News – SoWe

Community Conversation: Housing & Homelessness – 9/25

Youth Bowling Club – Volunteers Needed

Peace In The Streets Block Party

Mark your calendars for this year’s block party! Volunteers are need. You can sign up here.

If you’re a business owner in the neighborhood, please join us on Thursday, May 30 from 5 to 7pm at 551 West. You’ll have a chance to meet other business owners, learn more about SoWe, and enjoy free appetizers and drinks. RSVP by emailing SoWe Director Amos Stoltzfus at Amos@WeAreTenfold.org or by calling 717-358-9358. We hope to see you there!

Cabbage Hill History Talk – May 5

(Aerial View of Historic Cabbage Hill Neighborhood)

Due to the popularity of this event, Jim will be sharing his presentation again! Join us on Sunday, May 5 from 4 to 5:30pm in the Parish Hall of St. Joseph Catholic Church (410 St. Joseph St.). Admission is FREE, and parking is available in the lot across the street from the church.

SoWe is hosting a talk by Jim Gerhart (author of “History on the Hill”) about a dynamic era in Cabbage Hill’s history. In an illustrated presentation, Jim will chronicle the growth of Cabbage Hill from a small settlement in the mid-1700s to the bustling working-class neighborhood of 1870-1970.

This 90 minute talk will focus on the people, institutions, businesses, and buildings that helped make Cabbage Hill such a close-knit, self-sufficient neighborhood. Along the way, Jim will discuss how the Hill’s Golden Century was made possible by several growth catalysts, including the establishment of St. Joseph Church, which is celebrating its 175^th anniversary this spring.

The talk will conclude with a summary of some of the challenges facing the Hill since 1970, and how recent activities are making inroads against some of these challenges.

SoWe Store Stories: 568 Manor Street, Philip Schum (1852)

The building at 568 Manor Street is one of the oldest surviving buildings on Manor Street, having been built in 1852. Like most old stores on Cabbage Hill, it holds a special place in the memory of today’s older Hillians, with many neighborhood old-timers fondly recalling it as the Manor Street 5&10. But it also has an interesting history that goes back way beyond living memory.

Philip Schum, a German immigrant, built the double, two-and-a-half-story, brick house on the southeast side of Manor Street, just across from where Old Dorwart Street intersected Manor from the west. New Dorwart Street would not be opened for another few decades; instead, a stream ran past Schum’s new house, in the middle of what would later become New Dorwart. The double house had two front doors and was divided into two houses by a wall running through the middle of the building. The address of the house, according to the 1857 directory, was “Manor nr the Bridge”, referring to the bridge that had been built to carry Manor Street over the stream.

Schum ran a grocery store out of his new house, and soon added coverlets he made to his store inventory. The coverlets turned out to be very popular, so much so that he soon moved his store to Water Street, and focused exclusively on coverlets, becoming a wealthy, successful merchant. Schum and his wife would be killed near Salunga in 1880 when their carriage was hit by a train.

In 1857, when Schum moved to Water Street, he sold the double brick house on Manor to Jacob Shindel, the son of his neighbor, Peter Shindel, who lived in a log house along the stream next to Schum’s property. Jacob Shindel then sold the house to Adam Finger, a German immigrant, in 1860, for $3,000. Finger, his wife, and their four children lived on the second floor, and ran a grocery and dry goods store on the first floor of one side of the building. Over the forty years that Finger lived and worked there, he added more store and storage space to the rear of the house. He also sold the back of his lot for the building of houses facing New Dorwart in the 1880s, and then sold the land he owned on the northeast side of the next block of New Dorwart for more houses in the 1890s.

After Finger’s death, his son Philip sold the house and store to Philip Fellman for $2,500. Fellman and his brother Louis ran a hardware store out of the first floor, and lived above it. In the 1910s, the Fellmans added a three-story brick shop and warehouse behind the house along New Dorwart, where they added metal-working to their resume. For a brief spell in 1922-24, the store was leased to S.S.S. Stores of New York City.

In 1934, the house and store, as well as the warehouse and shop behind it, were sold for $2,705 at a Sheriff’s sale to Leonard Horst of Philadelphia. Horst never came to Lancaster but leased the store to American Stores Co, Inc., a grocery chain, and rented out the second floor as a residence.

In 1944, after Horst’s death, Joseph Martin of Dauphin County bought the property for $6,500. Martin also was a landlord who continued to lease the store, this time to Acme Supermarkets, renting out the second-floor residence. Martin also converted the warehouse and shop behind the house into apartments, which they have been since.

In the late 1940s, Martin leased the store as the Manor Street 5&10 Cents Store, which it remained into the mid-1970s. The store advertised frequently in the local newspapers, especially for special sales for Christmas, Easter, Fourth of July, and Back-To-School days. In 1970, a fire in the attic was extinguished by the city fire department before any significant smoke or water damage could occur.

Santos Rodriguez bought the house, store, and apartment building in 1972 for $12,500. He completely renovated the apartments over a couple of years and then in 1976 sold the property to Charles Rettew of Lititz for $45,000. Rettew flipped the property that same year for $57,500, selling it to Michael Mastros of Lancaster. Mastros continued leasing the store and renting the apartments until he died in 2012 in a car accident.

For several years starting in the mid-1970s, the store was occupied by Playland and then Denny’s Game Room. The store was vacant throughout most of the 1980s. From 1991 to 2007, the store was occupied by De Jesus Mini Market, and from 2008 to 2011, J&A Mini Market. For the last twelve years, Sunshine Market has operated out of the store. The second floor and three-story rear attachment are still rented as apartments. The nearly 175-year-old building at 568 Manor has seen several modifications and additions. It started as a double house, serving as a store and residence, which it was until the first few years of the 1900s. At that point, the entire first floor was reconfigured as a store with a storefront, including two five-by-twelve-foot show windows (now covered); a cornice that spanned the entire front of the store, supported by large brick columns; and a recessed entrance. Added to the rear, also in the 1910s, was a three-story warehouse and shop that has been an apartment building for the last one hundred years. It started out as a house and store on a dirt road near a bridge over a stream, and ended up as the home of some of the key businesses in “downtown” Cabbage Hill.

Support SoWe During ExtraGive

If you’re participating in this year’s ExtraGive, please consider including SoWe in your giving. Your support helps your neighbors and our neighborhood! We use donations to:

Fund several neighborhood events every year, including our Earth Day Celebration, Annual Block Party, and our Halloween Trick or Treat. These events connect neighbors to each other and give us a chance to celebrate our wonderful neighborhood!
Support low-income homeowners with grants to make critical repairs to their homes. Our Affordable Home Repair Program helps our neighbors maintain safe, quality housing.
Keep our parks clean through our partnership with Lancaster County Food Hub’s Hand Up Partners Initiative. This project provides stipends to our homeless neighbors to clean Culliton and Brandon Parks, providing both critical support to neighbors and ensuring our parks are able to be enjoyed by SoWe families and households!

You can donate directly to SoWe on November 17th using this link.

SoWe Food Box Giveaway

SoWe Store Stories: 23 New Dorwart St., John Funk (1899)

This article is part of a series of posts from SoWe Volunteer Historian Jim Gerhart about the stories behind the stores on Old Cabbage Hill.

The origin of the corner store at 23 New Dorwart Street, which most people will remember as King’s Confectionery, begins with the building of a sewer. In the early 1880s, a small stream called the Run, which ran along what is now New Dorwart, was diverted into an arched brick sewer buried beneath the street. This opened the door for further building of houses along New Dorwart, and within a couple of decades, the street would be fully built out.

Before the sewer was installed, the empty lot on which 23 New Dorwart would be built was owned by Adam Finger. Finger was a wealthy, German-immigrant grocer and landlord who operated the grocery store at 568 Manor, and owned various other properties in the vicinity. In 1892, Finger sold a twenty-foot strip of his land between Lafayette and High to the city so that South Dorwart could be widened on its northeast side so that houses could be built (New Dorwart was named South Dorwart in its early years).

Finger sold his land along New Dorwart between Lafayette and High to the Home Building & Loan Association in 1894. The HBLA, a development company, built the row of twelve two-and-a-half-story houses on the northeast side of New Dorwart in the mid-1890s. The house at 23 New Dorwart was located on a lot with sixteen feet of frontage on New Dorwart, extending eighty-three feet along Lafayette. It had a store on its first floor and a residence on its second floor. There were six rooms, a bathroom, and a two-story frame back building. Later, two other houses would be built on the lot along Lafayette.

There was a storefront for the first-floor store, much of which remains today. The doorway to the store was canted at forty-five degrees to face the intersection. Facing New Dorwart, there was a large display window with transoms above it, which remains today. Separating the storefront from the residence above was a cornice that also remains. Old maps indicate that for most of the first half of the twentieth century, there was a wooden frame with an awning that extended on both sides of the entrance, overhanging the sidewalk in front of the store.

In 1899, the HBLA sold the house and store it had built on the corner of New Dorwart and Lafayette to John B. Funk for $1,375. Funk also ran a grocery store at 401 West Walnut that he called Model Cash Grocery. In 1899, he opened a new branch of his West Walnut grocery in the building he had just bought at 23 New Dorwart. Funk enlisted his twenty-five-year-old son, Clifford A. Funk, to run the new branch store. Clifford continued living at home on West Walnut while running the new branch of Model Cash Grocery at 23 New Dorwart.

In 1903, John Funk sold his branch store on New Dorwart to Jacob Kohr, who eighteen months later, sold it to John W. Wenger for $2,200. Wenger opened his own grocery in the store, and operated it until 1910, when he sold it to William P. Ostermayer for $2,800. Ostermayer moved his family into the second floor of the building and ran a grocery in the store for about five years. Ostermayer went bankrupt and in early 1916, the Union Trust Company purchased the store for $4,110.

The store was vacant for a couple of years, but then Union Trust Company leased it to Lena Ansel and her daughter Pearl, who opened L & PS Ansel Grocery in the store. Lena was the fifty-five-year-old wife of Lazarus Ansel, a clothier. Lazarus and Lena were both Russian immigrants who lived on Hebrank. The Ansels ran their grocery for a couple of years, but in 1922, the Union Trust Company sold the store to Walter D. King for $4,200.

Walter King, who had served in the Army in WWI, opened King’s Confectionery in the store. He later added a restaurant to the candy store. King’s would be in business for the next seventy years, and become a favorite in the close-knit Cabbage Hill community. King was twenty-six when he opened the store, and he operated it until his death forty years later. King and his family lived above the store, and then in the house facing Lafayette behind the store. After King’s death, his widowed third wife, Pauline, some twenty-five years younger than him, sold the store to Harry R. Martin for $18,000.

Martin, a WWII veteran who ran a similar store at 401 East King, would retain the name of King’s Confectionery for his store at 23 New Dorwart, and would own the store until his death in 1990. Martin covered the building’s brick with form-stone and rented the second floor to tenants. When Martin died, his wife Marion sold the store to BJ Properties, a property management company and landlord, for $70,000.

In 1993, BJ Properties leased the store to three brothers—Jim, George, and Leo Bournelis—who opened a restaurant they named The Steak-Out, and later Steak Attack, which they ran in the store into the late 1990s.

Next, BJ Properties leased the store to LeGrant Williams, who opened Premier Cuts and Styling, a men’s barbershop. In 2002, Williams bought the store from BJ Properties. In 2016, Williams sold the store, and now two owners later, it remains a barbershop, but now it is known as Century 21 Cuts.

Trick or Treat – 10/31