You've driven by an old official-looking building on Greene Street dozens of times without noticing it. People used to call it "the bank" because it once resembled one. It was the office/research center/auditorium of the former Remington Rand (originally Safe Cabinet Company) plant. It, and the sprawling four story brick and glass facility, were once the bustling center of a leading national brand of office equipment.
The Safe Cabinet Company made fireproof safes and file cabinets. It had an unlikely beginning: a Methodist minister named Willis V. Dick founded the company in 1905. He saw a need for a storage product to organize and protect valuable documents, such as those of his church. Though designed for historical records, there was soon wide commercial office demand. Severe fires were more common a century ago with less advanced building codes, construction methods, and fire fighting equipment. Companies wanted the protection – from fire and building collapse - that the Safe Cabinet provided.
The founder's son, R. H. Dick, worked with New York City firefighters to learn more about the characteristics of structure fires. The company installed a laboratory to heat-test the safes. Soon their product could withstand an hour of extreme heat and survive a fall of three stories if the burning building collapsed. Underwriters Laboratories certified the safe cabinets as effective in withstanding heat up to 2,000 degrees F. and impact from a 30 ft fall. With that certification, sales soared.
The Safe Cabinet Company outgrew three facilities until the 224,000 square foot building on Greene Street was built in 1925. Hundreds of people worked there. The stone clad building with columns housed the office, laboratory, and an auditorium. The latter contained theater seating (see photos below) for a live, carefully orchestrated fire test and the drop test. It had the precision and drama of a missile launch today.
Cut away illustration of Test Auditorium.Copied from The Tallow Light, Vol. 46, Fall-Winter 2015
A Tallow Light article by Claire Showalter sets the scene: "...a safe was pulled off the line at random…, filled with documents..., exposed to an hour of intense heat in a furnace, (then) hoisted 30 feet up..., and sent crashing down to a bed of crushed brick while white-hot." The safe was then opened, showing that the contents were preserved intact. The audience could clearly see stunning eye-witness proof that the product worked. The process is shown in the above illustration on the stage area as the safe is heated, then dropped from 30 ft above.
Sadly, today the building sits empty. Its state-of-the-art research and testing are long gone. The plant is mostly empty. Safe Cabinet Company was acquired by Remington Rand in the 1920’s. The Greene Street plant was moved to the new Remington Rand plant in Reno, Ohio in the late 1960’s. Over the decades, reduced demand for fireproof storage and office automation spelled the end of the Safe Cabinet Company products. Their pioneering technology survives in similar fireproof safes and vaults today.
