Standing on the 500 block of South Bethlehem’s East Third Street, with the long closed Bethlehem Steel Corporation’s headquarters, from which Schwab and Grace once ruled an industrial empire at your back, it is almost possible to agree with the unknown wit who stated cynically that, “the history of America is parking lots.”
But out of this sea of asphalt, a small, white, neo-classical gem of a building rises, demanding to be heard. This refugee from a time when Europe’s “tempest tossed” came to Bethlehem Steel to hopefully create a new life in a new world was once the Gosztonyi Savings and Trust Company.
Created by immigrants John and Rozi Gosztonyi in the early 20th century, it represented for newcomers to America, a way to understand this new land and to build a way of life.
If the streets of the new country were not, as some had been led to believe “paved with gold,” at least with the aid of people like the Gosztonyis they could begin to save their hard-earned wages, buy a home, raise a family and, like many immigrants do to this day, send money back to their relatives.
Today, after many years the Gosztonyi Savings and Trust building is about to embark on a new life. It is now Social Still, a craft distillery. The building’s new owners are Bethlehem Renovations II, a limited liability company of BethWorks Now, an original developer of the former Bethlehem Steel plant. They are supporting and encouraging the effort to have the Gosztonyi building placed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Their inclusion was recommended unanimously by the Bethlehem Historical Conservation Commission. If the plan meets national historical standards, it would enable developers to apply credits toward the project, which is estimated to cost $1 million. The Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission also gave its support.
The remarkable Gosztonyi family began their life in America with John. He apparently left Austria-Hungary in the early 1880s.
One source claims Gosztonyi’s first stop in Pennsylvania was Plymouth, Luzerne County. It was a center of anthracite mining and he is said to have gone there as a miner. But a combination of poor working conditions, ethnic prejudice and perhaps the typhoid epidemic of 1885 that struck the immigrant community there hard, led him to leave for Phoenixville.
Another source claims Gosztonyi came first to Phoenixville and was a miner there for a time. Here he eventually opened a general store and published one of the first Slovak language newspapers in the country.
It was also here, in 1886 or 1887, one source claims, that he met and married Rozi Gosztonyi. They were to have five children: Charles, John, Rudolph, Rose and Julius. Charles would graduate from Lehigh in 1910 with an engineering degree and later work as a superintendent for Bethlehem Steel before joining his mother at the bank.
In 1888, Rozi’s uncle Otto Tachovsky arrived in America and went to work in Gosztonyi’s store as a clerk. After a time in Philadelphia he would work for Gosztonyi in Bethlehem before becoming the proprietor of the Arcade Hotel at East North Third Street.
From his arrival in Bethlehem in 1892, Gosztonyi turned his hand to a number of business ventures, including a food market and a saloon. His most successful was the Lapierre Hotel, a boarding house for immigrants.
Here, seeing the need, he established a foreign exchange bank for immigrants. In time it grew to the largest foreign exchange operation in the city. He may have already been depending on his wife to help him with at least some aspects of the business.
Tragedy struck the Gosztonyi family on May 22, 1905 when John Gosztonyi, then in his 40’s, died suddenly. Rozi stepped in to take over the business and banking interests, including running the Lapierre Hotel. Her uncle Otto took on the task of acting as a father and guardian figure for the young children until they reached maturity.
By the 1919, it was apparently clear to Rozi that running the business out of her home or a hotel was no longer how she wanted to operate. Probably in 1922 she contacted the Allentown architectural and engineering firm of Tilghman Moyer Company, whose primary clients were businesses and banks.
Two prominent local structures that Moyer designed in Allentown in the 1920s were the Dime Savings and Trust Building, now the Dime Restaurant of the Renaissance Hotel, and the offices of Arbogast & Bastian, an Allentown meatpacker, now used as office space by the America on Wheels transportation museum.
The building the Moyer firm designed for the Gosztonyi Trust was a handsome, stately, understated Neo-classical revival structure. It fit the image that most people had of a bank building, solid and respectable. Moyer was so proud of its building that it featured it in its 1924 publication, “Building the Bank for Business.”
Throughout the 1920s, the Gosztonyi bank thrived with Rozi Gosztonyi at the helm. One publication of the day called her the first female bank president in Pennsylvania.
But the collapse of stock market in 1929 and the Great Depression of the 1930s, that saw Bethlehem Steel operating only three days a week, hit the little institution hard. According to one source, by 1933 it was only able to pay fifty cents for every dollar deposited. In 1934 it was reorganized under the name the Gosztonyi Bank. In 1939 it became a branch of the People’s Bank.
Yet the entrepreneurial spirit that powered the Gosztonyi family continued to thrive with the establishment of a popular travel bureau business on Bethlehem’s Main Street that continued into the 1980s.
The placing of the Gostztonyi Savings and Trust Building on the National Register of Historic Places will be a tribute not just to one family but to hardworking immigrant men and women in the thousands who, over the years, built both a steel industry and a country.
from 69News:Home http://ift.tt/1E7e9yP
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