The Glass Bank
March 21, 2017 3:04 PM   Subscribe

Those with a penchant for 1960's futuristic designs would find a lot to like in the building at 505 North Orlando Avenue. It's swooping glass walls on all four sides gave it a unique profile that seemed thematically linked to nearby Cape Canaveral. Yet this result of the Cocoa Beach development boom would lead a very strange existence for the next fifty years involving unfortunate elevator designs, the savings and loan crisis, hurricanes and a climactic suicide. Welcome to the Glass Bank.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI (14 comments total) 18 users marked this as a favorite
 
OMFG that penthouse was amazing.
posted by grumpybear69 at 3:09 PM on March 21, 2017 [1 favorite]


Oh my god it's a rusty venture nuclear bunker
posted by The Whelk at 3:37 PM on March 21, 2017 [4 favorites]


This area hasn't been a place for multi-story commercial buildings since the optimism of the Apollo program faded, and certainly not since Shuttle ended. There's also a 10-story office building built in 1965 that is now mostly-vacant with busted windows and a weird red light emanating from within.

Don't know what will eventually get built there, I guess whatever goes between a liquor store and a dentist's office at the entrance to a beach town. It was an eyesore, but it was an interesting eyesore. Quite a tale, too.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 3:47 PM on March 21, 2017


Oh wow, I actually remember that building from before the additions. I remember seeing it while down in Cocoa Beach with my Dad on business—we lived just north in Titusville. I was just a kid, and tagged along with him several times one summer on local business jaunts.

Man, reading that was a strange feeling. I saw the first photos and thought, I know that building, but it didn't look right and I couldn't place it. What a maddening sensation. Then I scrolled down and saw the older pics and a lot of old memories came back.

Florida, 1980, 10 years old, Mazda rotary hatchback (bright green!), hot summer sun, and at some point—that building. I can remember seeing it and thinking that the glass looked so out of place in the hot Florida sun, like greenhouse out of place.

Looks like the article implies both '81 and '83 for the updated exterior, but in either case I must have first seen it not that long before the exterior work. How strange. Even weirder, now that I think about it, I had to have seen it many times later, but the additions don't ring a bell. Oh well, all I can do is shrug at that. Stupid memory.

Never did get along that well with my dad, but those in particular are some good memories I hadn't thought of in a while, so thanks, random website!
posted by los pantalones del muerte at 4:09 PM on March 21, 2017 [2 favorites]


An odd story about an odd building remade by an odder man. But now I can only hope that when I am slated for demolition, someone writes "RIP" in red Solo cups in the fence surrounding my deteriorating body.
posted by ejs at 4:19 PM on March 21, 2017 [5 favorites]


John D. MacDonald to the courtesy phone
posted by thelonius at 4:20 PM on March 21, 2017 [1 favorite]


The original building was really wonderful.
posted by DarlingBri at 5:21 PM on March 21, 2017 [1 favorite]


Cocaine is a hell of a drug
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 7:18 PM on March 21, 2017


That's ... remarkable.
posted by rmd1023 at 7:57 PM on March 21, 2017


The Venture bunker, that is. The original building is quite nice looking, but the penthouse is a left turn into wtf.
posted by rmd1023 at 7:58 PM on March 21, 2017


That story took a lot of turns I wasn't expecting.
posted by Chrysostom at 9:43 PM on March 21, 2017 [1 favorite]


First-world problems are everyone's problems.
posted by Chitownfats at 2:31 AM on March 22, 2017


Calling the building as a whole brutalist is quite the stretch. There was still quite a lot of glass. On the whole, it wasn't much different than remodels of many 60s-era public buildings (like my elementary school) that had large expanses of glass that made the buildings impractical and unaffordable to heat and cool thanks to energy prices having quadrupled or more since they were built and before triple glazing, low-E coatings, and the like became reasonably priced.

See Oklahoma City's Jetsons/UFO bank for another example. The interior of that one was still pretty nice last I was in there. It was relatively unchanged, unlike the exterior.

The sad thing about the penthouse is that he could have put in fake windows for a few grand and it would have looked a lot better. The telephone exchange on a roof look didn't work with the rest of the building, even after the reskinning.
posted by wierdo at 7:21 AM on March 22, 2017


That article lost my goodwill at "brutalist stucco."
posted by sonascope at 7:44 AM on March 22, 2017


« Older Unhappily Ever After   |   it might just be the penguin idols Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments