HUNTSVILLE — It is 7:45 on a hot August morning in 1925. Huntsville is experiencing a bit of a boom as additional cotton mills built here in the early part of the century remained operational throughout the coming Great Depression.
No one knew it yet, but it would be the first of two times fate would intervene in Huntsville’s future to provide the town with economic stability through otherwise catastrophic economic times.
One hundred years ago this month, Jefferson Street was transitioning from a “patchwork of cart paths meant for horse and ox-drawn wagons” to hard packed dirt roads that could “withstand the rigors of automobiles”.
Three young girls from Huntsville’s Italian neighborhood off Holmes Avenue are walking to school, books in hand, chattering about the upcoming math quiz they are about to take.
As they approach the corner of Holmes and Jefferson Street, the Lombardo Building stands at the corner of 315 Jefferson Street and Holmes just blocks from the Downtown Huntsville Train Depot.
The girls get suddenly quiet with anticipation as they approach.
As they turn the corner, there he is. A dapper Sicilian man wearing a tall hat, sitting in a wooden chair with a cane seat in front of the new wholesale goods store. This stretch of sidewalk was known as Grocery Row, due to the number of grocery, vegetable, and fruit warehouses there.
When the man sees the girls approaching, he stands up.
“Good mor-ning Mis-ter Lom-bar-do,” they sing-say in unison.
Lifting his hat up off his head and elegantly sweeping it underneath as he bowed grandly at the waist, “Good morning, ladies,” Mr. Lombardo said, stepping aside to let them pass.
One of those girls was Marguerite Tumminello Leslie, and she lived across Adams Street from Layne Dorning and her late husband of 52 years, Claude Dorning.
“Marguerite lived to be 100 years old,” said Dorning, the owner of the Lombardo Building and Railroad Station Antiques, which has occupied the building since 2005. “She said they thought that was the most wonderful thing and she told me that story over and over again how much it meant to her.”
The Lombardo Building was built in August 1922 and has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1980.
In the early 2000s, Claude Dorning went for his daily 6 a.m. walk around downtown. He always met up with then-owner of the Lombardo Building, a man Layne calls Mr. Mitchell.
“Mr. Mitchell’s son lived in Philadelphia, a hot-bed for antiques at the time, and he drove an 18-wheeler to Huntsville two or three times a month filled with wonderful antiques,” Dorning said. “It was very popular until Mr. Mitchell’s son died, and the merchandise stopped. Mitchell was a clock collector and the store had fallen somewhat into disrepair and was not doing very well, but Mr. Mitchell didn’t care. He had plenty of money.”
Every morning when they walked by the building, Claude would ask Mr. Mitchell when he was going to sell him the Lombardo Building.
“One morning Claude came in from his walk and said, ‘Today!’ Mitchell said he would sell me the building today, Layne! What are we going to do?
“You are going to have a closing and pay for it and then we will figure out what to do,” Layne said she told him.
There are still remnants of the original building despite many of the more modern features. All the fluorescent lights have been replaced with LED. However, a one of the original lights still stands in the exposed beam ceilings and an original antique fan still remains. The century-old store has the oldest working Otis Elevator in Alabama, a rumbling wooden-gated elevator offering access to the second and third floors.
But over the past 15 years since the Dornings have owned the building, another old fixture of the Lombardo Building began showing up.
Dorning’s daughter Suzanne Conway said when she and her husband ran the store in 2009, customers and employees, including perfect strangers who are just “passing through” Huntsville on tour buses and on road trips, often reported the presence of a tall, aging man wearing coveralls on the third floor.
“You know, there is a ghost on the third floor, right?” they would say.
“As you can see, I channel George every day,” said Joanie Williams glancing down at her coveralls.
Williams works at Railroad Station Antiques and most of the time thinks nothing of the ghostly figure until a price tag she just put on a piece of merchandise suddenly disappears and she finds it in the elevator; or lights flicker for no reason.
“He is just bored so he likes to play tricks, but he is harmless and just lonely,” Williams said.
Walking along the long third-floor corridor, it may be the play of fluorescent lights on gaudy baroque-framed wall mirrors, clocks, and mirrored trumeaus that cause the double take. But the slightest wispy movement in the peripheral vision is enough to raise hair on the arm.
The most intrusive of these visitations occurred with a new vendor who stayed late to set up her displays. She kicked off her high heel shoes to climb a ladder and when she came down from the ladder, the shoes were gone.
After looking for a half hour, she left, baffled and barefoot.
The next morning – there were her shoes, right where she left them, sitting side-by-side at the entrance to her booth.
“I have never seen or felt George,” Dorning said. “But we had a live ghost here for real recently.”
She went on to tell the story of Saul Miller, a Huntsville accountant who rented an office on the third floor.
“He came in one morning and was walking down an aisle when there was a man sleeping on a vendor sofa.
“It turns out, he climbed up the fire escape in back and discovered a way in through a trapdoor on the third floor so people could escape in the event of a fire.
“We do not know for how long he been doing it, but he was roaming the store at night, using out bathroom, sleeping in the vendor booths and eating our cheese straws we keep for guests and open house events,” Layne said.
The fire escape has since been hoisted and wired up and a padlock put on the trapdoor, but the man disappeared that morning and has never been seen again.
Aug. 18 is the 100th anniversary of the Lombardo Building. To celebrate, everything is 20% to 50% off all month at Huntsville’s Railroad Station Antiques.
Tell them George sent you to wish them a happy 100th!
Don’t miss out! Subscribe to our email newsletter to have all our smart stories delivered to your inbox.
