1925

Today it's the Stetson-Harza Building, and for 50 years before that it housed Woolworth's. From 1880 to 1939, though, the entire six-floor building was the home of Fraser's Department Store, founded in 1876 by Robert Fraser on the west side of Genesee Street. Four years later he moved across the street to 173-181 Genesee St.

A local historian once wrote that Fraser's was "the busiest and finest department store under one roof between New York City and Buffalo." The store had dozens of departments ranging from men's and women's clothing to carpeting to furniture and appliances.

One of the highlights of the city's summer season was Fraser's annual picnic at Madison Lake for his employees. Large crowds lined Genesee Street the morning of the outing to see the Fraser family and dozens of employees parade up Genesee to Oneida Square where they boarded trolleys for the trip to the lake, just south of the village of Madison. They were led by marching bands and were greeted at the Square by a display of fireworks.

"Fraser's is on fire!" From one end of the city to the other at the supper hour on the evening of May 10, 1905, the word sped, and within a matter of minutes the streets were filled with young and old hurrying toward downtown. The fire, a $500,000 loss, had broken out at about 5 that afternoon, when smoke was observed seeping through the boards of the first floor of the drygoods store, from the basement.

In a, matter of minutes, the building was emptied of clerks and office staff. Almost immediately the fire was sweeping through the lower part of the store, soon to leap in bursts of flame to the second, third and fourth stories.

The fire department, every company of which was on the scene in record time after the alarm was turned in, worked valiantly. But the force of the streams of water, provided by the steam-pipe engines then in use, made little impression on the flames.

It looked for a time as though the whole block of business places would go. As it was, damage to the stores adjacent to Fraser's was considerable. In the Genesee Street block, from the left, were the A. B. Mather Bank, at Genesee and Bleecker; Tygert's Restaurant, John H. Sheehan's Drug Store, John A. Roberts Drygoods Store, Buckingham & Moak, Piano Dealers, with Mansbach's Millinery Store on the first floor; Fraser's Drygoods Store, Howarth & Ballard's Drug Store, the Parlor Shoe Store and Parker's Grocery at Genesee and Elizabeth Streets.

John C. Swan, office manager for Fraser's store then, recalled how Robert Fraser indominatably dispatched his store buyers to New York the day after the fire for an entire new stork of everything from thread to carpets. Within 30 days Fraser's had its head­quarters established in the Sherwood & Golden crockery store at 125 Genesee. Shortly there­after Robert Fraser bought that store, crockery and all, and did a flourishing business there while the burned-out drygoods store was being rebuilt.

That job was completed in March, 1907, when Fraser's moved back to the old stand. There, until 1939, when it went out of busi­ness, the store, up-to-date in every particular, catered to shoppers from all over Central New York. In 1940, the F.W. Woolworth Co. remodeled the first two floors and moved in.