Recordpub.com - Downtown Ravenna landmark for sale: Terry Kane putting building up for bid

Kane & Kane Building Terry Kane in the basement - in the darker area with his flashlight. photo by Robert J. Lucas

By Diane Smith

Record-Courier staff writer

A landmark Ravenna building — and 150 years of history locked inside it — all will go up for auction next month.

Terry Kane, the lone occupant of the structure at the corner of Main and Chestnut streets, said he’s relocating his office to a third floor location that once housed Bohecker’s Business College.

The building, and all the contents in it, will be auctioned at noon on July 8.

Kane had once shared the building with his late father, Herbert, who died in 2001; his uncle, Ron, who died in 2005; numerous other lawyers, a doctor, a title company and the offices of White Rubber. Terry Kane joined the law practice in 1977.

Now that he’s the last surviving family member at Kane and Kane, he said, he thinks it’s silly for him to occupy the sprawling structure all by himself.

“It’s just me now,” he said.

Kane’s office is in the middle of the former Second National Bank, a mainstay at the building for most of its history. The law offices are home to numerous safes and vaults, some of which are used to store valuables for clients, and some have been renovated to house offices or libraries. One circular safe, dating to the early days of the bank, was manufactured in “Pittsburg.” That was the spelling of the Pennsylvania town’s name in the late 19th century.

Locked away in the vault are drawings from Elizabeth Bell, who is known for her paintings of horses. They include Happy Landing and Smitty, drawn in 1951, and Sun Beau, the horse for whom the farm was named, drawn in 1950.

In the basement are pictures of Sterling Smith, owner of Sun Beau the show horse and White Rubber, and Judge Vernon Filiautreau, Herbert Kane’s first partner. Terry Kane knew the man as “Uncle Judge.”

A metal plate along the sidewalk of North Chestnut Street sits atop a trap door that leads into the basement. At one time, a delivery chute allowed customers to interact with a teller located in the basement, who could see what was going on at the street level via mirrors.

“It was all mechanical,” Kane said. “There were none of the tubes like they use now.”

Also in the basement are several typewriters, including the first one used by Angelo Sicuro, a longtime editor of the Record-Courier. Sicuro’s son, Thomas, had once served as a partner in the Kane law firm, and his father was a regular visitor.

Tossed into the incinerator in the boiler room, but never incinerated, are numerous blank money orders drawn on Second National Bank. Also in that room is a perforating machine once used to cancel checks.

The hand-hewn beams in the basement indicate that the building was constructed before the Civil War, Kane said.

“I always thought this area might make a nice tavern,” he said.

Upstairs, in the area that housed the White Rubber offices until 1993, the law practice stored more than 30 years worth of files. Kane recently paid $2,500 to have all 30,000 pounds of the paperwork shredded.

A skylight was put in just above two more vaults, which were brought in through the roof of the building when White Rubber moved in. A third story was destroyed in the 1950s by fire.

A corner office was once occupied by Paul Jones, the former Ravenna mayor, Democratic party chairman and state representative. Later, green signs hung from the windows in support of a bid to free the former mayor from prison.

More recently, the space was used on behalf of the Obama campaign.

An upper-level room with peeling paint and hardwood floors hosted the offices of Dr. Iolas Huffman, who practiced out of there until the 1980s.

When a title company vacated the ground-level offices last year, employees left personal photos behind.

Kane hopes the building will go to someone who can breathe new life into the downtown, and he put off the auction for a month in hopes that a buyer would step forward. However, he knows tenants are hard to come by in this economy — the building behind his went into foreclosure and still has not been occupied because of a lack of downtown parking.

When the auctioneer comes on July 8, Kane plans to be elsewhere.

“It’s a shame,” he said. “I remember when everybody was pretty busy downtown, and lawyers and doctors were on the second floors of buildings all around.”

The Phenix Block, located on the north side of Main Street from Chestnut Street to Hickory Way, is one of the oldest buildings in downtown Ravenna. Construction began in April 1853, and the first tenant, John H. Bostwick & Co., a dry goods emporium, began moving in as 1853 was drawing to a close.

The original tenant of Kane’s portion of the block was Rowell, Witter and Co. The Second National Bank later was a mainstay of the property for many years before the site was sold to the Kane family.