I live in the yellow box house at Fifth and Fulton. I have heard it used to be everything from a meat market to a sewing shop. I’m especially interested to know after cleaning out my basement and finding a box full of vintage foil hot dog sleeves!

    Thanks for asking. I hope this won’t disappoint, but it’s really got a fairly mild history, and you’ve got most of it already. From 1914 until 1932 Mary Flynn ran a grocery and general store there.

    Had a few owners during the Great Depression: perhaps hard to make a go of it. In WWII, Arthur Anderson opened the Fifth Avenue Market (meats and groceries) and lived above it. Marx & Hagman Office Supplies took the retail space in the mid-’50s, but Anderson lived upstairs for another 30 years.

    You’re right: sewing shops in the ’70s – “Fifth Ave.” and then “J Five.” The retail space struggled through the ’80s: Short Stop West grocery, Helping Hand secondhand store, First Class Artistry (don’t know what they did). Became an up-down duplex in the early ’90s. Your wiener sleeves? Likely forties, fifties….

    For a half-century, the place directly across the street (just torn down this month) was also a grocery and meat market, owned by the Carroll family – and there were groceries nearby on Hudson, Bellinger, Oxford. Now, a guy’s gotta go clear to Mega West.

I’ve heard that the spooky-looking house on Ann Street used to be located somewhere else – and used to be a brothel! Any truth to that?

    This may disappoint you, too. It was indeed moved, but I don’t think it was a “habitation of the soiled dove,” as they used to say so discreetly.

    Brothels were thick in Eau Claire during the lumber heyday of the 1870s and ‘80s, and gave our city such colorful characters as Three-Fingered Mol. (Sounds like a lovely gal).

    Architecturally, 113 Ann Street is an example of the Second Empire style. (During Napolean’s reign, French designers came up with the characteristic flat roof so they could add another story without breaking Paris’ house-height code. The house in Hitchcock’s Psycho is a Second Empire, so now they’re spooky). Early settler and rich dude George Buffington built it in 1867, and lived there until he died in 1893.

    By 1899, D.R. Davis (Dells Pulp and Paper) called it home, but only briefly. He died in ‘03. His wife Claire stayed on until 1910. Don’t know about the six years between Buffington and Davis. Anything’s possible, but would Davis buy a place recently a brothel? And by 1910, hooker mania was pretty much over in Eau Claire.

    Buffington had built the house at the northeast corner of Second and Lake. It probably moved to Ann Street about 1920. The place offered baths in the late ‘30s (I kid you not), as did several Eau Claire establishments in the Depression days: might be how the brothel story started.

    It has been apartments since the ‘40s. Most recent owner: Scheppke Real Estate. County made an offer on it; don’t know where that stands. Back in the 1970s or ‘80s, if I remember right, it was the site of one of Eau Claire’s relatively rare murders. Oh yeah, and a great-looking Camaraderie waitress (weren’t they all?) lived there one year, whom I wanted to date but didn’t, so there’s that.