The Lee Building

The four-story brick-and-terra-cotta block at 201 West Market Street stands where West Market Street meets South Second Street, one block west of Centre, in the densest commercial part of downtown Pottsville. It has been called the Lee Building since it was built, and the name is older than the building: it commemorates the Lee grocery store that stood in the earlier structure on the same corner. Put up in the second half of 1909 and finished by the year’s end, it is a characteristic work of the Pottsville commercial architect Frank X. Reilly, and over more than a century it has housed a civil engineer, the county’s electric-railway (trolley) offices, the Pennsylvania Power & Light Company, and — for the last two-thirds of its life — the Logothetides family’s tavern and restaurant, “The Famous” and, later, the Wheel.

The corner before the building

Pottsville was laid out on the coal land of John Pott in 1816 in a regular grid, and by the second half of the nineteenth century its Centre and Market streets were a compact “Little Philadelphia” of banks, terra-cotta commercial blocks, and merchant storefronts. The corner of Second and Market was, before 1909, occupied by a brick building that housed the Lee grocery store. In the summer of 1909 that older building was pulled down to make way for a larger, up-to-date commercial block. The Pottsville Daily Republican of July 14, 1909, under the heading “Tearing Down [the] Lee Building,” reported that “work has been commenced on the razing of the brick building at Second and Market Sts., formerly occupied by the Lee grocery store,” and that “the work of constructing the new building will be rushed with all possible speed.” The new block kept the old grocer’s name.

Frank X. Reilly’s commercial block (1909–1910)

The building went up quickly. By November 12, 1909, the Pottsville Republican could report that “the Lee building is completed at [the corner of] Second and Market Sts.,” noting that the civil engineer William Cochran would “remove his engineering offices to there from the G. M. Smith building on Mahantongo Street.” Real-estate and architectural records conventionally date the finished building to 1910, the year it came into full use.

Its design is attributed to Frank X. Reilly, the architect responsible for much of Pottsville’s best early-twentieth-century commercial architecture. In Buildings of Pennsylvania, the architectural historian George E. Thomas groups the Lee Building with Reilly’s downtown work — the Yeager Building, the Green’s Jewelry building, the Miller & Miller Building, the William C. Cowen Drugstore, and the Union National Bank — describing, “at 2nd and Market streets, … the narrow elevation of the Lee Building (1910), a brick and terra-cotta picture frame surrounding three stories of bay and Chicago windows.” The composition — a tall, narrow terra-cotta frame around ranks of projecting bay windows and wide “Chicago” windows — is typical of the Free-Classic and Beaux-Arts commercial idiom that Thomas notes survives in unusual concentration in downtown Pottsville. The building rises four stories above the street. The attribution rests on Thomas’s authoritative architectural survey rather than on a located 1909 building permit, so it is best read as a credible attribution.

The trolley offices and the power company (1910s–1929)

From its earliest years the Lee Building was an offices-over-stores commercial block. Among its first tenants was the engineer William Cochran (1909); in April 1910 the dentist Dr. J. F. Flaig moved his practice into the “new Lee building” from 12 North Second Street; and by 1910–11 the ground-floor showroom served as the Pottsville agency of the National Cash Register Company, run by the agent W. L. Filman, who advertised his “Lee Building, Second [and Market], Pottsville” address in the local press.

For much of the 1910s and 1920s the building’s upper floors were the local headquarters of Pottsville’s electric-railway (traction) system. The business offices of the East Penn Transportation Company and the East Penn Traction Company — the operators of the trolley lines that knit together Pottsville and the surrounding coal towns — occupied the third floor. On June 14, 1929, the Pottsville Republican reported, under “To Move East Penn Offices,” that “on July 1 the business offices of the East Penn Transportation and East Penn Traction companies will be removed from the third floor of the Lee building at Second and Market Sts., to the third floor of the Caster building, at Centre and Norwegian Sts.,” and that “the space vacated by the traction company in the Lee building will be utilized by the Penna. Power & Light Co., which will thus occupy the entire” building. From 1929, in other words, the electric utility took over the block that the electric railway had left.

The building’s assembly rooms also served the ordinary civic life of the town: through the 1920s and into 1930 the local press carried notices of lodge meetings and dances — Knights of Malta, the Order of the Amaranth, and similar fraternal groups. In December 1936 the U.S. post office leased the building’s main floor as temporary “annex quarters” to handle the Christmas parcel-post rush through the end of the year — a reminder that the block sat squarely in the working heart of downtown.

”The Famous” and the Logothetides family (1969–2016)

It is with the Logothetides family that the Lee Building is most closely associated in living memory. By 1960 a Pottsville restaurateur, Sava G. Logothetides, was running the Famous Restaurant — his name turns up repeatedly in the local press of the early 1960s among the merchants awarding prizes in downtown promotions, always as “Sava Logothetides, Famous Restaurant, Pottsville.”

The family’s tie to this building dates precisely to September 1969. Under the headline “Lee Building Sold,” the Pottsville Republican of September 16, 1969 announced that “the Lee building at Second and Market Sts., a landmark in the city, has been sold to Sava Logothetides, proprietor of the Famous Restaurant,” and that “it will be occupied … after extensive renovations, now under way, are complete.” Attorney George W. Lindsay represented the buyer, and the sale was handled by John W. Higgins, Inc., realtors. Sava Logothetides thereby became the owner of the entire four-story block, and moved his Famous restaurant — later remembered as the Famous Bar & Grill, or simply “The Famous” — into the corner it would hold for the rest of the century, running it with his wife of nearly six decades, Cleo Taylor Logothetides, into a second and third family generation.

The Wheel, Tres, and the building today (2016–present)

In September 2016 the third-generation operator Savas Logothetides remodeled the old “Famous” space and reopened it as the Wheel — a restaurant that became locally famous for its grilled cheese and drew regional notice during its run. The Wheel served the corner until its last day on January 16, 2023.

The family immediately reconceived the space, and in February 2023 reopened it as Tres, billed as downtown Pottsville’s only taco restaurant, serving “tacos, tapas and tequila,” again under Savas Logothetides. Tres has since been succeeded, and the ground floor remains in restaurant use. By early 2025 the building itself was offered for sale — a four-story, roughly 9,600-square-foot mixed-use property (parcel 68-27-0348.000) with a fitted-out ground-floor restaurant carrying an “R” liquor license, an upper-floor apartment, and additional unfinished upper stories. It remains a contributing building within the Pottsville Downtown Historic District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.