As Time Goes By At Nassaus Hub

By Rhoda Amon | Staff Writer

HEMPSTEAD VILLAGE, known as the Hub, has been a-changing, sometimes slowly, sometimes in rapid stages.

The art deco building with the clock tower, above, rose in the mid-1930s and came down in the early '40s. Built in the '30s style of the Empire State Building at the southeast corner of North Franklin and Fulton Avenues, the Discount Building housed Stumpp & Walter Co., purveyors of "seeds, bulbs and garden supplies." Hempstead old-timers recall a disastrous fire during the World War II years that precipitated its downfall.

The Discount Building was replaced by the Fisher-Beer "5-and-10-cent store," a building with a lower-profile clock tower, popular with a generation growing up in the Fifties, recalls Hempstead Village historian James B. York.

Alexander A. Avella Jr. bought the building for his Amerifirst Mortgage Co. in 1984 and gave it a new face, a gray cement Aztec-style finish that extends to the facade of the Executive Office Building at 250 Fulton Ave. That tall, circa-1929 structure, originally called the Central Nassau Building, remains a mainstay of the changing Hub.