Middletown Town Is Historical Part XX

Main Street:

Pythian Building (1874/1938)

June 14th, 2014 Posted in Colonial Revival, Commercial Buildings, Middletown, Organizations, Renaissance Revival

The building at 360 Main Street in Middletown was built circa 1873-1876 to replace an earlier structure, a hotel called that Kilbourn House, that had burned down. The new building served as a hotel, known as the Farmer’s and Mechanic’s Hotel and later the Hotel Chaffee. In 1905 the building was sold to the Pythian Building Corporation. From then on, the first floor has contained retail businesses (Woolworth’s was here in the 1920s and 1930s). The second floor was converted for office use and the third floor became the meeting space of the Knights of Pythias, a fraternal organization. The Pythian Building‘s current facade, with marble and large windows on the first two floors and a Palladian window on the third story, dates to 1938.

The Capitol Theater, at 350 (354) Main Street in Middletown, was opened in 1926 by two Italian-immigrant brothers, Alessandro and Salvatore Sareceno. The theater originally presented vaudeville and silent films, later becoming a movie theater. By the early 1930s, the theatre was being run by Salvatore Adorno, also an Italian immigrant, who had built the Grand Theater (later called the Palace Theater), located next door on Main Street, in 1915 and was leasing both the nearby Capitol and Middlesex theaters. The Capitol closed in 1975 and the lobby was converted to become a liquor store. The Palace Theater was demolished in 1980 to be replaced by the Middletown Transit Authority bus station. The 1892 Middlesex Theater was demolished in 1984, but the lobby was saved and is now home to the Tuscany Grill restaurant. Over the years the Capitol Theater became dilapidated. Its interior ornamentation had been removed and holes in the roof left the interior exposed to the elements. Trees were also growing on the roof! The building was declared unsafe by the city in 2009 and was finally demolished late in 2011. Today only the former lobby facing Main Street remains.

191-195 Main Street, Middletown (1835)

December 20th, 2014 Posted in Commercial Buildings, Italianate, Middletown

The present style of the front facade of the building at 191 to 195 Main Street in Middletown dates to c. 1891, when the original two-and-one-half story structure with a gable roof was raised to a full three stories. The north section of this commercial building was built in 1835 by Joshua Stow, a former county judge and Middletown post master (also a politician and ardent Jeffersonian Republican) who operated a store. In 1845 the building passed to William Trench, who rented it out to various commercial tenants. From 1882 to 1887 it was rented by the Middletown Police, who used it as the town’s first police station. The matching south section of the building was in place by 1856 (and may have been built at the same time as the north half (1835), with the brick fire wall down the center of the building being shared by the owners of the two separate halves).
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