The Hasler Building

The four-story brick commercial-and-apartment block at 123–125 West Market Street — long known as the Hasler Building, and in the 1920s as the Keim & Hasler or Hasler-Keim Building — stands at the south-east corner of Second and West Market streets, on the 100 block of West Market, in the densest commercial part of downtown Pottsville. It sits directly across Second Street from the Lee Building at 201 West Market. Over more than a century it has held a remarkable sequence of tenants: the branch store of Arthur Womrath, a pioneer of the American rental library; the two West Market merchants, Keim & Hasler, who bought the building in 1922 and gave it its name; a Remington Rand office-equipment agency; Clem’s Hat Shoppe; the early law office of Joseph F. McCloskey, later president judge of Schuylkill County; a bicycle shop; and — after years of vacancy and a 2014 condemnation — today’s Drasdis & Son men’s clothiers, who rescued and restored the block.

The site and the earliest store (1890s)

Pottsville was laid out on the coal land of John Pott in 1816 in a regular grid, and by the end of the nineteenth century its Centre and Market streets were a compact “Little Philadelphia” of banks, terra-cotta commercial blocks, and merchant storefronts. A commercial storefront stood at 123 West Market by the mid-1890s: on December 8, 1896, The Miners’ Journal reported, in its local column, that “Arthur B. Womrath, the stationer and newsdealer, has opened a branch to his South Centre street store, at No. 123 West Market street,” adding that “the store is well stocked with all goods pertaining to his trade and is conveniently located.” The item is more interesting than it looks: the Pottsville stationer it names — better known as Arthur R. Womrath (1871–1945) — had founded his first circulating (rental) library in Pottsville that same year, and went on to build a national rental-library chain of some seventy branches in fourteen cities and fifteen hundred outlets by 1930. His 1896 West Market branch is a small footnote to a national retailing story that began a block away on South Centre Street.

The four-story brick corner block is older than its “Hasler” name by a generation. The Sanborn fire-insurance map of April 1896 already shows the corner lot (125) at Second and Market as a four-story brick building — with a ground-floor variety and dry-goods store (“Haney’s”), a hand-printing office, a dwelling, and a lodge room on an upper floor — while the lot next door at 123 was then a separate three-story brick meat market, one of a row of three-story brick stores running east toward Centre. By the 1903 Sanborn the corner reads as a four-story brick store, its Second Street wall built on masonry courses thickening from twelve inches at the top to twenty at the base — the signature of a tall load-bearing brick block. So the present building’s four-story corner (125) was standing by 1896; the neighboring 123 was raised or rebuilt to join it over the following years, producing the double storefront known today as “123–125.” The assessor’s “about 1900” is thus close for the unified block, but the corner itself is older; the exact build years and the architect — which the digitized 1891 Sanborn and the county deeds would fix — remain open.

Susan B. Archbald sells to Keim & Hasler (1922)

The building acquired its lasting name in a January 1922 real-estate deal. Under the headline “$90,000 Paid in Market St. Deal,” the Pottsville Republican of January 4, 1922 reported that “another big property deal in the city of Pottsville was placed on record today when the deeds to the Keim and Hasler store buildings on Market St. were transferred by Susan B. Archbald, the present owner, to Messrs. Keim and Hasler.” The consideration was given as roughly ninety thousand dollars — a figure partly obscured on the page by an overlapping column, and so best read as approximate.

“Keim & Hasler” was not a single store but a partnership of two neighboring West Market merchants who bought the corner block together. The 1922 Boyd’s Pottsville directory identifies the first as Charles M. Keim (wife Mary L.), whose “art & gift store” stood at 113–115 West Market Street — the business that survived into the 1950s as “Keim’s Kard Shop.” The second was A. C. (Arthur C.) Hasler, the electrical dealer who advertised a supply-and-wiring business a few doors along at 119 West Market Street and on West Norwegian Street around 1906–1913. Zerbey’s History of Pottsville and Schuylkill County cross-references the two men — “C. M. Keim” and “A. C. Hasler” — and no joint retail firm “Keim & Hasler” appears in the directory: the pair owned 123–125 as an investment block, tenanted by others, rather than trading from it themselves. The 1922 report’s phrase “the Keim and Hasler store buildings on Market St.” fits that reading.

The seller, Susan B. Archbald, belonged to Pottsville’s branch of the prominent anthracite-region Archbald family; the Pottsville Archbald of the day was Colonel James Archbald (1866–1937), agent of the Girard Estate at Pottsville from 1911 and grandson of the railroad-and-coal engineer James Archbald, for whom the borough of Archbald, Pennsylvania, is named. Susan B. Archbald’s exact place in that family, and the chain of title before her, remain to be pinned from the county deed books.

An offices-and-stores block (1920s–1940s)

Through the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s the Hasler Building worked as a typical downtown offices-over-store block, and the local press documents a steady succession of tenants. In 1924 a pressed-brick company kept an office in the building, advertising to prospective builders to “come in… for prices, and see some samples of buildings with Schuylkill bricks.” A 1925 newspaper list of Pottsville’s downtown office buildings names the “Hasler-Keim building” among them — confirming the name in use — in a run of insurance and lumber-company addresses (the Prudential Insurance company, the Beecher Lumber Company, and the Lowrey Insurance company appear in the same list, though the fragment read does not tie each firm to this specific building).

In January 1934 the block housed the local agency of Remington Rand, the office-equipment maker, which ran a week-long advertising campaign giving its address as “123 West Market Street, Hasler Building, Pottsville, Pa.” — selling typewriters and the company’s filing and records systems. And by 1939 an upper floor of the “Keim & Hasler Building” held Clem’s Hat Shoppe, a millinery “now showing… Spring Millinery.”

A young lawyer’s early office (late 1950s–1960s)

By the late 1950s the building’s professional offices included the early practice of a man who would become one of Schuylkill County’s leading jurists. Joseph F. McCloskey (1929–2021) — a Villanova-trained, Korean War Navy veteran who opened his general law practice in 1957 — gave his address in legal notices of 1959 and 1962 as “123 West Market Street, Pottsville, Pennsylvania.” McCloskey went on to serve as solicitor for the City of Pottsville, was appointed to the Schuylkill County bench in 1975, served as president judge from 1990 to 1998, and later sat as a senior judge of the Commonwealth Court; the former Pottsville Hospital School of Nursing was renamed in his honor in 2012. His time at 123 West Market marks the building’s mid-century role as low-rent professional-office space above the store.

Yoffee ownership, decline, and condemnation (1980s–2014)

For much of the later twentieth century the building belonged to the Yoffee family, recorded in the county’s deed history: Esther and Sharon Yoffee (1984), Lewis and Esther Yoffee (1988), and, after an interval, Mark and Genoveva Yoffee (2003). (Earlier deeds, back to Keim & Hasler, are not in the county’s online assessment record and survive only in the Recorder of Deeds’ books.) The property then passed through a series of investor-owners — Hollis Properties LLC (2004) and, from November 2007, Nekhanevich Holdings LLC, a Brooklyn landlord who paid $200,000.

Under absentee ownership the building declined. It briefly held a bicycle shop — Pottsville Bike and Board, at 125 West Market, from 2012 until the fall of 2014 — but the property’s water was shut off in August 2014 for nonpayment and, with conditions unimproved, the City of Pottsville posted the building unfit for occupancy in the fall of 2014, forcing the bike shop to close. The block, recorded as a seven-unit dwelling, then stood vacant and condemned.

Rescue and Drasdis & Son (2019–present)

The building’s revival came through local hands. After passing to Jamison Glennon in 2017, the property was bought in December 2019 by the Drasdis family of Pottsville. Working “with the help of the Redevelopment Authority and PADCO,” the family rehabilitated what its owner called “a prominent building that has been vacant for over 10 years,” and in December 2020 opened Drasdis & Son, a men’s clothing and tailoring shop, in the ground-floor storefront. The Schuylkill Chamber of Commerce held a ribbon-cutting on July 23, 2021. Owner Joseph Drasdis III said he was “excited to open this store in my hometown, especially with all the excitement and momentum that downtown Pottsville has had in the past couple of years.” The store — selling suits, sportcoats and formalwear, and offering tailoring — remains open in 2026, so that the building’s current owner and its current occupant are, once again, a single family running a store beneath its own roof, as Keim and Hasler’s block was owned by the merchants it is named for a century before. It remains a contributing building within the Pottsville Downtown Historic District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.