Lewis Crafts Building, 112 Market Street: September 2019
As mentioned in my last two posts, several buildings located on the northwest corner of Front and Market Streets will be demolished soon. This news was reported on the front page of last week's edition of The Link (paywalled). The paper states that one of the buildings to be demolished is the old Lewis Crafts Building yet specifies no address for it; however, the yellow demolition notice sheet that has been affixed to some of these properties shows a 112 Market Street address so I am assuming that is the address of the old Lewis Crafts Building.
I cannot find any information online about Lewis Crafts. Looking inside the windows on the front of the building, I see what appears to be an office, one that, if already abandoned, has not been abandoned for long because the clock on the wall still showed the correct time. Of course, I was out here on a Sunday so if someone is still using this building as an office (1) they wouldn't be here on a Sunday and (2) it doesn't really matter because they're going to have to move anyway.
The building is old enough to have been built during a time when central heating was neither readily available nor cheap because it has a chimney on the roof so it could easily be one hundred years old. Given its age, it does not look to be in bad shape. I am not sure what the deal is with the ice machine out back, and it didn't seem to be running. I started to look inside the machine, but when I touched the door handle, a wasp flew out. Suffice to say the desire to not be stung easily won against any curiosity I had about the machine.