Wilhelm: Downtown saw big changes with the opera house demolition
Roy Wilhelm
With the sale of the US Bank building on the northwest corner of State and Arch streets, Fremonters are watching to see how the site changes.
Whatever, the change certainly won’t be as dramatic as the one that took place in the middle of the 20th century.
It was in 1958 that the beautiful old Opera House was razed to make way for the new Liberty National Bank building. The new bank building for the merged Liberty and National banks was certainly different than the structure that had been one of the city’s beautiful landmarks, one that reportedly was considered by many to be the “finest structure of its kind between Cleveland and Toledo.” A series of banks eventually followed Liberty National, with US Bank being the last prior to the financial institution’s closing of that office.