(Click on image to enlarge)
Image courtesy of David Conley.
It was built by Teofil H. Grabowski, and named for his daughter, Aurelia. We can assume that the building went up sometime after Aurelia's birth in September 1922; that's as exact as I can get at this point.
It stood on the north side of West Fifth Avenue in the 900 block. In addition to office space, it held apartments: for example, the dentist whose sign we can see on the nearest corner, Samuel De Haven, appears in the 1930 Census in a rented residence at 902 West Fifth, and his office is listed at the same address in a 1929 city directory.[1] In the same directory, Dr. Sophie Solf is listed at 914 W. Fifth. The awning of the Fifth Avenue Restaurant gives its street number as 904.
I'm guessing the photo dates to roughly 1929 (although some of the businesses in the photo are not listed in the 1929 directory).[2]
The Aurelia Building is no longer standing. My source tells me that family members saw it as late as (approximately) 1967 as they were driving through the region. According to Lake County records, the Rally's restaurant now on the site was built in 1989. A few years after that, Aurelia Grabowski Conley came to the area for a brief visit and found her namesake building replaced, but she did get to visit her childhood home north of Ainsworth.
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[1] Polk's Gary (Indiana) City Directory 1929. Chicago: R.L. Polk & Co., 1929. Via Ancestry.com.
[2] Ainsworth's own vintage-car expert tells me that he can't see anything inconsistent with that approximate date in the vehicles on the street.
