Q: What’s behind Lyceum Dean’s vault door? – A: History.

So you find yourself at CC’s Community Coffee House in the Lyceum Dean building downtown on North Boulevard. On your way to the restroom something unusual catches your eye. Actually, you can’t miss it.

It is a massive steel bank vault door.Around 10 feet tall and almost nine feet wide, it looks like something plucked from a Depression-era gangster film. Behind a thick Mosler Safe Co. cold steel vault door, several generations of Baton Rougeans stored their prized possessions in safe deposit boxes.

Although the vault’s door frame is square, the door itself is round, notes Buck Moise, retired chairman of City National Bank, which operated in the building for more than 50 years. Back then that circular shape conveyed prestige and stability—“possibly because they were harder to make.”

It represented state-of-the-art security, and even the bank managers couldn’t bypass the timer on which it operated. “A customer might call to get their passport out of their safe deposit box, but it didn’t matter who they were because of the time mechanisms,” Moise says.

City National became the vault’s owner in 1933 after being created during the July banking holiday when Union Bank, the vault’s original owner, merged with Bank of Baton Rouge. City National operated in the Lyceum Dean building until 1985 when it moved up the street to City Plaza.

Today, Lyceum Dean Ballroom and Plaza hosts parties and shows. The building also is the home of Urban Entrepreneur Partnership Gulf Coast, the aforementioned CC’s, and Cyntreniks, a strategic consulting company. But the vault still draws its share of attention. “Everybody asks about it,” Cyntreniks’ Trey Godfrey says.