Quick Facts

NPS Description

121 South Main Street, ca. 1880s.  

Contributing

Description

Commercial Italianate two-story brick retail/mixed use building with a 22 foot frontage on South Main Street. The upper façade is of painted brick with a brick corbelled detail below the frieze and parapet. The building front presents a keystone in the center of the parapet and fluted pilasters at the ends. The second-floor windows are double-hung vinyl replacements with arched panel transoms and ornate raised brick arched hoods with keystones. The center window has been infilled. The storefront has glass and wood arched display windows and fluted pilasters with a recessed entry and arched transom. A side entry, with an arched panel transom, to the second floor is to the south of the recessed entry. In the recessed entry is a half exterior, half interior giant bicycle gear replication attached to the ceiling. Fluted piers between the storefront windows rise to a decorative sign board transom panel, and the storefront is capped by a narrow cornice with a center keystone. 

The east (rear) elevation is of brick covered in vertical vinyl siding with a one-story painted concrete block addition and second-story wood deck. No other elevation is visible due to adjoining buildings. 

The interior is remodeled with modern finishes but retains some of the original tin ceiling. 

History 

121 South Main is one of the oldest remaining buildings on this street, having been constructed in the mid to late 1880s. Through the 1890s and 1910s it had a variety of businesses in it, including a furniture store, grocery, dry goods store, jewelry and millinery, with a cigar factory on the 2nd floor in the 1910s. From 1930 to the mid-1950s, it was Richmond and Shangle Hardware, and then Van Dyne Hardware to 1963. 121 is not listed in the city directories in the late 1960s and 1970s. Motorless Motion has occupied the storefront since 1980. 

Integrity Analysis 

This building appears on the 1890 Sanborn map as a double building connected to 123 South Main. Early photographs from the 1880s show both sides sharing a cornice and with similar arched windows with stone hoods. 121 retained its cornice into the 1950s, but it was removed sometime after that, although the brick corbelling remains in place. The arched window openings and decorative hoods remain in place, although the windows themselves have been replaced with units that do not match the historic configuration of double-hung one-over-one sash. The center entry storefront also appears to have remained into the 1950s, although details are not discernible in the available historic photographs. The current storefront and windows date to 2005. 

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.