Back when St. Mary's Bank was headquartered in a marble building nestled among small shops, Connie Roy-Czyzowski would bang on the door at night, waiting for her parents to let her in so she could do her homework and play around with the adding machines.

She remembers her parents videotaping the scene when a wrecking ball smashed through the bank in 1970, destroying an elegant building that fell victim to “urban renewal” that erased the Flat Iron neighborhood on Manchester's West Side. Planners thought a shopping center strip mall would be superior to a collection of mom-and-pop businesses and city streetscapes. They “traded up” from a pharmacy with a soda fountain, a shoe store, a grocer and other merchants to Forest Hills, a discount store with a sea of parking spaces.

St. Mary's Bank continued to do business just east of its former home for the next four decades — in a nondescript '70s-style building few will miss when it's demolished. More than just another slight move to the east, the new headquarters under construction at 200 McGregor St. aims to recapture some of the 1925 building's splendor, with a curved corner that faces the roadway.

The three-story, 29,000-square-foot facility was designed by Lavallee Brensinger Architects and is being built by Harvey Construction. It will be home to a branch office, mortgage and commercial lending divisions, human resources and executive administration offices and include four drive-through lanes and a drive-up ATM.

Roy-Czyzowski attended a topping out ceremony for the building on Wednesday with her 88-year-old mother, Simmone Roy, and her son Evan. She pushed her mom around in an office chair and helped her fill in the blanks of her 45-year career with St. Mary's, where Simmone Roy rose to the rank of controller.

While bank employees past and present signed a white steel beam with felt-tipped markers, Roy clutched two tiny banks fashioned to resemble miniature books, St. Mary's souvenirs from the 1940s. She said what she loved most about working at the bank was meeting people.

One of those people was her late husband Raoul “Ralph” Roy. The two knew each other before becoming co-workers but only started dating once Raoul was hired by the bank as a teller. Back then, Simmone Roy, who joined the bank on March 10, 1943 while still a teenager, worked as a bookkeeper and teller. As the couple rose through the ranks, they worked hard and long, debunking the myth about banker's hours, Roy-Czyzowski said.

“At the end of the month, she would balance all the books,” said Roy-Czyzowski, who spent many evenings at the bank until she went to high school and instead hung out with friends. “She told me this morning that one night she worked straight through. Even when they balanced, if something didn't feel right to her, she'd go back and pick it apart and dig through it and look just to make sure.”

In the late '60s, St. Mary's recruited Ralph Roy to become the bank's data processing manager and sent him to school for training.

“I remember driving to Boston to see him and have dinner with him. He was living there for several weeks,” Roy-Czyzowski said. “He said, 'I don't know if I can do this. This is really hard.' He was mid-career. I said, 'You can do this.' He said, 'I know I can and I will.' It was a moment of vulnerability that you never see in your parents. That moment really touched my heart and I never forgot that. I think their work ethic was amazing and formed my own work ethic.”

Like his wife (and his brother, Leo), Ralph Roy spent 4 1/2 decades with St. Mary's Bank before retiring. He grew up in a house that faced the back side of Ste. Marie's church, the Catholic parish whose pastor Monsignor Pierre Hevey organized St. Mary's Bank as the nation's first credit union in 1908 on behalf of Franco-American mill workers. Ralph Roy, whose name is written in the church steeple just as his wife's name is now scrawled on a beam at the new St. Mary's Bank building, was an altar boy at the church.

“When altar servers wouldn't show up, the priest would yell out the window to my grandmother, and she would send my father to fill in,” Roy-Czyzowski said.

While Ste. Marie's steeple remains an icon to the West Side and its French-Canadian heritage, the neighborhood St. Mary's Bank once anchored is long gone, now home to a half-empty shopping center whose sole tenant is Rite-Aid. Hand-written signs in the window of the defunct state liquor store alert passers-by that the pharmacy at the other end sells wine and beer.

Perhaps the next chapter of the “La Caisse Populaire, Ste-Marie” will usher a brand of urban renewal that does a better job respecting the neighborhood's past and understanding how its future might be best served by reclaiming its roots. That would be something to bank upon.

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Mike Cote is business editor at the Union Leader. Contact him at 668-4321, ext. 324 or mcote@unionleader.com.