Do you own a business in the SoWe neighborhood? If so, please join us on Thursday, September 14 from 5 to 7pm at Two Dudes Painting for a SoWe Business Mixer. You’ll have a chance to network with other business owners in the neighborhood, learn more about the work of SoWe, and discuss ways we can support each other.
Appetizers and drinks will be provided. Please RSVP to by calling or texting Amos at 717-344-3637. We hope to see you there!
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.
Close to the corner of East Filbert and St. Joseph Streets, across from the green “Welcome to Cabbage Hill” house, is a two-story brick house with adjoining shop that was the headquarters of the meat business for four generations of the Falk family for nearly 100 years.
Charles Falk, Sr. and his wife Frances immigrated to America from Germany about 1850, when they were in their early twenties. He and Francis went on to have four sons and one daughter. Charles, Sr. was a shoemaker, and he worked in that trade for several decades in their log house at 516 High Street.
In 1883, the Falks, in their son Charles, Jr.’s name, bought the lot where 509-509A are located today. The lot was on the northwest side of St. Joseph Street, fifty-five feet wide and extending back to West Vine. By 1885, Charles, Sr. had given up his shoemaker business, and he and his sons had built a two-story brick house facing St. Joseph (now 509A), with a butcher shop and slaughterhouse behind it on West Vine. Charles, Sr. and Frances lived in the house, while their sons Charles, Jr, and Louis continued to live at 516 High while they worked at the butcher shop.
The business got off to a rough start. On a Sunday morning just after Christmas in 1885, shortly after moving into the new house and starting the meat business, Charles, Sr. had an accident while delivering meats. He was traveling in his new wagon on Chestnut Street at Water Street when he almost was hit by a passing train. He barely avoided the collision, but the scared horse bolted and veered into a lamp post, destroying the wagon, which he had just bought a few weeks earlier. The wagon and a new harness were a total loss at $150. Charles, Sr. was not seriously injured, and the horse survived.
Frances died in 1895 and Charles, Sr. died in 1902. Their sons, Charles, Jr. and Louis took over the family meat business, which they named Falk Bros. Meats. About 1920, they built a shop, or meat market, on the southwest side of the house. This is the small building (now numbered 509) that still stands next to the house (now numbered 509A).
By the mid-1920s, the next generation of Falks had taken over the business. Charles III and Louis Falk continued to sell meats under the name of Falk Bros. Meats. They were quite successful, selling meats in their shop, delivering meat to customers, and operating meat stands at Central, Southern, and Northern Markets. Louis also branched out into property management, when in 1923 he purchased the grouping of three houses next door at 513-17 St. Joseph for rental income.
The fourth generation of Falks took over the business by the 1940s. Robert and Richard ran Falk Bros. Meats for several more decades, until they closed the business in 1980, making it nearly 100 years that the Falks had been in the meat business on St. Joseph Street. Increasing Pennsylvania health regulations were part of the reason for their closing in 1980.
Over the years, the Falks had built quite a complex of buildings on their property. In addition to the house and shop facing St. Joseph, and the slaughterhouse facing West Vine, they built a smokehouse, a rendering shop, a wagon house, a wagon-loading stage, and later a garage for cars and trucks.
In the mid-1980s, after the business had closed, the house remained a residence, the slaughterhouse was converted to apartments, and the shop remained vacant. By about 1990, the shop was converted to an apartment as well. In 2022, Mike Brenneman, who lives on the same block, purchased the property and began repairing and updating the apartments. He also opened up the display window in the shop that had been closed up when it was converted to an apartment. See the photo for the renovated buildings.
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.
Not every store on Cabbage Hill was owned by German immigrants. The brick house and store at 705 High Street was built by a Russian immigrant of the Jewish faith.
Abraham Ansel arrived in Lancaster in 1880 and took up residence in the Southeast Ward where he began working as a junk dealer. He and his first wife Rebecca soon entered the grocery business at the corner of Mercer and Locust Streets. In 1908, Rebecca died at the age of forty-three, leaving Abraham with their young son Myer.
Abraham remarried and he and his second wife Sarah had five children. Following a tragic accident in their house in which their two-year-old child lost his life, Abraham and Sarah moved from the Southeast Ward to the Southwest Ward, buying a house and store at the corner of High and Laurel Streets. He bought the house and store from Conrad Zimmerman, who had been running a grocery in the store.
The house was a two-story frame house and the store was a one-story frame building attached to the house. The house and store were on a large corner lot that ran all the way to Lafayette Street, and contained four other adjacent frame houses facing Laurel, and two larger brick houses facing Laurel at the intersection with Lafayette. The lot also contained the house and store at 705 and an adjacent house at 707, both facing High. Abraham rented out the other houses while living in 705 High and running the grocery store there.
The store must have been successful, because, ten years later, in 1923, he replaced the frame house with attached store with a three-story brick house and store. He also built four other connected two-story brick houses along High south of the corner store. Ansel and his family lived in 707 and ran the now larger grocery store on the first floor of 705. They rented out the upper floors of 705 as apartments. The buildings he built a hundred years ago in 1923 are the same ones present today.
Abraham Ansel retired from the grocery business in 1936, and lived the rest of his long life of ninety-eight years on Chestnut Street. When he retired in 1936, his son Walter and his wife Sarah took over the store at 705 High. Walter then bought the house and store at 705 from his father in 1946, and continued operating the grocery there for another forty years. In 1985, Ansel sold the house and store to Kyoo Shik and Young Im Cho, who reopened the store as the Y&C Grocery, a business that lasted about twenty-five years. The next and present owner, Yoangel Plata-Cabrera, took over in 2016 and continues to operate the store as the V&Y Mini Market 2.
The storefront that Ansel built in 1923 is still largely present. The cornice can be seen extending past both sides of the large modern canopy and signage, and the large display windows with transoms, although mostly covered now, can still be seen on either side of the canted doorway with its sidelights. The doorway sits five steps up from the sidewalk, and like many storefronts built after 1900, there are no bulkheads below the display windows.
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
Many people will remember 502 High as the Hi-Fi Café, and indeed that is what it was for some 20 years. But fewer people know that 502’s early days were spent as a grocery store, and like many stores on old Cabbage Hill, its builder and its early proprietors were German immigrants.
The building that stands today at 502 High was built over 125 years ago, but as old as it is, it was not the first 502 High on the site. The first 502 High also was a 2-story brick building, but its location on the northeastern edge of the lot proved problematic. The city had to remove the house in the fall of 1890 when the original 14-foot-wide Filbert Alley was widened to make East Filbert Street. After the widening, the lot that remained was only 14 feet, 7 inches wide along High.
In 1891, Ernst Roehm, who immigrated here in 1881, bought the then-empty lot from which the first 502 High had been removed. He also bought a 2-story brick building at 506 High, which is no longer there, and that’s where Roehm and his family moved, and where he opened a grocery store. After a few years, in 1895, Roehm built the house and store that became the second, and current, 502 High. He designed it as a long, necessarily narrow, house with a first-floor store, and he moved his family from 506 High into the upstairs of 502 High, and moved his grocery store into the first floor of his new building.
The store was built with its entrance canted at 45 degrees so that it faced the intersection rather than either of the two streets forming the intersection. Roehm eschewed the elaborate Victorian storefront features that had been popular for the previous several decades, settling instead on a more modest storefront with two display windows on either side of the entrance. Instead of heavy cornices over the two windows, he went with subtle arches in the brickwork.
Today, the old storefront looks different than it did originally. A small green roof has been placed over the door, the transom has been covered, the front door and display windows have been replaced, and concrete steps have been added.
Roehm did not stay long at 502 High, but it remained a grocery store under several different owners into the 1930s. The grocer who had the longest tenure in 502 High was Leo Huegel, who ran a grocery there for about 25 years. After Huegel’s grocery closed in the late 1930s, George and Marie Ziegler opened Ziegler’s Café in the first floor.
When the property changed hands in 1960, the Zieglers retired and the building’s new owner, Carl Bermel, opened the Hi-Fi Café there with his brother August. The Hi-Fi became a popular fixture on the Hill for the next 20 years. From 1967 to 1973, it was run by Erma Jaggers and was known as Erma’s Hi-Fi Café. When the Bermel family sold it in 1973, the new owner, Harry Martin, hired Charles Null to run the Hi-Fi, which he did until it closed in 1980. After it closed, the building and its first-floor store/café became a residence, which it has been over the past 40 years, under 8 different owners.
Jim Gerhart, April 2023
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 store at 306 East Filbert, with its slate-gray Victorian storefront, has been standing on its corner for more than 130 years. It has been an apartment for more than seventy-five years, but for its first thirty-three years, it was a bake shop operated by a series of three German-speaking bakers, the first of whom, Ambrose Wirth, was its builder in 1891.
Ambrose Wirth immigrated to America in 1873, and soon he was in Lancaster working as a baker. In 1878, he married Emma Lichty and in 1886, the couple bought the lot at the south corner of East Filbert and Fremont for $510. In 1891, Wirth built a two-story brick house (306) with a first-floor bake shop (304), as well as a backyard bakehouse and an adjoining two-story brick house (308). The Wirths lived in 308 with their seven children while Ambrose ran the bakery in 304 until his death in 1907. (After it closed some fifty years later, the store in 304 was absorbed into 306 and a third story was added to the building.)
After Wirth’s death, his widow Emma and her younger children continued to live in 308. Joseph Kauffman bought 304-306 and ran the bakery, living above the bake shop with his wife Lena and their three children. Kauffman was a German immigrant who arrived in Lancaster in 1888, went back to Germany for several years, and then returned here in 1896. He died in 1912 at the age of forty-two.
Kauffman’s bakery assistant, Jerome Yecker, an Alsatian immigrant, took over the bakery after Kauffman’s death. Yecker soon married Kauffman’s widow, Lena, and the couple ran the bakery until 1924. The store in 304 was then leased to the A&P Tea Company, the first large national grocery chain, until the mid-1930s, with the two upper stories becoming apartments. In the late 1930s, Harold Benn operated a grocery in the store, but about 1940, the store closed and it too was soon converted to an apartment, as it remains today, with its large display window boarded up for privacy.
The original decorative storefront is still nearly intact, with its elaborately capped bracketing pillars, its projecting cornice supported by corbels, and its glass transoms above the display window and door. Should a new business want to reopen the store for the first time in many decades, the Victorian storefront could be restored fairly easily by uncovering the display window and door transom, as well as replacing the modern door with a door more representative of the 1890s. If such were to happen, the spirit of an old German-immigrant baker named Ambrose Wirth would no doubt approve the store’s return to Cabbage Hill’s business community.
Jim Gerhart, March 2023
