On your right, look for a four-story red-brick corner building with rounded-arch windows, stacked bay windows, and a five-sided turret crowned by an onion-shaped dome.
This place started as business... but Aurora turned it into theater. Albert Hobbs, a furniture dealer, undertaker, and civic leader, opened this building in eighteen ninety-five. His family had already been in that trade since at least the eighteen sixties, and Albert started helping out when he was just fifteen. Back then, that combination made perfect sense: the same shop might sell you a parlor chair, a bedstead, a coffin, and the funeral service too. Ordinary commerce, sure... but never really ordinary.
Architect James E. Minott gave Hobbs a building with swagger. He used Richardsonian Romanesque, a hefty style with big round arches and a sense of weight, then mixed in some Queen Anne playfulness through the bays and that dramatic corner turret. Builder Levi Hull Waterhouse, one of Aurora’s great brick men, turned the design into a real downtown performer. Notice the decorative brickwork, the limestone trim, and the ornamental terra cotta. This building knows how to hold a pose.
And then Aurora pushed it from stylish to unforgettable. In the nineteen ten Fourth of July celebration, a man jumped from the top of the dome into a six-foot pool of water below. Yep. A furniture-and-funeral building became a stunt platform. That’s about as pure a piece of civic showmanship as you’ll find.
If you want the before-and-after miracle, check the image on your screen: that restored dome is a replica, brought back after years of decline and a major renovation. After Albert died in nineteen twenty-six, the family era ended. The building sold at auction in nineteen twenty-nine for fifty-five thousand dollars, about a million in today’s money, changed hands again, and later sat vacant. The city removed the failing dome in twenty sixteen, but J-H Real Estate rescued the place in twenty nineteen, restored its storefronts and windows, rebuilt the copper cornice, and welcomed residents in twenty twenty-two. The National Register finally recognized that fight in twenty twenty-one.
From this public-facing showpiece, we’re heading toward something quieter: the William Tanner House Museum, about a ten-minute walk away, where Aurora’s story shifts from storefront ambition to early home life and the city’s first mapped identity.
