203 North Centre Street

The red-brick building with the slate mansard roof at what is now 203 North Centre Street is downtown Pottsville’s quiet survivor — and the keeper of a borrowed name. For more than a century this was 205 North Centre Street, a store-and-dwelling in a Second Empire row; the number it carries today belonged to its southern neighbor, the long-famous Zerbey stationery store, until that building came down in the 1970s. Untangling the two histories is the first duty of any honest account of this address.

The Second Empire row (1870s)

The west side of the 200 block was rebuilt in the 1870s as a row of brick commercial buildings in the Second Empire taste — mansard roofs, bracketed cornices, brownstone trim. Three survive between Arch Street and the Majestic Theatre: the corner building at 201 (its mansard since removed), this building, and the flat-roofed Ulmer Building at 207. The 1982 National Register survey style-dates this one to 1870–80; it keeps its slate mansard, its bracketed wooden cornice, and one of its original dormers. By 1877 the Boyd’s directory records its first documented household: Rebecca E. Holt, druggist, and Thomas L. Holt, sewing-machine dealer, keeping store and residence under one roof. The first Sanborn survey of the block, in June 1885, draws it in a solid brick row, marked “SEW’G MACHS” — the surveyors counting its mansard attic as a fourth story — and the 1891 edition marks it “Fancy,” a fancy-goods store.

A store-and-dwelling (1885–1915)

The building spent its first half-century in the classic pattern of the block: a shop at street level, the shopkeeper’s family above. In January 1900 it was advertised — “For Rent—The desirable store and dwelling No. 205 N. Centre St. … Suitable for clothing, notion or fancy goods store and residence. Apply at Zerbey’s, 203 North Centre” — applications taken through the famous stationery store next door. J. H. Dahm sold sewing machines and supplies here in the early 1900s; from about 1907 Mrs. Elizabeth Nagle kept a variety-and-ice store, her sons clerking, into the mid-1910s.

Hill’s Music Store — and the Zerbeys next door (1920s–1930s)

Between the wars the building held W. B. Hill’s Music Store — pianos, victrolas, and “the new electrically cut Columbia Record,” as a 1928 advertisement put it, “At W. B. Hill’s Music Store 205 N. Centre St.” Walter B. Hill was family to the block: he had married Sara Frances Zerbey, daughter of the man whose store stood next door. When the new tailors Bruno & Broyer fitted out the old Zerbey building in October 1934, their grand-opening ads located them the only way Pottsville needed: “NEXT DOOR TO HILL’S MUSIC STORE.”

The vanished 203: the Zerbey store and Bruno & Broyer

The building that gave this one its present number deserves its history told plainly. William Merkle Zerbey (1824–1891) founded a window-shade and Venetian-blind business in the early 1850s — “in the year 1852,” said a 1926 feature that called it “one of the oldest, if not the oldest business in consistent existence in Schuylkill County” — first on West Market Street, moving “in about 1867” to the store the family bought and remodeled at what became 203 North Centre. Stationery was added in the 1860s; the family lived above for nearly half a century. His sons made the name county-famous twice over: Heber Swalm Zerbey kept the store, while Joseph Henry Zerbey founded the Pottsville Daily Republican on October 28, 1884 — whose first issues carried the store’s “Old Reliable” advertisements. After the founder died on May 30, 1891 — “the old and well known window shade and blind manufacturer of this city” — his widow Sarah L. (Schwalm) Zerbey and Heber traded as W. M. Zerbey & Son, “The Window Curtain House,” advertising at 203 as late as November 1927. Heber died in the building on March 1, 1928; a nephew, Charles Spencer, carried the business briefly before it was discontinued.

In October 1934 the storefront, “entirely remodeled,” reopened as Bruno & Broyer, custom tailors and furriers — fourteen years’ fitters for Doutrich’s striking out on their own — while Dr. Heller, optometrist, advertised from “203 Cor. North Centre and Arch Street” that same winter. Bruno & Broyer traded for thirty-seven years, closing with a “GOING OUT OF BUSINESS” sale in March 1972. Sometime between that closing and the 1982 historic-district survey — which inventories 201, 205, and 207, but no 203 — the old Zerbey building was demolished. Its lot was absorbed into the corner parcel, and in the years after 1988 the county’s records reassigned its number to the surviving building next door. The result is today’s paradox: the address most identified with the county’s oldest store now belongs to the building where the founder’s son-in-law sold pianos.

The building today

The 1982 inventory — recording it under its historic number — describes “a three and half story Second Empire commercial building built 1870-8[0], four bays wide,” with “the mansard slate roof … preceded by a bracketed wooden cornice, but only retaining one original dormer.” That is the building that stands: the last mansard of its row, weathered but essentially intact, its storefront vacant. In June 2026 its windows carried a brokerage’s for-sale signs, offered alongside the Ulmer Building two doors north — two survivors of the Second Empire row awaiting their next chapter.