Fire destroys Beacon building

Did the headline startle you?

Well, it did the same thing to Dave Scott, former deputy business editor and regional issues reporter at the BJ.

It was a “scary moment at the gym,” Dave said, because the TV “Screen said Beacon roof collapsed in a fire.”

False alarm.

It was a “Beacon Building,” but not the one owned by David Black’s Canadian company. It was an abandoned building on North Howard Street in Akron. Apparently someone or some firm with Beacon in its name. The building burned to the ground and is a total loss.

The structure went up in 1913 but hadn’t been used for years.

North Howard was closed in both directions between Cuyahoga Falls and Tallmadge Avenue.

No one was injured in the fire.

Last month Mark J. Price, the excellent reporter of historical events for the BJ, wrote about two Howard Street buildings collapsing in an 1891 disaster.

Two shops occupied adjacent three-story buildings on the west side of South Howard Street in downtown. The stores were south of the West Market Street crossroads of Hall’s Corners, an intersection that no longer exists today but served for a century as the center of the retail district.

The buildings housed Shepherd B. Lafferty’s Model Bakery, a dining hall, lunch counter and confectionery, and, next door, Herrick & Son, which specialized in “wholesale and retail china, glassware, crockery, stoneware, fruit jars and lamps of every description.”

Both structures were built after a major fire destroyed earlier businesses on Howard Street in 1852. A heavy wall separated the two stores.

No one was killed in the collapse of the buildings, except for a horse that had been hitched to a post in front of the stores.

Damage was more than $50,000 — about $1.3 million today.

Herrick & Son reopened two days later on Main Street in a vacant room at the Academy of Music. Lafferty reopened at a Market Street storefront.

The Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co. bought the disaster site and built a grocery that operated for decades. The entire block came crashing down when Akron razed South Howard buildings for 1960s urban renewal.

Today, the site of the 1891 disaster rests near the parking garage at the back of the Federal Building.