Colonial Trust

The financial institution behind this temple facade is far bigger than it first appears. Inside the entrance, it stretches all the way through the block to the next street 250 feet away, creating what was once called the world’s longest banking hall.

The doors opposite exit through a nearly identical temple front, designed by the same architect, Frederick Osterling. Osterling also designed a third entrance fronting on Wood Street more than 20 years after he did the original entrances. The resulting T-shaped complex is often bathed in sunlight shining through its skylighted ceilings 42 feet high.

The financial institution that operated here was organized in 1902. Before its second anniversary it had absorbed 10 other banks and trust companies. It eventually succumbed to the same fate, and for a time the property was vacant. After an unsuccessful attempt to turn it into a mall called the Bank Center, it was purchased by Point Park University and converted into the main library and other offices and classrooms.

The buildings to the left of the entrance were originally for real estate brokers. One has decorative numbers above the doorways using the city’s original street numbering, which was replaced during the 1890s.

Joshua Rhodes

An immigrant who came from London with his family as a boy, Colonial Trust founder Joshua Rhodes persisted through a sequence of business fits and starts before he finally enjoyed success. As a young man he opened a grocery store, only to see it burn down in the 1845 fire that destroyed much of the city. He also had a brewery business that failed, which forced him to step away from the presidency of a promising new industrial railroad he had been chosen to head, the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie.

Rhodes next bought an iron pipe mill, only to give up on it and try a second pipe mill that he outfitted with new machinery. That one, the Pennsylvania Tube Works, succeeded. Rhodes also was an organizer and early investor in the city’s first streetcar line on Penn Avenue.