BRATTLEBORO — The lower end of Main Street looked a good deal different in 1927 than it does today, but the soon to be built Brattleboro Food Co-op, located where Best Muffler was recently torn down, follows some of the foot prints of the long gone Vinton Block.
In a way, it will return lower Main Street back to the way it looked 83 years ago.
“Vinton Block is Nearly Finished,” was the headline in the business section of the Jan. 14, 1927, edition of The Brattleboro Daily Reformer. “Total cost is about $90,000.”
The new Brattleboro Food Co-op building will be built for around $10 million.
The Reformer article laid out the particulars.
“Brattleboro's chief mercantile acquisition for the year 1926 is the new Vinton Block on lower Main Street, almost opposite the Plaza. (This is referring to the Plaza Park where the Spirit of Life Statue was erected.) The new building is a substantial structure of two stories, housing six stores, the upper story providing an annex for the Billings hotel. ….The erection of the new building not only serves to replace an unsightly and unused section of property, but serves to lengthen the business section of Main Street. It also gives indication that for the present at least the growth of the business section is toward the south.”
At the time that this article was written, four of the six shops planned for the building had already been rented. The Vinton Block was to house six stores on the street level and a second story some of which was to be used as an annex for The Hotel Billings. An overhead bridge was to connect the upper story with the main hotel building next door.
The Brattleboro Candy Shop, already located at 109 Main St., was planning a second store. The proprietor, Nicholas Bardis, was to manage the new store, and business partner Peter Apostoles would continue to run their shop on Main Street. The Candy Shop offered “confections, ice cream, sodas and a luncheonette.”
Homer Broe, who had been operating the Cash and Carry Market in the Abbott apartment building, planned to open a meat market and grocery store in the basement of the new building.
The third store was a men's furnishing shop, operated by Elmer W. Fuller, who for several years had been employed in the men's department in the Goodnow, Pearson & Hunt store, located at the current site of Twice Upon a Time on the Main Street hill.
The fourth rented store housed Andrew Petrosini, a shoemaker who had been operating his business at 25 Canal Street, and planned to specialize in shoe repair.
The Vinton Block was situated on a side hill and was 13 feet higher at the south end than at the north, and on “a decided curve of the street,” the article stated, “which presented much more than the average problem in the design and construction” of the building.
The building had frontage of 145 feet of Canal Street and a depth of 65 feet. It actually comprised three large triangles which when assembled together provided an area of about 6,300 square feet. It had a Greek Doric design.
Two firewalls extended from the floor of the basement to the roof, and the firewalls were equipped with automatic fire doors, a new feature for its time period. The main floor was divided into six stores varying in size and shape which provided each with two display windows of glazed plate glass.
The outside had “cast stone of a limestone color.” The Art Stone Co. of Millers Falls, Mass., was the mason. The roof was flat with a main cornice of copper and stucco. The store entrance floors were of a colored concrete block and the interior floors were hardwood. An “electrically operated freight elevator, installed by the Bay State Elevator Co. of Springfield, Mass., has been installed at the rear for the convenience of lessees of the two northernmost stores.”
Katherine Wright of Brattleboro was 13 and l living on South Main Street when the building rose up.
“My grandfather worked in the Vinton Building at the grocery store there. Over the years some of the stores changed. There was Park Drug Store and an appliance store at one time. The building was connected upstairs to The Hotel Billings building next door on the second floor,” she remembered. “My mother Mrs. Francis (Donna) Holiday made beds there part time. My father worked at the Estey Organ Factory and walked down to the hotel and waited for her every night in the lobby of the hotel on his way home from work.”
Another hotel in town
The Hotel Billings was operated by Arthur L. Billings. Located across the street from the railroad station, it had a steady clientele of business people, salesmen and visitors to the area. The Hotel Billings occupied the space between the Vinton Block and the Wilder Block, where the entrance to the parking area of the Co-op now lies. Behind these buildings was the Vinton Paper Mill, and the Vinton Pond, a popular spot for ice skating in the winter.
The hotel had a lobby and restaurant on the first floor and 65 rooms on the second, third and fourth floors. These were the days when single men often boarded at a hotel long term. When the Vinton Block was completed, some of its rooms were located in what they called “the annex.” The cost of a night at the hotel was $1, $2 or $3, while rooms in the annex went for $1.50 per night. The Billings Restaurant was open for three meals a day.
Dummerston resident Ken Laughton had the pleasure of a meal at the Billings Restaurant, a real treat for a kid in 1938.
“There were six of us boys from Dummerston Center down to the Odd Fellows Hall on an outing for a 4-H event, with our leader, Mr. Bruce Buchannan. After the event, we all went down to the hotel for dinner. Dining out was a real treat for a kid in those days, so it was a great deal of fun,” he said.
After the death of Arthur Billings in 1941, his widow, who continued to operate the hotel, sold the building and the business to Peter and John Latchis.
The new owners announced in a Reformer article on Sept. 12, 1941, that “the Billings would be operated by the Latchis Hotel for the present in the same manner as in the past.”
Having acquired the building, the Latchis family then owned a majority of the buildings from the foot of Main Street to the corner of Flat Street. The former Vinton paper mill buildings then housed their private printing shop along with a garage behind the buildings along Main Street in the area where the Food Co-op is currently housed.
By Dec. 7, 1961, all that was left of these buildings was an editorial in the Reformer called “Obit of an Old Building.”
“Well on its way toward surrender to various methods of destruction – a ceremony including no mourners among those who watch it - the old Billings Hotel ... deserves something in the way of an obituary. While its exact age has not been determined it is believed to be about 70 years old. Once the site of its melodeon factory, the land was sold by the Estey Organ Co. in 1889 to Charles Miner, believed to be the original builder. It remained in his name along with that of Dr. Charles Sholes until 1907 when the property was sold to Arthur B. Clapp and after his death it was sold again in 1921 to the Billings family who made it into a hotel.
“In the case of the old Billings block the only source of personal recollections are of old time residents. In the course of its long life the block had a long list of tenants including a garage that at one time occupied its entire ground floor. It also housed a restaurant, a drug store, a candy shop and a basement food market.
“From its falling bricks, shattered plaster and twisted plumbing no sound has come to arouse the skeletons supposed to inhabit family closets as might well have been the case had a building with such a varied history been able to talk.”
Yet, buildings do stay alive so long as people retain memories of them, and Katherine Wright has a dandy.
“I happened to be going by the building one day when the electricity went out. All the ice cream in the shop was melting. The manager told me that I could eat all I wanted, but that wasn't much I can tell you. I'll never forget that day. Imagine, telling a young thing she could have all the ice cream she could ever want. I can remember that like it was yesterday,” she said with a broad smile.