Albert Pissis designed this superb bank building, the oldest "temple" bank in San Francisco and one of the best.

It has long been abandoned and stands in a stretch of Market Street that has been blighted for decades. It still wears the shamrock green Hibernia Bank name, even though Hibernia Bank was acquired by Security Pacific in 1988 and ceased to exist after more that 150 years in San Francisco. Security Pacific, in turn, was acquired by the ever voracious Bank of America four years later, and that, in a nutshell, is how banks became too big to fail.

Hibernia Bank's fifteen minutes of national fame occurred in 1974 when the Symbionese Liberation Army and Patty Hearst robbed the branch in San Francisco's Sunset District.