The Trenton Times published the following article on May 11, 2013. To read the full article, click here.

Wells Fargo moves its downtown Trenton branch from landmark West State Street building

By Erin Duffy/The Times of Trenton 
on May 11, 2013 at 7:24 AM

TRENTON — Wells Fargo will be moving one of its downtown Trenton branches across the street in coming months, a spokesman said yesterday.

The move will allow the bank to downsize into a smaller rental space, but the move will leave the branch building at 1 W. State Street, a landmark stone building at the corner of West State and Warren streets, vacant by the end of the year.

The bank branch and its 15 employees will move just down the block to the Capital Plaza building at 50 E. State Street, Wells Fargo spokesman Kevin Friedlander said yesterday.

“We are moving to a space that better meets our long-term needs,” he said.

The branch’s lease for the West State Street building expires later this year. Friedlander said the 10,000-square foot, first-floor space is just too big for the bank. The new Capital Plaza measures just 2,800 square feet and will include space for a 24-hour ATM, a feature missing from the West State Street branch.

“The trend in the banking industry is smaller spaces,” Friedlander said. “We don’t need all that square footage.”

He didn’t know when the move would occur, saying just that it would happen sometime before the end of the year.

The West State Street building the bank is leaving is owned by Trenton developer Ron Berman.

In March, the state Schools Development Authority announced it would move out of its six floors in the building and lease space in another downtown building on East Front Street that is, coincidentally, being vacated by Wells Fargo later this summer. Wells Fargo is moving its East Front Street regional headquarters office to the Carnegie Center in West Windsor.

With the departures of both the Wells Fargo branch and the SDA offices, the West State Street building will be completely vacant, a scenario Berman bemoaned last February when he was trying to convince the SDA to stay.

He did not return a call for comment yesterday.

“If you leave to go a couple blocks somewhere else it’s normally not such a big deal, but in this instance it’s very clear because of the economy and where we are in the city of Trenton, this building will be quite vacant and it will not be preserved,” Berman said in March at an SDA hearing. “The question of preserving the facility is an important one.”

The neoclassical building, featured on Trenton’s list of historic landmarks, is located at the so-called “corner historic” and was opened in 1930 as a bank. It has marble floors, antique fixtures, soaring ceilings and an N.C. Wyeth mural that portrays George Washington riding through Trenton on the way to his first presidential inauguration. Before it was a bank, that corner served as an 18th century tavern and the site of a 1784 meeting of the Continental Congress.

The painting belongs to Wells Fargo and will remain in Trenton, Friedlander said.
“We’ll work to find a place where we can loan it to and make sure it’s in a highly visible place,” he said. “We know this is an important Trenton mural and we want to ensure it remains in the city.”