The several thousand people of the Occupy Portland protest who filled Pioneer Square today to protest the antics of Wall Street and the nation's principal banks likely viewed their location as the block between Nordstrom on the west and the Pioneer Court House on the east. Observers with a knack for historical irony might look not west and east, but north and south. To the north stands what is now called the American Bank Building, but was originally the Northwestern Bank Building, housing the eponymous bank from shortly after its opening in 1913 until its collapse on Tuesday, March 29, 1927, following a weekend when telephoned rumors led to a massive run on the bank on March 28. To the south stands the former home of Pacific First Federal Savings Bank, purchased in 1993 by Washington Mutual, which after a decade of bloat and a series of misguided acquisitions was seized by the federal government three years ago September and pushed into the waiting hands of JPMorgan Chase.
So even as the crowd protested the abuses of the present, they were shadowed by the relics of the past. Protestor, si monumentum requiris, circumspice.