File:Oswego State Downtown - fmr First National Bank of Oswego, Marine Midland Bank West Side Branch - Oswego, New York - 20210221.jpg

English: Oswego State Downtown, 186 West First Street at Bridge Street, Oswego, New York, February 2021. Built in 1910-11 to a design by Mowbray & Uffinger - a New York City architectural firm well known for their work in designing bank buildings and engineering vaults - this is a fine example of the High Classical architecture typically employed at the time in such buildings. The floor-to-ceiling windows that dominate the façade of the building furnish a spacious ambience and plenty of natural lighting to the interior spaces; these are flanked consecutively by pairs of engaged Doric columns and pilaster strips, and topped by an entablature where Greek-style triglyphs are a predominating ornamental element. Paired side entrances facing Bridge Street are topped by smaller, ancone-supported entablatures. It was noted at the time of the building's opening that the foundation was solid enough to allow for the future addition of as many as four floors to the top of the building; ultimately this was not done, and indeed the top floor, which once featured an engaged pediment with a raking dentil row to match the one on the modern-day roofline as well as decorative balustrades on the side elevation, was removed some time later. The First National Bank of Oswego was organized in 1864 and moved ten years later to an earlier building on the same location as this one in the heart of the city's business district. The bank prospered, counting future U.S. Congressman Luther Mott among its executives, and rode out the Great Depression thanks to its October 1929 merger with rival Second National Bank. The newly renamed First and Second National Bank and its successor organization, Oswego County National Bank, continued to maintain its offices here, and the building served as a branch location of Marine Midland Bank from its 1953 purchase of the latter until 1990. The building now houses Oswego State Downtown, an art gallery connected with the local branch of the State University of New York.