Paving Crescent Avenue
This picture was taken by Harry W. Horton who was the Assistant Borough engineer under Alex Main from 1920-1925. The picture shows Ellwood City in an important stage of its development, when it was getting more of the community out of the infamous muddy roads following World War I.
The picture is taken from the front yard of town founder Henry W. Hartman on Fourth Street looking west up Crescent Avenue. The picture was originally taken to shows Crescent Avenue being paved with bricks made in Ellwood City. As you can clearly see, Fourth Street was already bricked and looked beautiful.
The picture was taken before Hartman Elementary School was built and while the old Lawrence Hotel was still standing. At the time or this picture, the hotel was no longer in business as it was sold to the Ellwood City School Board in 1915 and converted to a school building and apartments. The building in this picture in front of the hotel (approximately where the Statue of Liberty is located today) is probably a temporary building for school purposes.
There are a number of homes that have not yet been built along the north side of Crescent Avenue as you can see but there are a lot of things in the picture that are no longer there. The Methodist Church on the corner of Crescent and Fifth Street is still the original wooden structure (barely visible) and we are not sure what the steeple is beyond the hotel, approximately where the Saxon Club would build their first building (today the Denny Schill apartments stands on this ground). Also in the picture is just the very edge of the trees that lined Oliver Park that surrounded the hotel and gave Park Avenue its name.
This is another one of those great pictures where we are sure that we missed something so please leave any comments you might have below or email us at info@ellwoodcitymemories.com
Great info. A great uncle from Boston was working as a plumber in 1900 at what I belive was Crescent Ave. As a boarder in the census. Th e census taker did not list numbered houses in house # column only that uncle’s spot was 417 in terms of order of visitation on Crescent Ave. The census started on Borden Ave but then changed to Crescent. Any info about uncle’s location would be appreciated it appears on google maps and your site any structures housing folks then were torn down. Thans, Mark
This photo, more than any other I have seen on this site connected me to the past as it was almost 100 years ago. My grandfather told of working at the Oliver Hotel at the turn of the century. He was a carpenter. In fact he was there when the first murder in Ellwood happened near the hotel. The body was found under a tree and people thought the man was sleeping after a night out drinking. This photo was taken of a location most Ellwood people are familiar with and I can easily relate to the lay of the land and actually envision what it would have felt like to approach the hotel from that direction. I wish there were other pictures of the hotel from other directions that included more of the land around the buildings so that we could more easily locate it on that block.