Center Avenue building’s rich history remembered following demolition
What's now a pile of bricks at the corner of Center Avenue and South Cliff Street was once a bustling hotel, the childhood home of a Philadelphia Eagles executive and a furniture business, according to a local historian.
The vacant structure at 119 Center Ave. was reduced to rubble Friday, Sept. 15, after sustaining significant damage during a fire early that morning.
Crews were called at 3:24 a.m. Friday and remained on the scene into the afternoon fighting the blaze. Two interior floors collapsed during the fire, and the building was demolished Friday afternoon after an assessment found that it was unsafe.
According to local historian Bill May, the Center Avenue structure was built in 1906 as the Keystone Hotel, and opened its doors officially in 1907.
It was designed by local architect William Foster and built by Hugh McNamee, a Murrinsville man who had opened a successful furniture store on Butler’s South Side when he was only 20 years old.
“Building on this success, he began construction of his 45-room Keystone Hotel in 1906,” May said. “It catered mainly to those traveling into town by train and disembarking from the B&O Railroad Station a few hundred yards up off Center Avenue.”
Accommodations at the establishment included an extensive number of rooms, an elevator and even a bar on the first floor.
May said the hotel bar was the subject of some controversy in 1918.
“(Hugh McNamee) was cited and brought before a judge when they banned liquor during the Spanish flu epidemic. It was just like COVID, except things weren’t shut down for as long,” he said.
The Keystone Hotel was not the only place to stay on the street, according to May. Just a few steps away at 100 Center Ave. was the Atlas Hotel.
“They were built just about the same time. Both went after similar tradesman,” he said. “Atlas would have been a little higher-up. It catered more toward traveling salesmen. Keystone was more for railroad workers or manufacturing workers.”
Unlike the Keystone Hotel, the former Atlas Hotel building still stands. It was formerly the location of Grace Youth and Family Foundation’s Net Cafe.
The Keystone was “budget conscious lodging,” May said, charging guests $1.50 per day. This was far less expensive than Butler’s Nixon Hotel on Diamond Street.
“I believe at that time the Nixon (rate) was three times what the Keystone would have been,” he said. “(The Nixon) was the crown jewel of Butler.”
According to May, the Nixon attracted the high-class customer, one of those being 27th U.S. President William Howard Taft.
“The Keystone, some would say, had more infamous people,” he said. “(It) would have never attracted someone with financial means.”
Owner and operator McNamee lived in the hotel with his wife and children, May said.
One of his three sons, Frank L. McNamee, was born in 1892, and went on to make a name for himself as one of the “Happy Hundred” investors in the Philadelphia Eagles football team in 1949.
Frank resided in the hotel as a teenager, then went off to college at Washington & Jefferson. He then obtained a law degree from the University of Pittsburgh in 1918.
May said Frank never practiced law, but had many high-ranking positions throughout his career. In 1950, he was appointed by Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford as the president of their filmmaking company, United Artists.
Just a year before, Frank had invested $3,000, along with 99 others, to buy the Philadelphia Eagles.
“Frank would go on to serve as its president from 1953 to 1964, where he helped lead the organization to two NFL Championships,” May said.
Hugh McNamee sold the hotel in 1923 to a new owner, who closed it for lodging two years later. It would go on to house various businesses, including a restaurant, Potter-McCune Wholesale Grocers and Elliott Furniture Auction.
Clair Boring, who bought the building in 2010, used it for storage until it burned. He said it was also being used as storage when he took it over, and that there weren’t many remnants of the hotel’s past left.
“Some of the rooms were still partitioned as rooms — you could go down the hallway and see room after room on the third floor,” he said. “It was a heck of a building, and I hate to see it gone like that.”
