Lou’s View

By Lou Bernard

I bet you never noticed.

If you’re reading this, there’s a pretty good chance you’ve been on Lock Haven’s Main Street. Maybe you’ve driven by, maybe you’ve been out for a walk. But there’s a lot that people don’t notice as they go past.

There’s a secret code above the door to the post office, and a government marker right beside it. There’s a mural downtown that’s a bit risqué, and nobody ever notices until I mention it on tours. There are several hidden symbols on the Civil War monument. There’s plenty of stuff that people walk right past all the time, and nobody ever notices.

And if you’ve walked on the corner of Main and First Streets, you’ve been by one of these spots.
I was riding by it the other day, and it hit me that I had mentioned this on tours, but I’d never really written about it before. It’s not the first time I’ve had a moment of “Hey, I should really write about this sometime.”

The house on the northeast corner of Main and First was built in 1888, according to the Historic Resource Survey Form. There are Historic Resource Survey Forms filled out for a lot of buildings in the county, detailing the history and architecture of old buildings. They were done by a committee in the Eighties, and they don’t give the building any special status—They just mean that the buildings were deemed interesting enough to do the research.

So in 1888, they went to work building a house at 55 West Main Street. The property had been owned by a J. Furst, according to the 1869 map, and he already had a house next door. He sold one lot so that 55 West Main could be built. The designer was P.A. Wesh of Philadelphia, and the contractor was local man J.C. Johnson. (Again, I didn’t look this up exactly; it’s all on the survey form.)

The building wound up being somewhat unique, even for Lock Haven, a community known for its unique buildings. (The Simpson Building, the Kistler House, and the Crawford House all come to mind when you bring up unique buildings in Lock Haven.) It was built at the high point of the boom economic era, when homeowners were all competing to see who could get the biggest, coolest-looking house.

The survey form says,”Together these men produced a very unusual structure; prominent for its unordinary Queen Anne roof-line.”

If you stop on the corner and look up—No, not that way, that’s just a tree. No, now you’re looking away from the house—Never mind. Just look at the roof of 55 West Main, okay? That’s the last time I try to creatively talk like a tour guide in a column. Okay. Look at the roof. There is a selection of noticeably different roof styles up there.

“Nowhere else in LH’s Nationally registered Water St. District is there a house with so many unusual roof styles,” states the survey form. “The combination includes flared gables, steeply pitched hip, shed dormers and an octagon-shaped dormer.” I assume this is all important; I’m more of a historian than an architect, but as you go by, you definitely notice the odd roof styles, all crammed together into one roof up there. (There’s a similar interesting situation down the street at 120 West Main, where the builder obviously had a thing for different styles of windows.)

55 West Main also has colored window glass, other unique window styles, and a few bits and pieces that aren’t part of the original structure. The Historic Resource Survey Form, filled out in 1984, makes note of these. Stop by the library sometime; I’ll show it to you.