Quick Facts

NPS Description

210-214 East Broadway Street, ca. 1900-1910. 

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

Description

Two-story brick retail/mixed use building with a 44-foot frontage. The upper façade is painted two different colors: the east half is light blue while the west half is yellow. The east side is framed by EIFS-clad piers with an EIFS frieze board running the length of the building. The second-story windows are double-hung aluminum replacements with arched transoms except for the easternmost triple light window. The storefronts are EIFS covered and painted. The east side is painted light blue like the upper façade while the west side is painted white. Both storefronts have recessed entries with replacement aluminum and glass display windows and fabric awnings. 210 East Broadway Street’s recessed entry is deeper than that at 214 East Broadway Street. The second floor entry lies between the two storefronts. 

The south (rear) elevation of 210 East Broadway Street is covered in EIFS with EIFS paneled in windows and exposed sills. A one-story painted CMU block addition connects to the back of the southern painted brick elevation, with its replacement windows, of 214 East Broadway Street. The addition has a painted mural with an aquatic theme completed around 1999-2000 by art students from Central Michigan University. No other exterior elevation is visible due to adjoining buildings. 

History 

These two buildings were constructed between 1900 and 1910, according to Sanborn maps. Prior to this there were a number of one and two-story frame commercial buildings that came and went. Sanborn maps show that a large one-story frame agricultural implement store was located on this block from the 1880s until after 1895. This may have been the business mentioned in the 1911 local history that states that in 1881 “C. M. Brooks opens one of earliest agricultural implement businesses with J. W. Hance and A. B. Upton.”4 The business went through a number of owners who eventually closed the business, and by 1900 that building was gone. The same history states that Alfred B. Warwick built a harness shop west of the Harkins Block (222/224 East Broadway) in 1901. As the 1910 Sanborn Map lists a harness shop in 214 East Broadway, this may be the same building/business. 

As stated above, what is now 210 East Broadway was previously 212 East Broadway. In 1910, it housed a drug store on the first floor and rooms for the Elks club on the second. Race’s Rexall Drug Store was located at 212 East Broadway from the 1920s through the mid 1960s. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, it housed the Michigan State Division of Vocational Services and Social Services. After 1973, the number 212 East Broadway disappears. Depending on when the address change was made, Capital Financial Services, listed at 210 East Broadway in the early 1970s, may have been in this building. 

214 East Broadway, constructed around the same time, was likely the site of Warwick’s harness shop as indicated in the 1910 Sanborn map. In 1919, Gennaro Fabiano and his sons Frank and Joseph moved to Mt. Pleasant and opened the Fabiano Fruit Market at 214. The Fabiano brothers would go on to found a wholesale beverage distribution business which still serves businesses across the Midwest. They moved their operations from 214 East Broadway to a warehouse on Franklin Street in the 1930s. In the 1930s and 40s, a number of bars/cafes occupied this space, including the Broadway Café, Oil Derrick Café, Sweeney’s Tavern, Brownie’s Bar and the Broadway Bar. In the early 1950s, Klein’s Mt. Pleasant Wallpaper and Paint Store moved in, remaining until the early 1980s. After a few short-lived tenants, the building was remodeled as the Headliners salon in the late 1980s; they remain the current tenant. 

Integrity Analysis 

212 and 214 East Broadway were two-story, 28 feet high dark brick buildings with metal cornices and brick piers to either side at the second floor. 210 had three arched, double-hung wood windows, while 214 had one arched double-hung wood window in the west bay, and a projecting oriel window in the east two bays. In the early 1900s, both buildings had large projecting decorative pediment-capped name/date plaques above the cornices, but by 1935 these were gone. By the 1960s, the oriel window at the second floor had been removed, replaced with a smaller rectangular window, and the storefronts had been remodeled; 212 had a large square recessed opening at the first floor. A 1982 photograph shows the storefront at 214 had been remodeled with wood over the transom and stone veneer outlining the windows. The exteriors of both buildings were more recently covered with EIFS, probably in the 1990s. 

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. 

4 Fancher, Past and Present of Isabella County, 367-8.