Steve Orr

@SOrr1

A mansion from Rochester's gilded age, its historic significance overlooked for years by the Monroe County agency that owns it, has been badly damaged by fire and is to be unceremoniously torn down.

The house at 2100 St. Paul St., torched in an apparent arson Sunday morning, was built more than a century ago and has a remarkable provenance: The property, in what once was a most fashionable part of town, has connections to three different lions of the city’s industrial past.

"St. Paul has its own history of distinctive houses and prominent residences. Not everybody lived on East Avenue," said Cynthia Howk, architectural research coordinator for the Landmark Society of Western New York.

But that history? Officials at Monroe County, which has owned the property since 2003, had not a clue.

“I don’t think they were aware of it,” said spokesman William Napier, referring to his colleagues in county government.

County officials now are preparing to have the house demolished, making it another noteworthy building lost in a city that has tossed aside many historic structures.

The richest part of 2100 St. Paul's history stems from its longest-tenured owner — Jeremiah G. Hickey, a Rochester native who quit school when he was 12 years old to help support his family and went on to co-found the Hickey-Freeman Clothing Co.

Jerry Hickey and his wife, Constance J. Hickey, lived in the vast house for 42 years and raised a large family there.

“This was a home that was right out of a novel. Grampy Hickey was the great industrialist, and Constance, his wife, was an elegant lady of society,” said Christopher Hickey, a grandson of the clothing-company magnate.

Years ago, the city of Rochester designated the 6,000-square-foot manse as a building of historic value. The structure, once surrounded by three acres of gardens and trees, is eligible for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places.

Howk called the brick-and-stucco house "distinctive," architect-designed in an Arts and Crafts style. Its impending demise, she said, was "unfortunate."

The house was never placed on the national registry, and its use as a family home ended long ago. When Hickey died in 1960, four years after his wife, the family sold the property and the house was converted to a funeral home.

Then, 13 years ago, it was purchased for $330,000 by the Rochester Pure Waters District, a unit of Monroe County government that maintains the sewer system in the city.

The once- proud structure’s fate was sealed.

The county agency had intended to place equipment on the property to monitor a sewer main and an overflow tunnel that pass far below the house, Napier said, but never did so. If it had plans for the building itself, he said, no one in county government today knows what they were.

Part of the grounds were sold to a neighboring church. The paved lot was used, less and less often as time went by, as overflow parking for the Seneca Park Zoo across St. Paul Street.

The house was boarded up, the utilities were turned off and the building was left to molder. To county officials, apparently, it was just an old funeral home for which they had no use.

“Looking at the property, it was an older home, and the kind of home that folks were building when St. Paul was a grand boulevard,” Napier said. “But I had conversations with a number of people (in county government). … This is the first I’m hearing that it may have had historical significance.”

Chain of possession

At a time when that area was beyond the city limit, given over to farming and forests, the land where 2100 St. Paul now stands was owned by Hiram Sibley.

Sibley, who died in 1888, was one of the wealthiest and most prominent men in 19th century Rochester.

Sibley was just 16 when he arrived in the Rochester region from Massachusetts and opened the first of several successful small businesses. Later, he co-founded the Western Union Telegraph Co. and turned that revolutionary technology, analogous to the early Internet, into a commercial behemoth. He later expanded his fortune in lumber, mining, seed sales, farming and other endeavors.

County property records do not indicate when Sibley bought the land along St. Paul. But his heirs sold the property in 1909 to William L. Thompson, who had worked for the Sibley family for decades and become a wealthy man in his own right.

Thompson built the house that now sits at 2100 St. Paul and lived there a few short years. He died at home in May 1915.

At that time, Howk said, St. Paul was a favored building site for moneyed Rochesterians, especially those whose businesses were in the northeastern part of the city. There was no Route 104 expressway and no bridge over the Genesee River there.

"It was very scenic and quiet," she said.

After Thompson's death, the home was purchased by Andrew Wollensak, a German-born machinist who moved to Rochester in 1882 and co-founded Wollensak Optical Co. 17 years later — the same year that Hickey Freeman was born.

In its heyday, Wollensak was the nation’s leading manufacturer of camera shutters and lenses and employed 1,000 people at its facilities in northeast Rochester. The company, which later marketed audio tape recorders, ceased operations in 1972.

Wollensak lived in the mansion next door, and had purchased 2100 St. Paul for his daughter Emma and her husband, Jacob L. Magin, who was an executive at the optical company. They took title to the house in late 1917.

A few months later, perhaps having thought better of living next door to the family patriarch, they conveyed the property to the Hickeys in return for $25,000 cash and the deed to the Hickey’s home on Lake Avenue.

That estimable Irish-Catholic family — Jerry Hickey’s brother, the Rev. Thomas Francis Hickey, served as Rochester’s Roman Catholic bishop from 1909 to 1928 — lived there for the next 42 years.

“In the years of my childhood we went there many times for Christmas, Easter, birthdays and other celebrations. The great wood-framed glass door opened onto marble steps that led to a plush carpeted, dark wood-paneled main hall,” Christopher Hickey recalled.

“To the right was the elegant living room, and straight down the hall the dining room. We sat around the large table at dinner, with Grampy at the head of the table,” he said. "The cook would be called form the kitchen by a buzzer under the table. Her name was Rosa Lohrmann and she was very sweet and loving to me. I remember her taking me to the zoo, walking through Seneca Park."

Hickey Freeman, founded by Hickey, Jacob L. Freeman and several others in 1899, became a large, nationally known manufacturer of men’s clothing. Jerry Hickey, who presided over the firm for more than 60 years, was a business and civil leader who stood with the Eastmans, the Gleasons, the Shumways and the Gannetts.

Though ownership of the company long ago passed from the founding families, Hickey Freeman survives today, turning out suits and other clothing at the same North Clinton Avenue "Temple of Fine Tailoring" to which Hickey traveled daily from his nearby home on St. Paul.

Already weathered one fire

That home, interestingly, survived a major fire in 1936 that damaged the upper reaches of the property.

The fire that was reported shortly after midnight on Sunday also appears to have done the worst damage in the upper floors of the home. It developed into a three-alarm blaze, with a dozen Rochester Fire Department trucks responding.

City officials said they were still investigating the cause, but Napier said "there were reports of multiple points of origin suggestive of arson."

Both city and county officials say the home was not a trouble spot, with no reports of break-ins or the like.

Napier said the house was damaged enough that the proper course of action was to tear it down. The city, which has more experience with demolition, has agreed to oversee that task, officials said Friday. The schedule wasn't yet clear.

Given the homes inclusion on the city's official "Designated Buildings of Historic Value" list, a private owner would need to seek a zoning variance before demolishing the building. But the county, a higher level of government than the city, has no obligation to get a variance, city officials said.

As it turns out, Napier said, the county was in negotiation to sell the property, though he would not identify the would-be buyer. "As a result of the fire, we now have to meet with the party to determine where we go from here," he said.

Asked if the county had been a proper steward of the historic home, Napier passed the buck to former county executives Maggie Brooks and John Doyle, who led the county government during the time the property was purchased and allowed to sit empty.

Cheryl Dinolfo, for whom Napier now works, became county executive in January.

"I can’t say what the decisions were by people in the previous administrations or what their thought was about the property," he said. "All I can tell you is currently we were looking to sell the property to someone who was looking to put it to a useful purpose."

He did not say what that purpose would have been.

Map showing 2100 St. Paul St.

SORR@Gannett.com