By Wendell Nelson

Bill’s Pizza Shop’s present site is a very old part of Stevens Point.   Because this parcel of land—on the south side of Main Street, halfway between Strongs Avenue and Third (Water) Street—is in the middle of the city’s business district, it has been used by one business or another (occupied by one building or another) for almost 175 years. Unfortunately, most—if not all—of those original or earliest business buildings (some of which began as houses) are long-gone. (Some may have been moved from Main Street and scattered around the city, but locating them or their remnants would be almost impossible.)

Equally unfortunately, no old photos have yet surfaced showing that section of Main Street before about 1910, but according to the Sanborn Insurance Map for 1884, the building that occupied the space now occupied by Bill’s Pizza Shop—more or less—was a boarding house.

I write “more or less,” because it was wider than the lot occupied by Bill’s, so it took up parts of land now occupied by—west of Bill’s–the Wooden Chair restaurant (the old First National Bank building) and, on the east side of Bill’s, the former Osco Drug Store space.

This section of the 1884 Sanborn Insurance Map for Stevens Point shows the
south side of Main Street (the east half of the block between Strongs Avenue and Third/Water Street). Left of center is an irregularly shaped building labeled “BOARDING,” meaning a boarding-house—that is, a place where people (usually single men) not only rented sleeping-rooms, but also ate their meals—as in “room and board.”
104 years later, Bill’s Pizza Shop would be moved to that space, to the west half of the brick double-store that G.F. Andrae was to build in 1891-92.

(The Osco building was constructed in 1966, after the January, 1965, fire that destroyed the Continental Clothing and Hannon Pharmacy stores. After Osco Drugs vacated that space, in 1994, the River City Diner occupied it from 1998 to 2002. Next came several antique stores, operating together in a mall under various names. Still later, the Clay Corner Studio was there, and then the Blonde & Beyond beauty salon. Finally, that space now is occupied by Sentry Insurance Company’s IT Co-op program for UW-SP students.)

Who the owner or operator of that 1884 boarding house was, is a mystery so far. The first city directory wasn’t published until 1889, and by then the boarding house was gone. Also, the tax rolls for that part of the city (Outlots for the Original Plat) are unclear. (For some reason, that boarding house—the Sanborn Map shows–was set back several feet from Main Street, unlike all of the present business buildings, which stand flush against the sidewalk.)

According to the same 1884 insurance map, only one building still stands in the entire 400 (now 1000-1100) block of the south side of Main Street, that was standing in 1884. That was Alfred R. (“Allie”) White’s hardware store, which was constructed of stone, and which is now

the west part—containing the Reading and Magazine Room (2^nd Floor), the Pinery (meeting) Room (1^st Floor), and the Prairie (meeting) Room (basement)—of the Portage County Public Library. All of the other buildings have burned down, been moved off, been torn down, or were not built yet.

For our purposes here, one building that was standing in 1884 near where Bill’s later located, was the Stevens Point Journal’s press and office building. The map identifies it, and describes it as “veneered”—i.e., with brick. This was important for insurance purposes, because even brick “veneered” buildings (as opposed to structural brick buildings—whose walls were constructed of bricks, and not of wood merely sided with bricks) were more fire-resistant than buildings constructed entirely of wood.

The 1889-90 Stevens Point city directory gives the address of the Journal’s building as 435 Main Street. That would locate it as just west of the present Bill’s building, whose old address was 437. But in 1889 and 1890, Stevens Point’s buildings were just in the process of being numbered. There was some understandable confusion, and some initial numbers were changed after discrepancies and duplications came to light. And in any case, the Journal operation was moved a few years later. That 1884 Journal building’s fate is unknown.

This was the Certified Survey Map (CSM#3887-13-245) drawn on May 11,
1987, for Jensen Building Associates after they bought the Seifert’s
Women’s Store property at 1101 Main Street, and before they sold the building and land—“LOT ONE”–to Richard Boldt for the second site of Bill’s Pizza Shop.

The 1889-90 directory also places G.F. Andrae’s store—the previous one, before he built the one that Bill’s now occupies—at 439 Main Street, literally next door on the east to Bill’s present building, but nothing stood just west of it in 1889-90, except perhaps for the frame boarding-house mentioned earlier. Again, the Sanborn map places Andrae’s earlier building

there in 1884, but how long it stood there is a mystery; it may have burned down or been moved or torn down well before 1889.

(Gustave F. Andrae was born in 1849 in Germany—despite his French names—and came to America when he was 17 years old, his obituary in the October 15, 1910, Daily Journal said.

After stopping in Mayville, Wisconsin, for three years, he came to Stevens Point in 1869, and a year later “went into the mercantile business with Henry Hoeffler” in John A. Walker’s block

(now 1008) on Main Street. “This partnership was dissolved in 1874,” and the two men ran separate stores. Andrae’s was on the south side of Main Street—apparently the one at 439, which he occupied until he built the double-store that eventually became the home of Bill’s Pizza Shop.

(When Andrae died, in 1910, his estate was “probably the largest ever brought before the county court of Portage county. Its value will largely exceed $300,000, and may reach half a million dollars,” declared the November 30, 1910, Gazette. According to the website measuringworth.com, $300,000 would have been worth $7,980,000 in 2017, and, of course—because of inflation, worth even more in 2019.)

 Andrae constructed several downtown buildings besides the one that came to house Bill’s Pizza Shop. Best-known is the Grand Opera House (built in 1893-94), which later became the Fox Theatre, but also the triple-store building at 1055 Main Street, which once housed the Pal Restaurant, the Continental Clothing Store, and the Hannon-Bach Pharmacy (later the Coast-to-Coast Store, Badger Hardware, and Jim Laabs Music Store). And there are others. Andrae’s great-grandchildren continue to own some of those buildings.

NEXT: Bill’s building is born