans rather than Datus himself. And it also leverages the architectural space in a sophisticated way. (This is also true of Datus's work at the Arizona State Library, the Paegant of Progress, where the pinnacle of progress is represented by a 'modern' couple outfitted in white linen and stepping forward onto the architectural pediment immediately below them, as if stepping into the room.)

Dig the parrot.

The side panels, according to Donna, are not recognizably the work of Jay Datus himself. But that's the wonderful thing about having students and graduate students.

These photos are the work of Ken Howie of Ken Howie Studios, Tempe, Arizona, and are reproduced here by Donna's kind permission.