Ventura County Landmark No. 75: Achille Levy House
Historical Background
The Achille Levy House is a two-story, shingle-style house with Craftsman influences and one of Oxnard’s largest houses. This residence was designed by Albert C. Martin and built in 1912 for Achille Levy, founder of the Bank of A. Levy. In the 1880s and 1890s, Achille Levy was a commission and forwarding merchant in Hueneme. When Oxnard was built in 1898, he moved his banking business to the new city but he continued to live in Hueneme until moving into this house in 1912. The house is now divided into apartments.
Achille Levy
Achille Levy was born in Alsace to French Jewish parents in 1853. At the age of 18, he traveled to California where he studied for two years in San Francisco and then began working as a clerk/bookkeeper for his uncle in Solano, California. In 1873, at the age of 20, he headed south to Port Hueneme which was the only deep-water port between San Francisco and San Pedro. It was a busy port, and growing rapidly with rich agricultural exports. He soon became an agricultural broker at the port, expertly combining the functions of broker and banker dealing in barley, peanuts, beans, honey, fruits, sugar beets, and livestock. By 1902, he built a bank in Oxnard, the Bank of A. Levy, which became known as the “the bank that beans built.” When Achille Levy died in 1922, he was the wealthiest individual in Ventura County.
Bank of A. Levy
Achille Levy considered his bank to be an integral part of the community; there were no foreclosures during his lifetime, even during the Great Depression in the 1930s. In 1927, with Achille’s son Joe as president, Bank of A. Levy moved its headquarters to a Renaissance-style building on the corner of A and Fifth Streets in Oxnard. Many branches of the Bank of A. Levy were opened, but headquarters remained at Fifth and A Streets for many years.
In 1995, the Bank of A. Levy Company was sold to First Interstate Bank. At the time of closure, there were 17 Bank of A. Levy branches across Ventura County with about 65,000 customer accounts (Online Archive of California, n. d.).
References
Online Archive of California (no date). Levy (Achille) papers. https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c8jh3tb6/.
Date Designated: December 1982
Location: 201 South D Street, Oxnard
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