The T-Mobile store here at 992 Springfield Ave. - whose employees and customers were evacuated from a partial building collapse Sept. 30 - may be reopened for business by the time you read this.
New or regular cell phone customers cannot miss the building at the northwest corner of Springfield and Myrtle avenues even though the T-Mobile lettering has been removed from its facade.
A&S General Contractors, of North Plainfield, has erected scaffolding around the two-and-a-half story building's yellow brick face. What rubble that fell onto the Five Points street corner at about noon Sept. 30 was carted away later that Friday afternoon.
That debris included bricks, signage and a steel I-beam that missed whatever pedestrians who were present that lunch hour. Officials, from Irvington Mayor Wayne Smith to Deputy Fire Chief John Tierney, said that no one in or out of the 1930s building was injured in the mishap.
The partial collapse closed that part of Springfield Avenue until about 4 p.m. Sept 30, rerouting traffic around Irvington's commercial heart.
"Our building inspector had determined that the building need not be demolished Sept. 30," said Smith to "Local Talk" Oct. 4. "We had the building owner call in a general contractor and a crane to lift part of the roof. The roof had caved into the second floor, pushing out beams and bricks."
Both Smith and Tierney, who was the incident commander Sept. 30, said that the building's second floor offices were unoccupied at the time.
992 Springfield Ave.'s owner is listed in the township's current tax assessor's book as Alba Yedid, of Brooklyn, N.Y. Yedid, on the assessor's book, also owns the adjacent former 994 Springfield Ave. lot plus four other commercial-retail buildings within the Central Irvington Business Improvement District. "Local Talk" was unable to contact Yedid before press time.
992 Springfield Ave., by "Local Talk" calculation and research, has been sitting on a 3,430-square-foot lot since 1933. The building with Art Deco styling touches was one of the last to replace the wood frame buildings that had street-level businesses around the Five Points. (994 Springfield Ave., a longtime produce market and billiard hall, was replaced in the early 1970s with a Fotomat-like drive-in booth.)
Newark clothiers Morris and Harry Miller moved their Miller and Sons business to the building in 1936. The Millers sold boys and men's clothing there until Olga Miller, Harry's widow in South Orange, closed it Dec. 29, 1962. Those with more recent memory recall the J&B Variety Store, opened by Nicholas Serrohico, of Bayonne.
Serrohico and the Millers must have known something about prime location since 992 Springfield Ave. took up one of the Five Corners.
The former Lenni Lenape trail that became Clinton Avenue was first bisected by the Newark and Springfield Turnpike - now Springfield Avenue - in 1806. Clinton Township elders renamed the southern road into modern day Hillside and Union townships Union Avenue in 1858 in honor of Union County's 1857 creation.
An 1858 map of Clinton Township and Camptown, Irvington's ancestors, depicts Myrtle Avenue as a dead end alley. Myrtle would be the last through street created.
The Five Points was an important stage coach and bus route stop long before its late 20th Century name. Public Service established the Irvington Bus Terminal, still serving nine NJTransit bus routes, was first built in the 1930s. The Garden State Parkway came through in 1952-54.
That same traffic nexus became a bottleneck for five hours Sept. 30. A "Local Talk" delivery team was among the detoured traffic around 1:30 p.m.
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