EVERY PICTURE TELLS A STORY
This photo of Kentucky Street was taken in 1908, soon after this stretch of Kentucky Street between Washington Street and Western Avenue became a central commercial strip.
The building on the corner was built by Angela Canepa in 1900. She and her husband Giovanni, both Italian immigrants, ran a grocery kitty corner across the street where Bank of America is today. Six months after Giovanni’s death in 1898, Angela purchased the old Washington Stable & Livery at the southwest corner of Washington and Kentucky streets, and hired a San Francisco architect to design a new Victorian commercial building on the site. Louis Solari, a clerk in her store, and his wife Emilia, opened the Golden West, a grocery tavern, on the bottom floor of the new Canepa Building in 1900. Canepa rented the upstairs out mainly to physicians and dentists.
In 1904, an Irish immigrant named Dennis Healey sold the grocery he operated with his wife Maggie on Main Street across from Penry Park, and constructed a new building next door to the Canepa Building for his new Petaluma Furniture Store. The couple had just built the new Healey Mansion at the corner of Washington and Keokuk the year before.
Two doors down from Healey’s furniture store, in 1901, Adolph Bloom, the son of Swiss Italian immigrants, purchased the Petaluma Theater (also known as the Opera House), built in 1870, and hired Brainerd Jones to convert it into retail space and offices.
Further down the block, in 1907, a German immigrant named Henry Schluckebier who operated Schluckebier’s Hardware across from Penry Park, moved his home from Kentucky Street to 245 Howard Street across from St. Vincent’s Elementary (currently under major renovation).
He hired Brainerd Jones to design a new commercial building in its place, extending 117 Kentucky St., where Threads A Boutique is today, to 131 Kentucky Street, where Round Table Pizza now resides. He named it the Telephone Building because the telephone company was his first tenant.
