On your left, look for the low building of long, thin Roman brick on a pink granite base, capped by a red-tile peaked roof and marked by a row of tall brick piers rising like sentries.
This is Old Second National Bank, and it plays a very confident little trick. Prairie School design usually spreads out low and wide, hugging the ground, but George Grant Elmslie, designing here in nineteen twenty-four near the end of his career, pushed that style upward. So instead of pure horizontals, you get a bank that stands up straight... polite, composed, and just a touch theatrical.
That mood came straight from William George, the bank president who led Old Second from eighteen ninety-five to nineteen thirty-three. He wanted a building that would grow old with grace and still announce that Aurora meant business. Not just a storefront for money... a public performance of steadiness.
Elmslie didn’t do it alone. He brought in sculptors Emil Settler and Kristian Schneider, plus muralist John Warner Norton. On the south side, the ornament gathers most densely, and the narrow terra-cotta trim - baked clay shaped into decoration - follows the gable like a careful signature. If you check the image in the app, you can catch those details more clearly.
And here’s the sly part: this bank was never only about deposits and ledgers. It held a two-hundred-seat auditorium in the basement, offices on the third floor, and a private club on the fourth and fifth floors. In other words, local business had grown up. It wanted finance, status, meetings, speeches, and a place to mingle after the counters closed.
Even after later interior changes, Norton’s three-panel mural of Aurora in the eighteen thirties stayed on the north wall, keeping the city’s origin story inside a modern bank. In nineteen eighty, architects restored the building and added a north office wing so it could keep serving the city, not freeze into a monument. Then around two thousand, crews repaired damaged terra cotta piece by piece, proving William George’s gamble might actually work.
And now, from money trying to look permanent, we slide into an older downtown art: welcoming travelers. The Galena Hotel is right here. If you want to return later, the bank generally keeps weekday hours from nine to five, a short Saturday morning schedule, and closes on Sunday.
