Former Meriden Castle Bank & Trust Company





In the shadow of the Hanover and Harbor Towers, a two-story brick building stood for more than a century. Built in 1910, it watched Meriden rise, fall, and try again. The address changed with the times, and those changes tell the city’s story in miniature.


On April 12, 1999, the doors opened as Castle Bank and Trust, an FDIC-insured community bank. For 10 years, it handled paychecks, mortgages, and savings accounts for people who lived a short walk away. On August 8, 2009, the bank merged with Naugatuck Savings Bank. Within four years, the brand shifted to Ion Bank, part of a wave of name changes and mergers across small-town banking.


After the last deposit slip was filed, the building kept working. Visiting Nurse Services Inc. of Southern Connecticut moved in. A local campaign set up its headquarters there during the election season. Then a church, Elohim Casa De Dios, turned the space into a place of worship. The floors and walls absorbed a lot of everyday life.


The city era came next. Around 2022-2023, after years of wear and limited use, Meriden bought the property and paid 336,900 to demolish it. A century of stories ended with the bite of an excavator and a flat patch of ground where a front door used to be.




Before there was 100 Hanover St, in 1896, the bronze lamp manufacturing company of The Bradley and Hubbard Manufacturing Company dominated the landscape long before International Silver Company took over in later years.




This corner did not exist in isolation. It sat inside what urban explorers half-jokingly called a Bermuda triangle of empty or wrecked places. Within about a third of a mile, King Street held the vandal-plagued Meriden-Wallingford Hospital complex, including the burned-out remains of the former Meriden Medical Center office building. Cross Harbor Brook to Cherry Street, and you meet the Factory H power plant at 104 Butler Street and 77 Cooper Street, once part of the International Silver Company, the industrial giant that helped build Meriden’s reputation for cutlery and silver. For explorers, these were easy finds packed into 1,600 feet. For the City Council, they were the kind of properties that kept budgets tight and patience thin.








Look at this one block, and you can see the broader arc. Community banking surged in the late 1990s. Then came consolidation and new names on old signs. Health care groups, campaigns, and congregations tried to make use of space built for a different era. When decay outpaced hope, the public paid to clean up what private owners left behind. It is the familiar math of small cities that once ran on factories and now juggle limited tax bases, aging buildings, and big decisions about what to save.


There is another layer to the bank years that matters too. While the teller windows were open and the ledgers looked neat, problems were growing out of sight. Later court filings would tie the address to a misuse of funds inside the institution, proof that trouble in a city is not always written in peeling paint. Sometimes it is hidden in account entries and quiet approvals, the kind of harm that leaves no graffiti but leaves a long shadow.


The bricks are gone now, and the lot is bare. Still, the life of that building tells a larger story about Meriden. It is a story of steady work and sudden collapse, of old industries and new names, and of how a city tries to move forward while facing what was left behind.



For ten years, Robert A. Nixon wore two faces at Castle Bank and Trust in Meriden. By day he ran Operations and looked like the person you could trust with the keys. Out of sight, he was moving money that did not belong to him.


From a desk inside the bank, Nixon steered more than a million dollars from the bank’s general account into the personal accounts of a friend. Sometimes he keyed the transfers himself. Sometimes he leaned on others inside the bank to push items through. Then he drew the money back out as cash, either by having his friend make withdrawals or by routing the funds to other banks and cashing out there. To hide the trail, he used his inside knowledge to make false entries. He also “reprocessed” old checks, a maneuver that made stale items look active and kept the books from showing a hole.








That stream of money built a private life the job could not support. The total, 1,039,227 dollars and 34 cents, covered his mortgage, credit cards, car payments, and upgrades at home. A large slice fed a gambling habit. The risk at the tables echoed the risk in the back office.


The scheme held together until he left the bank in 2009. After Castle Bank was taken over by the parent of Naugatuck Savings Bank, new eyes went through old records. Auditors traced the pattern of bogus debits and recycled checks that had masked the thefts for years.


The reckoning came in federal court in New Haven on October 26, 2010. United States District Judge Janet Bond Arterton sentenced Nixon to 55 months in prison, followed by three years of supervised release. He had already pleaded guilty to theft by a bank officer and to income tax evasion. The judge ordered him to pay about 1.2 million dollars in restitution to Naugatuck Savings Bank and its insurer. He also had to repay the IRS 268,784 dollars in taxes on the stolen income.


There is a lesson in how this happened and how it finally stopped. Small banks run on trust, and trust can turn into a blind spot when one person controls too many pieces of the process. Nixon knew the systems, the timing, and the paperwork well enough to move money and paper over the damage. The merger changed the cast of characters and the questions being asked. New auditors, fresh controls, and a clean look at the general account exposed what familiarity had missed.




Source(s):




1. U.S. Bank Locations. (n.d.). Castle Bank & Trust Company. Retrieved September 30, 2025, from https://www.usbanklocations.com/castle-bank-trust-company-35159.shtml

2. Federal Bureau of Investigation. (2010, October 26). Leader of New Haven drug trafficking organization sentenced to more than 11 years in federal prison. U.S. Department of Justice. https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/newhaven/press-releases/2010/nh102610.htm

3. East Haven bank boss stole $1 million. (2010, August 6). New Haven Register. https://www.nhregister.com/news/article/East-Haven-bank-boss-stole-1-million-11618264.php

4. Hartford Business Journal Staff. (2010, October 27). Ex-Meriden banker admits to $1M embezzlement. Hartford Business Journal. https://hartfordbusiness.com/article/ex-meriden-banker-admits-1m-embezzlement/

5. (1896) Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Meriden, New Haven County, Connecticut. Sanborn Map Company, Oct. [Map] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/sanborn01141_003/


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