The Past is not Far Away in One Block in West Chester

History has been on the minds of many West Chester residents, especially since a large chunk of the borough’s historic district –three individual structures on more than an acre of land – has been the subject of heated debate in recent public meetings with the Chester County Commissioners.   The county owns the buildings in the heart of the borough, and has accepted bids for their sale and development.

The block became part of West Chester Historic District more than twenty years ago, but that has never secured its protection. Back in 2000, there was a proposal to raze the block and build a new Justice center there. The proposal had a positive outcome – a historic survey was completed and a detailed history of each of the eleven buildings  in the so-called First Block helped persuade local residents and the borough of its architectural and historic value.

Compared to many landmarks, the quadrant of the block from the corner of West Gay and North Church Streets may seem to have an obscure significance  - the kind that inspires those jokey plaques that read “on this site, nothing happened!”    The fact that the buildings have served as county office space hasn’t helped either. It’s difficult to see the architectural beauty of these building behind facades that partly hide features such as Federal–style  townhouses and  1920s Art Deco.

One of the Federal-style buildings, 34 West Gay Street, provides a  window onto the borough’s history as a welcoming Quaker town after the Civil War. In the 1800s, “Burns Great Oyster House” was one of a handful of black-owned businesses taking up prime real estate -  in the center of the borough.  The significance of its history will be explained in subsequent story posts.  As for the other buildings in this block,  they once housed Chester County’s largest department store, Mosteller’s. 

Mosteller’s – More than a department store, a neighborhood institution.

To hear longtime residents describe it, one might conclude that it was like any big-city department store - say, Macy's of New York, with its celebrity Santa Claus and fabulous window displays.

It was Mosteller's Inc., which, during its heyday in the 1960s, occupied a sizable corner of Church and Gay Streets in downtown West Chester.  It was not the only department store in town, but it was the most impressive .  Indeed, the building was routinely described by news accounts as the "largest store in Chester County," a place where merchandise was elegantly displayed on four "selling floors,"  and where patrons could buy everything from pots and pans and artists paints  to prom dresses. 

For many, Mosteller's had become to represent the good old days, a time when people shopped in West Chester and customers were known on first-name basis. Others remember this family-owned business as part  of a large business community that drew out-of-towners, and a place where local office workers liked to spend their lunch hours. 

There were other family-owned stores in West Chester, such as Benson's, a clothing store. There were also chain stores there, such as W.T. Grant Co., J.J. Newberry Co. and F.W. Woolworth Co.  Still, of all the stores, Mosteller's, with its gleaming windows and silvery art deco-style lettering above its front doors , seemed to have cornered the market on sophistication. For many residents, it was a place so big - it was typically described as having "more than an acre of space" - it could take an entire afternoon to explore.

For a 2002 newspaper story, I interviewed several residents including the late Margaret "Peg" Baldwin who recalled that Mosteller‘s was more than a department story but a meeting place on Friday night. “That was the night you had to go to Mosteller’s” Baldwin recalled,” We bought everything. Clothes, dishes, linens, household things. It was the kind of store we should have now.

The late Harold Barnett, then 82, spoke as a former employee, recalling that "you would come in and feel comfortable browsing,"   He had worked as a window designer and later oversaw the store's advertising, and in recalling his years at the store, spoke of those years in the same tone that World War II veterans use when speaking of the postwar boom years.

Barnett recalled it as a time when shopping was a neighborly experience and people followed the “service with a smile” credo, long "before the malls came."  "In those days, people used to come to town, park their cars, and spend the evening just window shopping," Barnett said, "It wasn't just our store [that] people came to see, but all the stores in town."

Barnett, who worked for Mosteller's for 40 years beginning in 1938, recalled the many aspects of his job, such as going to New York to learn about window displays. At Mosteller's, people could expect to find the December-holiday window displays up as early as Halloween, Barnett said.  By Christmas, Mosteller's Santa Claus had seen more crowds than a politician on Election Day.

Of course, Mosteller’s  earned its reputation -  it was the “place to be and be seen” – not overnight but after  a long period of expansions, over several decades. 

The business started out small - as a two-story dry goods store in 1920 - and continued to expand up North Church Street and along West Gay Street until it was generally described as “modern structure” with large display windows and  an entrance on Gay Street.

Indeed, its founders, James B. Mosteller, his oldest son Dewees, first took over the long-established store known as Moses & Lumis  – it was housed in a tidy brick building at 19 and 21 North Church Street – with the intention of continuing  it as a dry goods store. 

James Mosteller had long operated a general store and creamery business in the northern Chester County village of Birchrunville and was eventually joined by his two younger brothers in West Chester, according to a 1949 program celebrating the store’s 150th anniversary.

When Moses & Lumis was in operation, it  was surrounded by grocery stores, livery stables and several large hotels including the handsome Beaux Arts-style corner building at Church and Gay housing the White Hall Hotel. By the late 1920s, the Mosteller’s  had changed the scope of their operations, perhaps echoing the day’s business outlook as West Chester grew from a  so-called “farmers’ town” to a county center.

Judging from the 1949 program, after  the “modern” improvements were made  in 1927, Mosteller’s began to look like a dressy department store with drapes hanging in its second-floor windows and mannequins on display in the front entrance.  

Curiously, no mention was made of residents’ reaction to Mosteller’s a state-of-the-art elevator, complete with an operator who announced the floors.  However, when a new 10,000 gallon water tank was installed, in 1929, on top of the store, one local newspaper noted that there was much “attention and anxiety.”  “For a few days customers were afraid to enter the store in fear that it might fall upon them,” the paper said of new tank, which held 7,000 gallons “at all times” and was designed to supply an automatic sprinkling system.

By 1929,  Mosteller’s was a  full-fledged department store with three floors of merchandise.  By then, the family had purchased two additional businesses  –    25 and 27 on N. Church street – including  clothier Barrington S. Eldridge whose business “immediately became part of the establishment, ” as one account described it.  In 1941, the Mosteller family expanded on W. Gay street by purchasing two of the leading men’s stores, the 53-year-old enterprise J.R. Harkness, as well as Whitcraft and Croff, which had been business for 27 years.  

Two properties including the Boston Clothing Store were acquired along  Gay Street in 1944 and 1945, and were demolished the following year  and replaced with one structure, an Art Deco-style building, with diamond-shaped detailing on its façade and  herringbone brickwork.  Although news accounts observed that the new building was designed to blend in with the original Mosteller’s store on Church Street, the Mosteller family made subsequent changes that were vastly different - perhaps in keeping with the “modern” mindset of the post-war years.

In 1987, the West Chester Historic District was established and recorded in the prestigious National Register of Historic Places.  It included the entire block on which the Mosteller complex is located.  A 2001 report prepared by West Chester's Historic and Architectural Review Board (see the 2.4.1.building description   at  www.west-chester.com/historicinv.php) noted that the corner of the block had an appropriate height and scale as other buildings in the district and that many of the closed-in windows, including the handsome Palladian windows shown in early photographs, could be easily restored.

Thus preserved, Mosteller’s,  which closed in 1981 after a slow decline beginning in the 1970s when the Exton Square Mall was built,  could be rehabilitated to retain the diversity of West Chester’s many historic eras.