This ornate building was put up in the 1880s for an obviously prosperous grocer named F. Beckert, and that is as much as old Pa Pitt can tell you about it. Whoever drew the Ohio Street façade had a great deal of fun tracing angular intersecting lines. In fact those lines may be more clever than we realize at first glance: they disguise the asymmetry of the front. The left bay is wider than the other two, but because of the complexity of the patterns in the ornamentation, we read the building as symmetrical.

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Except for the new windows on the second floor, which look a bit staring but do at least seem to fit the holes they were made for, this building is unusually well preserved—a Victorian feast of ornaments of all types, applied lavishly but not without an eye for the overall effect.

The fact that the left half is a sort of narrower duplicate of the right half suggests that it was built as an addition when Mr. Hollander acquired the lot next door.

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