The History of Grandview Heights

This text has been copied and lightly revised from Nat Netscher’s book From The Beginning: A History of Manheim Township

Township citizens were clustering in neighborhoods during the 1920s. The most ambitious housing project was called "Grandview Heights," named after the McGrann family's former Grand View Farm on which the suburb was developed. Described in newspaper advertisements as the "first development of its kind for people of moderate means," it enticed prospective home buyers with "sanitary sewers, permanently paved streets,” concrete sidewalks, street lights, trolley car service, city water mains, gas lines, fire hydrants, and free mail delivery.

In an Intelligencer Journal story published in June 1928, Grandview Heights was described as being unique because it was the first modern real estate development that catered to people of moderate means. That was surely the reason my parents were able to rent a house there in 1932. I was still of pre-school age when that happened, too young to appreciate what it was about Grandview that had lured my mother and father from Lancaster City: wide streets, ornamental streetlights, sidewalks, city water and sewers, trolley car service, growing trees and an elementary school, Rossmere, only a couple of blocks away. Promoters of the project even used the proximity of the Fulton Market on North Plum Street as a come-on, claiming "appetizing table supplies" could be obtained there. But even though I was a mere tad, I was old enough to appreciate the presence of acres of open fields on which to play and boys my age to play with.

Samuel R. Slaymaker had cleared the way for this model suburb in 1925 by purchasing four hundred acres of farmland from the McGrann and Rohrer families. By the end of 1926, surveyors, engineers and landscape architects had completed their preparations. Starting in April 1927, steam shovels began overturning earth for streets, water mains and sewer lines. The first houses were nearing completion by the middle of 1928, and from what I've learned, homeowners began moving in the following year. On an aerial photo taken in 1929, one house could be seen on Louise Avenue near its intersection with Coyle Avenue. Houses in the 800 block of Martha Avenue showed up on another aerial taken a year or so later. Bill Pfautz, whose family were pioneers on Martha, remembered that only one lane of the street was paved when they moved in, although it really didn't matter since there was little traffic. When Larry Woods stripped wallpaper from a room in his house on the north side of the 900 block of Janet Avenue in the 1980s, he found "1929" written on a wall.

Grandview residents didn't have to go all the way to Plum Street anymore to buy appetizing table supplies after Benjamin Wohl's Grandview Pure Food Store made its debut at the corner of Martha and Fountain Avenues in the early 1930s. Ralph Brackbill bought the store in 1935 and renamed it the "Friendly Neighborhood Grocery Store." Polly Abel remembered walking to the store from her home on Helen Avenue on hot summer days to buy two frozen Milky Way bars, one for her mother and one for herself. "I'd take them home and we'd play Flinch, sitting on the living room floor in front of the open front door," she said. "That was a way to keep cool in the days before air conditioning."

Cletus Brackbill, Ralph's son, told about the corner grocery store:

Dad had two routes he'd drive on Tuesdays and Thursdays to pick up orders from his regular customers. One route wound through Grandview, Rossmere and Glen Moore and the other to Eden and Eden West. Back at the store, he and my mother would make up the orders, and then he'd deliver them in his car. Some of his customers were small farmers who had to buy on credit and settle their accounts later when they sold their tobacco crop. Dad would even pick up medicine at Thatcher's Drug Store on Plum Street and deliver it to his customers. He sold an ice cream cone with two dips for a nickel. Business at the store was good enough to send me to Penn State, but after the Second World War, when the large food chains were springing up, he and mother had a difficult time. When my father's health declined in 1950, he sold the store to Charles Kilheffer.

The store with Charlie Kilheffer at the helm proved to be just as friendly as when the Brackbills ran it, providing free delivery service and allowing customers to run a tab. The store became a Pennsupreme convenience store after Kilheffer pulled out, and after that it was a beauty parlor.

The Grandview Heights Corporation had an office in a tiny building at the intersection of McGrann Boulevard and Janet Avenue and also equipment sheds back over the hill to the north. Jack Wilson remembered how diligent the corporation was about snow removal, plowing sidewalks as well as streets, and Cletus Brackbill recalled the snow crews even shoveling the driveway at the grocery store. In the spring, the GHC workmen would stow their snowplows and haul out sickle-bar mowers to eradicate high-standing weeds from the many open fields. To me, that was always a sign school would soon be closing for the summer. Among its list of rewards that would acme to inhabitants of the development, the GHC promised free mail delivery. My parents discovered that while that was true, it didn't mean the mail would be dropped at our home on Janet Avenue. I had to fetch the mail from a box lined up in a row with those of our neighbors a half block away on McGrann Boulevard. Marguerite Hufford's family, like the Pfautz family, were early settlers in Grandview and lived at McGrann and Martha, a block from our mailbox. She remembered that when they first moved in, she had to jump over construction ditches to reach the Rossmere School on Pleasure Road. Once, she fell and gashed her forehead, leaving a scar she wore ever after.

Gashed forehead notwithstanding, Marguerite Hufford's memories of childhood in. Grandview Heights were pleasant ones. She and others like Albert Sabatine who were there at the beginning remembered the community park that filled half of the triangle formed by Janet and Cameron Avenues and Grandview Boulevard. This recreational hub of the suburb contained playground equipment, a softball diamond, a wading pool and a little house where a woman taught crafts. In its early years, Grandview was virtually a "planned residential development" long before that concept was introduced in the township. It had a park, a school, sidewalks, back alleys, front porches, a grocery store, and later a drug store, beauty shop, barber shop and a couple of churches. By 1936, it had expanded from the north side of Pleasure Road to Skyline Drive, where it was called "Grandview North," and in the early 1940s had spread even further, spawning "Homeland." pavilions.

Grandview Heights Apartments

"Most complete Apartment Project in Eastern Pennsylvania." That's what an advertisement for the Grandview Apartments claimed in 1939, just about a week before they officially opened in Grandview Heights. Maybe so, maybe not. But Manheim Township had certainly never seen apartments like these. Six buildings, including one that had been the McGrann mansion house, surrounding a landscaped park with "stately old shade." (The buildings even had names: Hardwick, McKean, Mifflin, Morris, Clymer, Franklin) Fifty-eight units. Private garages for all tenants. Tile baths. Soundproof walls. Modern kitchens. A separate building on McGrann Boulevard with three shops—Reeves Food Market, Dottie Bush's Beauty Shop, Sam Martin's Drug Store. And bus service to the heart of Lancaster City in only eight minutes.