Right in front of you, the Lewiston Trust and Safe Deposit Company has a dignified granite face, three stories tall, with striking round-arched windows on the second floor above a black-paneled retail space and a sharp, triangular marquee-just look for the elegant stonework sandwiched between its neighbors on Lisbon Street.
Picture it: it's 1898 on Lisbon Street, the heart of Lewiston's commercial world, clanging with streetcars and full of suited bankers dodging hat-wearing shoppers. This building-thanks to the brains of the local dream team, Coombs, Gibbs & Wilkinson-was the vault of Lewiston’s fortunes. Its ashlar granite façade, quoined corners, and stately metal cornice showed off the city’s ambition. Marble stairs led anxious customers to do business or, perhaps, nervously check if their coins and papers were still safe. It stayed busy through the Roaring Twenties, until the Lewiston Trust Company needed bigger digs and skipped right across the street, leaving this stone beauty behind.
Enter W. Grant and his clothing shop in 1926. Suddenly, the polished banker’s retreat had to embrace mannequins in snappy suits and ties-a fashion swap, you might say, rather than a bank heist. The ground floor transformed into a showcase for sharp shirts under that modern, black-accented entrance. But even with a parade of new retail faces, the marble floors, elegant staircases, and even the old bank president’s splendid wood-paneled office upstairs stubbornly stayed put, as if expecting a banker to walk back in at any minute.
Through the decades, and even now, the building keeps welcoming shoppers and tenants, wearing its original architecture almost completely intact. So next time you’re shopping here, just imagine those marble floors echoing with the clip-clop of bankers… or maybe a misplaced sock from Grant's Clothing rolling through history.
