100 Cleave St (via alley from Elkhorn Ave)
Current Use
Sandwich Mafia
Built of red tile in 1922 by renowned Southwest photographer, Fred Payne Clatworthy, to be a dark room and storage for his negatives and plates, the two-story Cleave St. building towered over his studio, which fronted at 115 West Elkhorn Ave. There were no windows and just one door. The original door was located where customers enter from Elkhorn (the South side) and made for easy access to Clatworthys studio and store on Elkhorn Ave. In at least 1931, Clatworthy offered photographic development services to the public.
In 1948, Clatworthy sold both his Elkhorn Ave. studio and the Cleave St. storage buildings to Ben and Clara Frumess. Frumess' opened The Pioneer Gift Shop in Clatworthy’s former studio building at 115 W Elkhorn.
Beginning in 1949 this building, the former darkroom, housed Mercury Cleaners, a dry cleaning establishment. By the late ’50s it had become a merchandise warehouse for the Miller and Frumess gift stores.
By 1973 Ben and Clara had died. Their son, Harry, and his wife, Doris, continued to run the Pioneer Gift Shop until 1994. The Cleave St. warehouse was owned by the Miller family until 2008 when they sold it to the Frumess estate run by Gregory and Richard Frumess.
Greg’s dream had long been to reunite the two properties and turn the humble storage building into a viable retail establishment. In about 2015, the family engaged Estes architect Joe Calvin of Thorp Associates to design a renovation that combined a curved mezzanine with an airy two story open space. The alley leading from in from Elkhorn gives the building a south entrance, while Cleave St. provides an entrance from the North.
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