(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.
3 comments:
I googled the address and in the Andrean High School yearbook in Merrillville for 1975, there is an ad in the back for a Joseph's Pharmacy at 900 West 5th Avenue in Gary. There's no picture, so I don't know if it was the same building, but it probably was. If it was still there in 1967, it probably made it until 1975 at least. Of course they could have torn down the old one, had a modern structure there for a few years, then built the Rallys in the late 80s, but I doubt it somehow. It was a beautiful building.
Thank you for your research. I'm inclined to think it was the same building in 1975.
You're welcome. I also found an obituary for the owner of Joseph's Pharmacy. It said that he lived in the area until 1985 when he moved to Florida. He wasn't retirement age when he moved, in fact it said he worked as a pharmacist in Florida for another 10 years. So I wonder if the building made it all the way until the mid 80s.
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