National Register Listing

First National Bank Building

217-233 Central Ave., NW, Albuquerque, NM

The First National Bank Building is primarily important for its architecture, which is enhanced by its commanding physical setting in downtown Albuquerque, but the structure also has significance as the home for over fifty years of Albuquerque's first bank, and of a great deal of the city's and region's financial history.

Joshua Raynolds and his brother Jefferson began their careers as bankers in Pueblo and Trinidad, Colorado; in 1876, moving south, they opened the Central Bank in Las Vegas, New Mexico, with another brother, Frederick. In 1878, two years before the Santa Fe Railroad arrived in Albuquerque, the Raynolds brothers established the Central Bank of Albuquerque in a still-existing one-story adobe building on the southwest corner of old Town Plaza. When the railroad line was laid one-and-a-half miles to the east of the original settlement of Albuquerque, now known as Old Town, a New Town grew up around the tracks, and the Raynolds brothers followed the general move to the east, establishing the Central Bank in a two-story ornate Victorian brick building (now demolished) at the northwest corner of Second and Gold.

By 1884, the brothers were able to buy out the First National Bank of Albuquerque and assume its name, and by 1902 they had extended the family business into El Paso. Joshua Raynolds, who became president of the bank in 1902, also assumed the presidency of the locally based Occidental Life Insurance Company (see Occidental Life Insurance Building, National Register, 1-30-78). Joshua Raynolds died in 1916, and his place as bank president was taken by his son, John Madison Raynolds, under whose authority the First National Bank Building was constructed.
Trost and Trost, who had designed the Occidental Life Insurance Building (and an earlier home for Occidental Life, now demolished) for Raynolds, were chosen as the building's architects at a time when they were also designing the very different Pueblo Revival facade of the downtown Franciscan Hotel (now demolished). Sumner Sollitt Company is listed as the contractor in the 1922 building permit, in which construction costs are estimated at $434,000.

J.M. Raynold's satisfaction with the building's design is made evident in a May 20, 1924 letter to the architectural firm:

Before starting to plan our building, we consulted a number of architects, local as well as certain architects who make a specialty of bank buildings in New York City. We never had any success with any of them except Trost and Trost, who seemed to catch our ideas of what kind of a building we wanted and what kind of a banking room we wanted, and put them on paper immediately.

Local significance of the building:
Listed in National Register of Historic Places in 1979.