200 North Centre Street

200 North Centre Street is a vacant three-story brick commercial building on the northeast corner of Centre and Arch Streets in downtown Pottsville, standing since at least 1885. It housed Murray’s court-week restaurant in that first year and has never carried a name of its own — known instead through its tenants: a jeweler, a druggist, an army-surplus counter, and, for much of the twentieth century, the appliance and drug stores that anchored the corner. Its story is not the story of one merchant but of a downtown corner and the long parade of ordinary trades that passed through it.

The corner in the nineteenth century

The building was already doing business in the autumn of 1885. On November 14 that year the Pottsville Daily Republican placed a restaurant firmly at the address, under a “Low Prices” heading: “At 200 North Centre Street — The rush at Murray’s restaurant is immense during this Court. Hundreds of people are served daily and all are well pleased.” The reference to “this Court” is the tell: when the county courts were in session, Pottsville filled with jurors, witnesses, and litigants, and a restaurant on the Arch-Street corner — a short block above the courthouse-bound crowds — did a brisk trade.

That the building stood and was occupied in 1885 places its construction in the same wave that built up this block: its neighbors across the street, the Second Empire block at 203 North Centre (occupied by 1877) and the Ulmer Building at 207 (built by 1885), belong to the 1870s–1880s. The county assessor’s file records a build year of 1900; the newspaper record is earlier. By the mid-1890s the upper floors were in residential use, in the store-and-dwelling pattern the block kept — help-wanted notices of 1895 sought “a girl for general work” at the address, the domestic advertisement of a household living over the shop.

A generation of trades (1916–1922)

For a half-dozen years around the First World War the storefront changed trades almost yearly — the mark of a rented downtown corner. In 1916 it was a branch of Clarke Bros. Stores, the variety-and-dry-goods chain. By 1917 it was a jewelry store: a display advertisement of that November set the name across the top with the address beneath — “H. DEULL — JEWELER — 200 NORTH CENTRE St.”

In the autumn of 1919 it was a furniture store — “Buy Your Heater, Stove or Gas Range at Freedline Bros. — FURNITURE — 200 North Centre Street,” hawking tapestry rugs and kitchen cabinets. The next summer it was an auto-supply outlet, L. C. Thompson’s United Auto Stores; and by January 1922 it had become an Army & Navy store, advertising surplus goods under a bold “200 NORTH CENTRE” banner. Variety store, jeweler, furniture dealer, auto-supply, army-surplus — five trades in six years, none of them staying long, until a druggist arrived who would.

Kennedy’s cut-rate drug store (1920s–1940s)

From about 1923 the corner settled into its longest documented retail run to that point: Kennedy’s, a cut-rate drug store. Its advertisements filled the Pottsville Republican through the 1920s and into the 1940s. A large masthead advertisement of January 1923 set the name in outsized capitals over the address — “KENNEDY’S — 200 North Centre St.” — and listed the stock beneath it: cigars, cigarettes and pipe tobaccos, toilet waters and face powders, compacts, shaving creams and shampoos, all at cut rates, the store “Open At Night Until 9 P. M. — Saturday Until 10 P. M.” Through the ownership of the Irmil Realty Company, which took title in June 1932, Kennedy’s was the fixture of the corner for some two decades.

Reiley’s appliance corner (1940s–1990s)

By the mid-1940s the drug store had given way to the tenant that would define the building for the rest of the century: Reiley’s Stores, Inc., an appliance, hardware, and electrical dealer trading at “200-A North Centre Street” — the corner by now divided into two storefronts, 200 and 200-A. A January 1945 advertisement is characteristic: “BELTS — For Home Machines, Refrigerators, Washers, Ironers, Pumps — REILEY’S STORES Inc., 200-A North Centre Street.” Reiley’s advertised heavily in the newspapers of the late 1940s and the 1950s, and it was still trading on the corner at the end of that decade.

Its tenancy became ownership. After the building passed from Irmil Realty to Joseph F. and Julia Harrison in 1957, Reilly’s Stores, Inc. — the same firm, its corporate name recorded with the double-l — bought the building it had long occupied on May 13, 1966, and held it for the next twenty-seven years, until 1993. For close to half a century — as tenant from the 1940s, then owner until 1993 — 200 North Centre was Reiley’s corner.

Later owners, a magistrate’s court, and vacancy

When Reilly’s Stores sold in 1993, the building passed to Yorkville Associates, Inc., and in 2007 to 512 Centre Street LLC. By the later 2000s the storefront was a trophy and gift shop — ET Trophy & Gift, “Plaques · Trophies · Gift Awards” — though a walking-tour brochure of the period listed the shop next door at 204, so the located record places it at 200 or at 204.

The building’s last tenant was a court. The office of Magisterial District Judge James K. Reiley occupied 200 North Centre Street until it relocated: in November 2014 the Republican-Herald reported that the magistrate’s office had moved to a new site, effective on or about November 10. With the court gone, the building fell vacant. It was sold to a private owner in 2021 and remains vacant, awaiting rehabilitation; the sale listing described a ground-floor storefront and two upper floors ready for remodeling, with a rear floor in partial collapse.

The building stands within the Pottsville Downtown Historic District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982; the district’s dedication marker stands at the corner of Centre and Arch Streets. Two contemporaries from the same 1870s–1880s wave of building face it from across the street — the 203 North Centre block and the Ulmer Building — while up the east side of the block stands the 1924–25 Diamonds Building. The plain corner that fed the court-week crowds in 1885 stands empty today.