Dan's Papers - December 14, 2007

If there's one thing you can say about the downtown shopping centers of East Hampton, Bridgehampton, Southampton and Westhampton Beach, it's that they are chic. The stores are nearly all high fashion. They have European names, with the furs and dresses and jewelry sparkling in the spotlight behind gleaming burglar-alarmed windows. Even the shoppers are high fashion. Sometimes, as a longtime resident of this place, I feel the urge, which I repress, to dress myself up when I go downtown. There are women with poodles, men in three piece suits with English sheep dogs, children with nannies - and of course there are now, even in winter, the Lamborghinis, the Benzes, the Hummers and the Lincoln Town Cars all lined up, some of them with uniformed drivers sitting at the wheels with the engines running.

And yet, beginning last week, there is something very jarring about one of those establishments. I am referring to what has happened to the color scheme at the North Fork Bank branches. Over the years, the colors of this bank's identity have evolved into greens and yellows and whites. These colors are in the checkbooks and on the nametags of the tellers, as well as in the brochures and on the ATM cards. I do business with North Fork Bank. My ATM card, like all the others, is forest green with the deep yellow logo of the rising star on the upper left hand corner. I visit the ATM machine beneath the green awning in these towns, and I put the card into a device that asks questions in green, yellow and white to authenticate who I am. It's a comfort.

Last Friday, however, the North Fork Bank branch where I bank unfurled a deep blue awning over the main entrance. It clashes terribly. And over it they have loosely placed a piece of matching blue fabric that says NORTH FORK in white, small unassuming letters so there is no mistake that you might be at the wrong place.

There is a reason blue fabric is draped over a blue awning. And it's because there is something foreign on that awning under that fabric. And I know what it is. They are going to peel the fabric off sometime in the next two months and reveal a new name and logo - Capital One.

Then the whole place, piece by piece, will turn blue because Capital One, the giant credit card company with $160 billion in assets, has bought the North Fork Bank, which is one-tenth its size, and they're putting the final nail in the coffin. At first, Capital One decided to keep the bank as a subsidiary and its President, John Kanas, as CEO for a year, with the green, yellow and white colors flying. No more. Kanas retired. And now, a year later, Capital One will finally swallow the bank completely.

And so, by next spring, everything at the bank that we all loved and cared for will be blue and white, the official colors of Capital One. First to show up is the new awning.

I have to say, by the way, that making this transition is a huge job. North Fork Bank has maybe 355 branches on Long Island, in New York, and in New Jersey. It had gone, over the last thirty years, from a little one horse bank on the North Fork to the largest force in banking on Long Island, brought to that status by the brilliant business sense of John Kanas.

Just to dismantle it and change its colors to those of the new buyer will involve about four months of being entirely un-chic. Just put on your Gucci sunglasses as you go in, and try not to notice.

Kanas was born as the son of a duck farmer in Moriches sixty years ago. In his senior year at Moriches High School, the owner of a deli where he worked during summers told him he was shutting the place down and retiring, unless Kanas wanted to buy it. Kanas, at 19, raised the money and did just that. Three years later, when the old potato farmers who owned the North Fork Bank and Trust in Mattituck decided they wanted to open a branch in Eastport - it was their first branch, I believe - they looked around for somebody to run it and came up with this young man.

Soon, Kanas was asked to be the assistant to the elderly President of the bank. And when he got sick, Kanas took temporary control of the bank. He was such a dynamo that the board soon voted to make him permanent President. He then spent the rest of his adult life working to grow this little bank, bringing it from about 5 branches to maybe 355.

It would be hard to fault him as he did this. This phenomenal growth brought hundreds of jobs to the North Fork Bank headquarters in Mattituck. But like everything else, particularly everything else in business, there are twists and turns along the road.

Once you become a medium-sized bank chain, it turns out, you either have to grow into a giant national and even international banking chain or, if you make one false move, find yourself swallowed up. Kanas did his damndest to find smaller things to swallow up, so as to eventually become the swallower rather than the swallowee when the time came.

He almost pulled it off. But in the end, particularly after a run at the Dime Savings Bank of New York failed about five years ago, he finally had to accept an offer of $14.6 billion from the giant Capital One that he and his stockholders could not refuse. The deal included him remaining on board for a few years to run the banking division - Capital One in the credit card business certainly needed a strong leader to run what was essentially their new banking business - but in the end, under pressures to tractor-beam the North Fork Bank into the mother ship and essentially close down the headquarters here on Long Island, Kanas saw the writing on the wall and engineered for himself a lucrative retirement and left the fray.

So green and yellow and white will slowly be replaced by blue and white. And the North Fork Bank establishment, which for many years was recognized by the banking industry as the most well-run, well-liked regional banking chain in the country, will be no more. It remains to be seen how it will all be run in the future. If you bank there, grit your teeth through the color clash this winter, hang in and hope for the best.