Author: Amos Stoltzfus

SoWe Business Mixer

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!

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 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.

SoWe Store Stories: 604 Manor St., Henry Breiter (1882)

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 two-story brick house and store at 604 Manor Street was built by Henry and Anna Mary Breiter in 1882, and it was owned by the extended Breiter family for its first seventy years. It was built on the fourteen-foot-wide southwest edge of Bethelstown lot 21. The other forty-eight feet of the lot’s frontage on Manor had been taken up by the construction of New Dorwart Street in 1881 when a small stream was buried in an arched brick sewer to make way for the new street.

Henry and Anna Mary built the narrow building at 604 Manor for use as a cigar factory. They lived on the second floor above where the cigars were made. Henry Breiter was an interesting character. He was born in Germany in 1830, immigrated to New York City in 1854, and settled in Lancaster in 1865, after serving in the 55th New York Volunteers in the Civil War.

Henry married Anna Mary Scheetz shortly after arriving in Lancaster, and for a while, he owned a cigar factory on Water Street. He also owned several other properties in the city and was a partner in the building of a hotel on South Queen Street. He bought Bethelstown lot 22 on Manor Street and built a cigar factory in the backyard, which burned down in 1877. In the late 1870s, the courts forced him to sell some of his properties to settle some debts.

Apparently, Henry had a short temper. In his first two decades in Lancaster, he had numerous run-ins with the law, including being charged with assault and battery several times. Henry was not a guy you wanted to provoke—he also was an officer and competition-winning member of the Germania Sharpshooters.

Anna Mary’s life ended disastrously. On the day after Christmas in 1900, at 604 Manor, she fainted while carrying a large pot of boiling water, spilling the water and scalding the left side of her body. She died a couple of weeks later of blood poisoning as a result of her burns. A little more than two years later, her husband Henry died at age seventy-three.

Anna Mary’s younger brother, Lorentz Scheetz, and his wife Ada, took over the cigar factory after the Breiters died, and lived on the second floor of the building. By the mid-1910s, Lorentz had modified the front part of the first floor at 604 Manor, adding a store where he sold the cigars that he was making. The angled doorway and the display windows near the corner of the building probably date to the mid-1910s, as does an overhanging cornice, now modified, that wraps around the corner of the building.

Henry L. Breiter, Henry and Anna Mary’s son, and his wife Minnie, operated the store for their uncle Lorentz Scheetz starting in the late 1910s and moved into the second floor of 604 Manor with the Scheetz’s. Lorentz eventually moved his cigar-making business to 47 Dorwart Street, where he continued making the cigars that Henry L. and Minnie Breiter sold in the store.

In the 1920s, Henry L. took a job as an inspector at Hamilton Watch Factory, and his wife, Minnie, took over the operation of the cigar store, adding candy to its inventory. Henry L. died in 1947, and Minnie continued to run the store after his death. Minnie apparently diversified her business: In 1951, the store was raided by the police and Minnie was arrested for taking bets on horse races. She served a month in the county jail for bookmaking.

Just as her mother-in-law, Anna Mary, had met a tragic end at 604 Manor during the Christmas season, so did Minnie. In the week before Christmas 1953, the building at 604 Manor caught fire. Minnie was discovered unconscious in her bedroom above the store and had to be rescued out of a second-floor window by a fireman. She died three days later as a result of smoke inhalation.

In 1954, following Minnie’s death, the store and house were sold for $21,200 to Anthony and Jennie Caterbone, who opened a branch of DeLuxe Cleaners in the store and rented out the second floor as an apartment. The cleaning business was in operation until 1975, and then the Caterbones leased the store to Zangari’s Pizza Parlor until 1980, when Louis Zangari bought the house and store from the Caterbones for $43,000.

Zangari’s Pizza Parlor was in business in 604 Manor until 1991, when the building was purchased by Lance Newswanger for $64,900. Newswanger opened Cabbage Hill Steak & Subs in the store, but within a year he changed the name to Three Adelphia Pizza & Subs, which was in business until 1998 when Newswanger sold the property to Anthoula Papadimitriou for $80,000. About 2006, the business in the store grew with the addition of another enterprise—Hit the Spot Pizza—to the continuing Three Adelphia business. The upstairs part of the building continued to be a residence, sometimes a rental and sometimes where the owner or store proprietor lived.

After Anthoula Papadimitriou’s death, her estate sold the property to Thomas Haines in 2008 for $110,000. Average Joe’s Pizza replaced Hit the Spot in 2010, and then in 2013, Par Café was added to the mix. In 2016, J&J Mofongo Restaurant opened, joining Par Café and Three Adelphia in the store. Then, from 2017 to the present, J&J Mofongo Restaurant has been the sole business in the 141-year-old store at 604 Manor, with Gabriel De Jesus owning the building until it was purchased by Dustin & Gary LLC in 2022.