The Lefkowitz Building

The four-story buff-brick building at 214 North Centre Street is the rare Pottsville storefront that still says, twice over, exactly whose it was. At the parapet, below the cornice, a weathered stone frieze reads LEFKOWITZ, over a carved shield dated 1925; five floors down, set into the tiled floor of the deep, glassy storefront entrance, the same name is spelled out in black-and-white mosaic above a smaller mosaic 214. With its quieter three-story companion at 212, 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” — almost directly opposite the Majestic Theatre, and backing, like the whole east side of the block, onto Railroad Street. The name belongs to Nathan Lefkowitz, a clothier who arrived on the street in the mid-1910s, moved his store here around 1918, and by 1925 had rebuilt the building into the four-story front that stands today.

The block before Lefkowitz

The Sanborn fire-insurance surveyors drew this stretch of North Centre in 1903, and neither lot looked anything like today’s pair. 214 was a three-story frame store with a two-story rear section; 212 was a three-story brick saloon. The east side of the block was a workaday mix — stores, saloons, a warehouse — running back to the railroad; the three-story frame saloon immediately north at 216, another of them, would be swept away in the same mid-1920s rebuilding that transformed 214, re-emerging as the Diamonds Building. The west side opposite carried the Second Empire row that survives at 203 and the Ulmer Building, joined from 1910 by the Majestic Theatre. The whole streetscape now sits inside the Pottsville Downtown Historic District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982 with a boundary that runs to Railroad Street — and the district’s nomination inventories both halves of today’s pair by name among its “significant and contributive historic structures”: the “Lefkowitz Building” at 214, Survey No. 13, a “four storey 1920’s brick commercial building with free classic inspired front,” and 212 on its own merits, Survey No. 14, an “Italianate inspired brick commercial building three stories high by two bays wide.”

N. Lefkowitz, clothier (1915–1925)

The Lefkowitz name enters the Pottsville record in the mid-1910s, and the directories let the story be told with unusual precision. No Lefkowitz appears in any Boyd’s directory of Pottsville from 1897 through the 1913–14 edition. Then, in 1915–16: “Lefkowitz Nathan, clothier, 314 N Centre, h do” — a clothing store one block north of the building that now carries his name, the merchant living on the premises. The 1917–18 edition keeps the store at 314 (the family then living in St. Clair), but by the 1919–20 canvass the listing reads “Lefkowitz Nathan, clothier, 214 N Centre,” with his son Leon clerking in the store. Somewhere around 1918, the clothier had taken over the old three-story store at 214.

He did not leave it as he found it. On December 29, 1923, under the headline “Will Enlarge His Business,” the Pottsville Republican reported that “N. Lefkowitz, the clothier of 214 N. Centre St., is preparing to greatly enlarge his store, extending back toward Railroad St., in the rear, giving him much needed space on the main floor” — a merchant who had already “added to it in depth” and made improvements “quite notable” “since taking over this property,” and who planned “new departments” for “his already large line of clothing and shoes.” What rose from that work is the building that stands: a tall, narrow four-story front of buff brick with stone trim — quoined brick piers at the corners, stone lintels and sills, a Greek-key band and paired iron window balconies below the fourth floor, a dentiled stone cornice, and at the top the carved LEFKOWITZ frieze and 1925 date shield. The county’s assessment card for 214 records the same year built, 1925. At the sidewalk, a black-painted storefront frames a deep recessed entrance — display windows angled inward over black-and-white checkered tile bulkheads, gilded fan rosettes at the corners, and the LEFKOWITZ mosaic underfoot, drawing the shopper in from the street the way a 1920s clothier meant it to. The work was still finishing as the block’s other new merchant building opened: announcing the new Diamond’s store next door at 216 on May 6, 1925, the Republican looked ahead to “when the new Lefkowitz building is completed, that section of the city will show great improvement.” The mid-century Sanborn map draws the finished result — four stories, with a concrete-block rear section running toward Railroad Street, the 1923 plan realized.

The family store (1926–1949)

By the 1926–28 directory the store was a family concern top to bottom: Nathan and his wife Lena lived in the building, and sons Abe and Leon both clerked in the store and roomed there. Zerbey’s county history, compiled in the mid-1930s, catches another of the children in passing — “Belle Lefkowitz, who assists in the Lefkowitz Store in Pottsville” — and its county chronology for 1934 records the marriage: “Miss Sara Shuman, of Reading, and Leon Lefkowitz, Pottsville, wed.”

Nathan Lefkowitz died on August 6, 1941, at the Pottsville Hospital — “N. Lefkowitz Dies; Clothing Merchant,” ran the Republican’s headline — still living at 214 North Centre, “where he conducted the clothing store that bears his name.” The obituary fills in the man behind the frieze: “a native of Austria-Hungary,” a son of Abraham and Terza Lefkowitz, and “a member of the Oheb Zedeck Congregation” — at the center of the merchant community whose story is told in the Pottsville Jewish community profile — widowed since about 1929: “His wife, Lena Weinberg, preceded him in death 12 years ago.” Five children survived him: Abraham and Leon in Pottsville, Morris in Miami, Anna (Mrs. Samuel Liner) in Pottsville, and Bella (Mrs. David Schwartz) in Canton, Ohio. Leon, the son longest in the store and a veteran of the First World War, followed young: he died on January 14, 1945, at 47, at the Graduate Hospital in Philadelphia, and was buried in the cemetery of his father’s congregation, Oheb Zedeck. The building, though, stayed in the family: the county’s online chain of title for 214 opens with a conveyance recorded on September 26, 1949, to Abraham and Sadie Lefkowitz — a non-market family transfer, the kind that marks an estate settling rather than a sale. When the store itself last traded under the Lefkowitz name is not yet documented; the family’s ownership of the building ran into the 1970s.

After the Lefkowitzes (1973–2023)

A transfer recorded in 1973 to Clyde A. Mehlman is the first owner of record outside the family — the end of a Lefkowitz connection then some fifty-five years old. From there the two buildings, on separate parcels, went their separate ways: 214 through private hands (Lord, 1986; Greis, 1999), while 212 passed in 1987 to the Pottsville Redevelopment Authority and back into private ownership in the 1990s, reaching Kimberly and Scott Greis in 1995. With the Greises holding both by 1999, the pair were reunited, and they have traded as one property since: to Frasin Properties in 2021, and on November 30, 2023 — by a single deed — to the current owner of record, a holding company of the Grube family of Orwigsburg. The prices paid are a matter of public record, on the county’s parcel cards linked under Sources.

The building today

Photographed in June 2026, both storefronts stand vacant — display windows empty at 214, papered over at 212 — while the county’s cards record the upper floors as apartments. What endures is the fabric a clothier paid for a century ago: the buff-brick front with its balconies and Greek key, the carved name and date at the parapet, the checkered bulkheads, and the LEFKOWITZ mosaic still greeting anyone who steps out of the street into the old entrance. Among the named merchant blocks of downtown — the Diamonds Building next door at 216, raised and carved in the same mid-1920s burst, and the Hasler Building on West Market — this one remembers, in stone and tile, the man who made it.