(February 5) – “When Carl Mason makes a trip to the bank, he has to buttress the floor so it won’t collapse, and sometimes he must blast through asbestos with a blowtorch,” writes Amy Merrick in today’s Wall Street Journal.

“To a demolition man, a bank vault can be downright demoralizing. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever made money on a vault,’ sighs Mr. Mason, a co-owner of Central Salvage Co. in Narberth, Pa. ‘They’re nightmares.’ “

“In a changing world, talk about a permanent fixture. Bolstered by tons of steel and concrete, the bank vault is nothing short of a fortress. As banks merge and close unprofitable branches, the vaults they vacate are becoming a weighty nuisance. More than 3,000 branches closed last year.”

“After a development group bought an old Mellon Bank branch in Philadelphia to convert into a Ritz-Carlton hotel, it spent three months and nearly $1 million to transform the main vault into a 6,000-square-foot ballroom. To remove the steel, workers torched out 3,000-pound sections in the summer of 1998, hauling them out on a tractor. Everything went smoothly until the vehicle fell through the floor.”

“A conference room of the Regent Hotel on Wall Street is a former bank vault. The building once housed the Merchants’ Exchange and the New York Stock and Exchange Board. “

“Vaults remain so intractable that moving them ‘hasn’t changed much since the pyramid days,’ says Glen Tucker, president of M. Lange Inc., a Bensenville, Ill., rigging company outside Chicago that specializes in transporting big, awkward objects, including an intact vintage automobile that had to be taken up a flight of stairs. And it sometimes comes to the rescue of other movers; one had dropped a safe weighing a ton down a flight of stairs.”

“The work might not seem worth the trouble, but architects love the opulence of old bank buildings. ‘Before banking became an electronicbusiness, customers kind of looked to architecture to reinforce a feeling of security,’ says Arthur Jones, an architect who helped convert a Philadelphia PSFS Bank into a Loews Hotel.”

“After renovating majestic old bank lobbies — and sometimes their vaults — hotels and restaurants get pretty elegant digs for themselves. In New Orleans, a restaurant called 56 Degrees decorated the vault it turned into one of its dining rooms with paintings of jewelry. The Regent Hotel on Wall Street, which took over the building that once housed the Merchants’ Exchange and the New York Stock and Exchange Board, has a conference room that had been a vault.”