The Diamonds Building

The three-story storefront block at 216 North Centre Street has changed its trade about once a generation without ever changing its address — ready-to-wear, then clothing, then meat, now cakes — and it still signs itself the way its builder intended: DIAMONDS, carved across the cast-stone frieze at the top of the facade. It stands on the east side of the 200 block of North Centre, the county-seat shopping street an architectural survey calls “the commercial heart of Pottsville,” with the four-story Lefkowitz Building — raised in the same mid-1920s rebuilding of the block-front — immediately to the south, and to the north a parking lot that was, for half a century, the Capitol Theatre. Of that stretch of the block, the Diamonds Building is the survivor in the middle: newer than the buildings it replaced, older than the void beside it.

The Fox property (1892–1922)

Before Isaac Diamond, 216 North Centre was a three-story frame building that did whatever work the street offered. In January 1892 it was already “Graham’s old stand” — a vacated storefront that a traveling show could rent by the week: “Prof. Griffin’s Glass Blowers and Wizard’s Annex, will begin a week’s engagement at 216 North Centre street, Graham’s old stand, Monday evening, January 25,” ran the notice in The Miners’ Journal, promising a “wonderful talking skull,” a snake charmer, and a present with every ten-cent admission.

The directories then fill the building with steadier trades. In 1893–94 Boyd’s lists both “Quinn John H., saloon, 216 N Centre, h do” — the saloon-keeper living on the premises — and “HELMS PETER D., butchers’ supplies, 216 N Centre”; in October 1894 Quinn advertised the “good will and fixtures” of the business for sale. By 1897 Jeremiah H. Helms carried the butchers’-supply trade, three boarders — a driver, a laborer, a miner — roomed in the building, and “Belinskie J.” was listed at the address: the John Bolinski whose application for a liquor license at 216 North Centre had drawn a formal protest that January. The 1903 Sanborn survey draws the sum of all this plainly: a three-story frame saloon, mid-block in a row of frame and brick stores backing on Railroad Street.

The frame building’s last recorded life is the one that named it. Boyd’s 1922 directory lists “Fox John C., (Sarah), hotel, 216 N Centre, h do” — a small hotel kept by John C. Fox, with a bar clerk on the premises. When the building came down two years later, the newspapers needed no address: everyone knew “the Fox property.”

Isaac Diamond builds (1924–1925)

The present building belongs to the North Centre Street building boom of the mid-1920s — the same burst that rebuilt 214 next door for the clothier Nathan Lefkowitz. On October 31, 1924, the Pottsville Republican’s building-permits column reported: “Most important among the permits was that of Isaac Diamond for the remodeling of the premises 216 North Centre street, recently purchased by him. The building will be converted into a store and two apartments.” Whatever the permit clerk called it, what rose read as new construction. On May 6, 1925, under the headline “Building Now About Ready,” the paper described “the handsome new store building at 216 North Centre St. to be known as Diamond’s, with Mrs. Chas. Diamond and Isaac Diamond conducting a fine ladies, gents, and children’s store,” announced ready for business on May 15th: “When the scaffolding is taken away, the public will find a most imposing new building erected on the site of the old property known as the Fox property.” The same report looked up the block — “when the new Lefkowitz building is completed, that section of the city will show great improvement” — catching the two merchant buildings, 216 and 214, going up almost together. (Zerbey’s county chronology supplies a quiet backdrop: “Chas. Diamond, Potts.; in clothing business” had died in January 1923; the Mrs. Chas. Diamond of the opening notice appears in the next directory as “Diamond’s (Mrs. Sallie Diamond).”)

The physical record agrees with the newspapers. Where the 1903 Sanborn shows a frame saloon, the 1950 sheet shows a three-story concrete-block store on the lot — and the 1982 National Register inventory describes exactly that fabric: a “three storey cinder block, cast stone 1920’s commercial building.” The county assessment card’s rounded “1900” year-built is the only dissenter, and it describes a masonry building the maps show did not yet exist in 1903. What Diamond built is what stands: a flat-roofed store-and-apartments block behind a paneled cast-stone front, DIAMONDS cut into the frieze above the third-floor windows — a merchant’s permanent nameplate, like the carved LEFKOWITZ on its taller neighbor.

Diamond’s, the Capitol, Schainuck’s (1925–1940s)

Diamond’s opened selling ladies’, gents’, and children’s wear. By the 1926–28 Boyd’s canvass the store was “Diamond’s (Mrs. Sallie Diamond),” with “Diamond Julius B., manager, 216 N Centre” and Samuel Diamond clerking, the family living at 901 West Market Street. Two years after the store opened, the block acquired its spectacular neighbor: the Capitol Theatre, a Spanish Colonial Revival movie palace of some 2,700 seats, opened at 218–220 North Centre in November 1927, and the three-story store spent the next half-century beside it.

By the mid-1930s the storefront had its second clothing tenant. Schainuck’s advertised “216 North Centre St., Pottsville, Pa.” through the winter of 1935 — pants clearances at 95 cents and $1.45, with spots “on WEEU daily” — a Main Street clothier of the radio age. The two apartments above kept their own quieter history of tenants.

Bixler’s Meats, and the survivor of the block (1976–2003)

The county’s online chain of title opens on April 7, 1976, with a non-market conveyance recorded to Lee G. and Jean E. Bixler, and under the Bixlers the storefront became a butcher shop. “BIXLER’S MEATS — 216 North Centre Street, Pottsville… WE ACCEPT FOOD STAMPS,” ran the display ads of January 1998, with Wednesday specials on spare ribs, cooked ham, and breaded veal patties.

The Bixler years also bracket the block’s great subtraction. On March 1, 1982, the Pottsville Downtown Historic District entered the National Register of Historic Places, its inventory listing the “Diamond’s Building” (Survey No. 12) between the Capitol Movie Theater (No. 11) and the Lefkowitz Building (No. 13) among the district’s “significant and contributive historic structures.” Within months the first of the three was gone: the Capitol, closed since 1977, was demolished in the second half of 1982, its site cleared for parking. The plain store beside it survived — which is why the Diamonds Building now holds the south edge of the gap where a movie palace stood. The deed record adds a brief coda: the Bixlers sold to Leonard and Kelly Phillips in 1999, the parcel passed through the Pottsville Area Development Corporation in late 2003, and the Bixlers took it back that December. The prices paid are a matter of public record, on the county’s parcel card linked under Sources.

Roberts ownership and Momma Millie’s Bakery (2014–present)

The building’s current chapter is a bakery. County records show Sharon Roberts as owner of record since a non-market conveyance in March 2014, and the storefront — behind an aluminum-and-glass front and a shingled pent awning added in the later twentieth century — is Momma Millie’s Bakery, run by Mildred “Momma Millie” Kennedy. When WNEP profiled the shop in July 2019, as it competed in a national “Sweetest Bakery in America” contest, the station put her standing simply: “For nearly four decades, Mildred Kennedy’s passion for baking and crafting delicious treats has made her a household name throughout Schuylkill County.” Photographed in July 2026, the bakery trades under a Republican-Herald “2025 Readers’ Choice” winner’s banner — “Voted Best Bakery & Wedding Baker” — while above the awning the upper floors keep their 1920s face, the DIAMONDS frieze still legible over the street. A century on, the building does what Isaac Diamond built it to do in 1924: a store below, two apartments above, and its name in stone.