TAYLOR, Pa. — There was a little less to see on day two of the demolition of an old hardware store on North Main Street in Taylor. On Monday, when demolition began, it drew quite a crowd.
"We were kidding yesterday. We were going to charge $2.50 to come over and sit here and watch it; we were making the joke. People were here all day yesterday watching it, and everyone had a different story," said Taylor Borough Manager Dan Zeleniak.
Fran Williams and her sister Alicia Lisowski have quite possibly the most interesting story about the 19th-century building. Their great-grandmother Mary Timlin built it.
"One year, for the first of the month of April, 1894, $30 a month," the granddaughters showed Newswatch 16 a rental lease.
The sisters' great-grandmother was a widow with five children when she built the three-story building in 1891 for a little more than $3,000. It was called the Morrow Hotel. Morrow was Mary Timlin's maiden name. Coal miners working in town would rent rooms in the space.
"We watched the back of it fall off. To see wallpaper in there that my great-grandmother probably put in those rooms is very touching and very sad to see," Williams said.
Most recently, it was the Leader Variety hardware store that sold pretty much everything; if it didn't have it, owner Seymour Weissberger would get it for you in a day or two.
"He attended every council meeting in Taylor, every school board meeting in Taylor. He was a legend," Zeleniak said.
The store closed a few years ago, and Weissberger passed away in 2019 at the age of 91. Folks around the borough knew for quite a while the building would be coming down, but that did not make seeing the debris in a pile any less shocking.
"The immediate visual is stunning to see it. It's been there forever, in my whole lifetime. It needed to go. It was really deteriorating to the point that it had to go," Zeleniak said.
Borough officials tell Newswatch 16 there are no plans right now for what will go in the space in the future.