When completed, the four-
story historian Sharon Gregor in 2010, and ''Crain's Cleveland Business'' magazine in 2015. and Litt described it as such in 1997. The building was widely praised, then and now, as "an ingenious solution to problems posed by an irregular site".
Exterior and superstructure The exterior of the structure is made of white
granite from the North Jay Granite Company, and quarried near
Jay, Maine. The site is not square, due to the
acute angle at which Euclid Avenue intersects with E. 9th Street. To accommodate the site, Post created a total of 13
bays Intricate embossed bronze
brackets supported the second-floor balcony. Seven assistants worked on the sculpture, with Bitter supervising the roughing out but doing the final sculpting himself. The work was unveiled on October 8, 1907. The work was considered a turning point in Bitter's career, when he matured from an over-reliance on classicism and began developing his own style. The rotunda's dome has an unusual number of segments (13), due to the acute angle of the building site. Historians Sharon Gregor and G. E. Kidder Smith, however, say it is only in the style of Tiffany. Sandvick Architects, consultant to the Geis Cos. on the renovation, said in 2013 that there was no documentary evidence to attribute the dome to Tiffany. To protect the stained glass dome, a dome of wire-mesh reinforced glass was installed above the inner dome.
Rotunda The rotunda stands above a
five-sided room. Each of the walls in the room are of a different size. The interior walls of the rotunda were finished in white
marble and
bronze capitals, light fixtures, railings, and other elements. The interior also featured columns clad in white marble, and the
drum supporting the dome was decorated with carved marble
garlands, dyed in pastel colors and gilded with bronze. the work featured the bank's name, a bag of money, a key, and an attorney's seal—all symbols of banking. The second floor (which had high ceilings) The bank had four vaults: The main vault, safe deposit box vault, and storage vaults for
fur clothing and
household silver. The main vault was in size. Its walls were
structural steel plate ("armor"), encased in of concrete. The steel was provided by the
Carnegie Steel Company. The vault door was manufactured by the L. H. Miller Safe and Iron Works of
Baltimore.
Murals The drum of the building was supported by
arches supported by the interior columns. The tympanum framed by these arches were decorated by murals designed and painted by
Francis David Millet. The Cleveland Trust Company hired Millet some time in the fall of 1908. Millet sketched out various designs for the murals until he developed a design he liked. Then a full-size "cartoon" (black and white line drawing) of the sketch was put in place in the tympanum to ensure that the design worked visually. After adjusting the design as needed, Millet sketched and then painted 13 smaller versions of the murals, each of them about in height and in width. Work on the draft paintings at Millet's Forest Hill studio in the
Georgetown neighborhood of
Washington, D.C., was under way by at least late March 1909. These small paintings were scaled up and transferred to
manila paper using
charcoal sticks. These scaled-up versions were corrected (if needed), and restudied in place in the tympanum. By late May, Millet was still at work adjusting the murals and finishing the final drafts. Work on the murals was complete by June 5, 1909. During this time, they were viewed by President
William Howard Taft, various officials of the federal government, and members of the diplomatic corps. The final works were again transferred to manila paper using charcoal sticks, and the manila drawings used to transfer the design to canvas which was then affixed to the wall. Millet and three assistants spent a year transferring Millet's designs to the walls, work which was completed in late December 1909 or early January 1910. Titled
The Development of Civilization in America, the paintings include: "The Norse Discoverers", "The Puritans", "Exploration By Land", "LaSalle on Lake Erie", "Father Hennepin at Niagara Falls", "Exploration By Water", "Migration", "Buying Land From the Indians", "Surveying the Site of Cleveland", "Felling the Timber", "Building the Log Cabin", "Plowing the Clearing", and "Gathering the Harvest". A
pneumatic tube system ran throughout the Cleveland Trust Company Building, connecting tellers to bookkeepers and each department. A
telautograph was also located in each department. This device enabled a handwritten message to be reproduced at the receiving station. The building also had 76 telephones (quite a large number for the era), and two private telephone exchanges in the building to accommodate telephone traffic. The building also had a
central vacuum cleaner system and a primitive
air conditioning system known as "
artificial ventilation" were built into the plaster-coated columns. ==History==