Quick Facts

NPS Description

112 South Main Street, ca. 1880s. 

Non-contributing (built within the period of significance but subsequent alterations have sufficiently impacted integrity to render it non-contributing) 

Description

Two story brick (covered in EIFS) retail/mixed use building with a 20 foot frontage on South Main Street. The second-story fenestration includes two recessed aluminum sliding replacement windows. The storefront is EIFS with a broad round corner window flanked by two points of entry. 

The west (rear) elevation is of painted brick with two aluminum recessed double-hung replacement windows on the second floor and a back entrance on the first floor. No other elevation is visible due to buildings to either side. 

History 

Portions of this building may date to the early 1880s. In 1881, Frank Sweeney opened a mercantile business in Mt. Pleasant. A circa 1884 photograph of this side of the street shows a two-story brick-front building with a cornice in this approximate location. It was of a similar height and had two windows in the second story. Sanborn maps show a two-story, 20 foot high grocery building on this lot beginning in 1884. Sweeney remodeled and enlarged his business in 1897. City directories show Sweeney and Company in this location into the early 1930s.13 After that, it became the Blackstone Restaurant/Café, later the Blackstone Bar, which occupied the building until 1984, with a dance hall upstairs. A wilderness outfitter shop was here in the late 1980s, and the Zoo Pet Shop in the 1990s. The building housed Allied Hearing in 2010, but it currently displays no tenant signage. *as of 2014

Integrity Analysis 

The ca. 1884 photograph of the building on this lot shows a two-story brick structure with two arched windows in the second floor, a center entry storefront with cornice above, a projecting cornice at the roof, and signage on the building advertising teas, coffee, glassware, and fancy goods. A building of this size and window configuration with a projecting cornice is visible into the 1930s. By the 1940s, the cornice is gone, and the windows appear to have transoms. A Blackstone Restaurant sign projects from the second floor. By the early 1980s, the original storefront had been replaced with a faux stone front. Building permits note the installation of new windows and a new storefront in 1985. A fire occurred in the upstairs apartment in May of 1996, damaging twenty percent of the building. The current EIFS façade was installed in August of 2003. 

Sources 

Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps (Mt. Pleasant: 1884, 1890, 1895, 1900, 1910, 1924, 1931, 1950); Mt. Pleasant City Directories, 1925-1998; Past and Present of Isabella County, 1911; City of Mt. Pleasant Building Permits; historic photographs. 

13 Sweeney later moved to 110 S. Washington, the present Sweeney Seed Company building.