Question: A rose by any other name may smell as sweet (per Shakespeare and Juliet), but a street by any other name could cause great confusion. Do you recognize any of the men in this photo? Do you know why they are surrounded by street signs?
Last week’s answer: The house in the photo from last week was located at 16 Charlotte St. approximately where the west side of the First United Methodist Church parking lot is now.
The 1875 directory shows that it was owned by the Voorhees family. In later years it was owned by the Heaton family. In 1941, the Heaton family heirs and Gates Funeral Home negotiated a real estate exchange under the direction of J. Amos Real Estate.
Gates Funeral Home had been operating at 56 Oswego St. for 16 years and needed more space. (Prior to that it was the location of Baldwinsville State Bank, Berndt & Michels Dry Cleaners and now Dani’s Dessert and Wine Bar).
When the transaction was complete, Gates Funeral Home, under the operation of Mrs. Harlan Gates and manager Lawrence Carter, relocated to Charlotte Street and ran their operation there until it moved to its current location at 29 W. Genesee St. in 1962.
At that time, the Methodist Church was running out of space, so they purchased the Charlotte Street property to use for Sunday school rooms, church offices and a meeting room. At that time it became known as the Lockwood Building, named after Mrs. Ethel T. Lockwood, who left a sizeable legacy to the church. She was the daughter of Addison Tooley, owner of the American Knife Works.
By the 1990s, the church was in need of more space so the house with the varied past was demolished to make room for the current education wing of the church.
Contact Editor Sarah Hall at [email protected] or leave a message at 434-8889 ext. 310 with your guess by 5 p.m. Friday (please leave the information in the message; we are not generally able to return calls regarding History Mystery responses). If you are the first person to correctly identify an element in the photo before the deadline, your name and guess will appear in next week’s Messenger, along with another History Mystery feature. History Mystery is a joint project of the Museum at the Shacksboro Schoolhouse and the Baldwinsville Public Library.
