Where Butler's Lost Main Street Block Lives On, Address by Address

The sign "has been saved and taken to a new home down the street in a museum." That was NorthJersey.com on April 10, eight days after the fire that damaged a row of connected buildings on Butler's Main Street. The paper wrote that the Woman's Christian Temperance Union building itself was "a lost cause." The faded W.C.T.U. sign that hung on its facade for much of the 20th and 21st centuries went up the street instead.

Seven months later, the block is easiest to understand from two places: the Butler Museum at 221 Main Street, and the museum's online address files. The address files list, by year, who occupied each storefront on Main Street. On three of those pages, the last entry now reads "April 2nd. 2026 fire." Taken together, those entries show that the fire hit one of the oldest continuous runs of commerce and civic life in the borough. They also show where that history now sits.

Three Addresses, One Last Line

The museum's series is called Butler Historic Address Highlights, and it starts from a Main Street search page on the borough website. Each address gets a short table with the business name in one column and the years in the next. The tables are brief. Read in a row, they show how much changed on this one stretch.

150 Main Street started as a confectionery store in the 1920s. It housed the Butler News Company from 1948 to 1972, The Paper Place in 1976, and Butler News & Candy Shop from 2021. That is close to a century of newspapers and sweets at one address, and then the fire line.

154 Main Street opens with Goldstein Bros. Department Store and Snyder's Confectionery Store, both listed from 1903 into the 1920s. After them came Louis Levine Men's & Boy's Store upstairs from 1926 to 1955, then Louis Levines and Sons Clothing Store from 1956 to 1994. Later entries include Faherty's Fabulous Family of Actors in 2004 and a Martial Arts Academy in 2010. In its April 7 report, NorthJersey.com put the Levine family's run there at 69 years, citing the museum's history of the property.

158 Main Street has the longest list of the three:

The ground floor turned over more than a dozen times: stoves, dresses, children's clothing, pizza, sushi. The top row stays the same the whole way down. The museum dates the upstairs hall from 1894 into the 2020s, and that continuity is the reason the sign mattered.

The Hall Upstairs at 158

The building at 158 Main was designed to work in two parts. In its April 7 report, NorthJersey.com described the setup: developers Howell & Noble donated the lot, the upstairs hall was used for meetings and lectures, and the first floor was rented out as storefront space. The storefront turnover in the table above is the downstairs half of that plan.

The Butler-Bloomingdale chapter was organized on May 12, 1885, according to a local history by Tom Riley, a Butler Museum volunteer and founder of the Bloomingdale Museum. Before it moved to 158 Main in 1894, the group met at the Ball Brothers Building in Bloomingdale, the Butler schoolhouse, the basement of the Baptist Church, and the Methodist Episcopal Church in Bloomingdale. The newspaper credits the founding to Mrs. P.A. Vreeland, who also led the Passaic County union, based on 19th-century reports in the Passaic Daily News.

The chapter was named for both towns and met on both sides of the borough line before it settled in Butler. Citing museum records, NorthJersey.com reported that the hall hosted public talks and English-language and civics instruction for new immigrants. The chapter sold the building in the 1970s. The proceeds went to the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, Chilton Hospital and the Tri-Boro First Aid Squad. The chapter stayed active until the mid-1980s, then dissolved as membership declined.

The proceeds went to familiar local groups, and the hall's history passed through museum volunteers and a published local history. The sign followed the same route. On April 7, its fate was still uncertain while borough officials assessed the damage to the building. By April 10, firefighters had saved it and taken it to the museum.

The Station at 221 Main

The sign went to the place in Butler that was built to hold this kind of object. The Butler Museum occupies the red New York, Susquehanna and Western Railroad Station on the upper end of Main Street. The station was built in 1888, and the museum has been there since 1976. That is 13 years before the borough itself was founded, on March 13, 1901. The building was renovated from 2011 to 2014 with money from the Morris County Historic Preservation fund and rededicated on April 17, 2016. It is listed on the State and National Registers of Historic Places.

The exhibits cover the American Rubber Company, Butler's ties to Thomas Edison and the Statue of Liberty, and the fire department, railroad, military, home life, schools, churches and telephones. The collection also includes vintage postcards and photos, business journals, family histories, cemetery records, and "The Nugget" yearbooks from Butler High School going back to 1921. The address files grew out of the same kind of record-keeping. Many of the business names in the 158 Main table survive because someone kept a journal, a postcard or a directory listing.

The borough's museum page lists hours on the first and third Saturdays of each month, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., with no admission fee. It also says the building is accessible. In November 2026, the first and third Saturdays are November 7 and November 21. The museum is run by volunteers, so a call to 973-838-7222 or an email to [email protected] before you go is a good idea.

A Saturday Route Up Main Street, by the Files

The address files are best read on foot. This route runs up Main Street in ascending address order and ends past the museum door. Each stop uses what the museum's own page for that address records.

1. 75 Main Street. De Baun's Grist Mill around 1872, a Scott Paper Mill before 1899, Butler Wood Working Co. from 1899 to 1915, then American Hard Rubber Storage from 1918 to 1928. Feed and grain dealers followed in the 1950s and 1960s.
2. 150, 154 and 158 Main Street. The three addresses whose files now end with the April 2026 fire.
3. 160 Main Street. The Butler Hotel from 1905 to 1930, an A&P grocery around 1928 to 1930, Wagner's Meat Market from 1930 to 1955, McKeon's Economy Meat Market from 1936 to 1964, and Butler Pork Store from 1967 to 1985.
4. 161 Main Street. The file calls the building the "Am. Hard Building," and its photo captions refer to the old rubber mill. This is where Butler's rubber history, the museum's lead exhibit, shows up across the street from the fire block.
5. 188 Main Street and 202 Main Street. Flynn's Dinner in 1918 and a photographer, Frederick Stork, in 1920 and 1921 at 188. Henry W. Smith Grain and Feed in 1928 and Butler Super Market in 1960 at 202.
6. 214-216 Main Street. Clothing stores in 1918 and 1929, Butler Auto Supply in the 1950s, and the Coin-O-Matic Laundromat, listed from 1960 into the 2020s.
7. 221 Main Street. The Butler Museum, in the 1888 station.
8. 234 Main Street. F.R. Casterlin's Park Hotel and Stables, listed from the 1880s into the 1970s, followed by Lookin Good Haircutters from the 1970s to 2021.

Along the route, the pattern from 158 Main repeats. Hotels, grain dealers and meat markets turn over every few decades, while a few long tenancies anchor the street: the Levine store, the Park Hotel, the laundromat at 214-216. The burned block held several of those long tenancies close together, which is why its three files read like a summary of the whole street.

The museum's Museum Committee is all volunteers. It meets on the first Wednesday of each month at 7 p.m., and the public is welcome. In November 2026, that meeting falls on November 4, the day before this post goes up. The next one is Wednesday, December 2. Anyone with old photos of 150, 154 or 158 Main may find that the committee is the group building the record of that block.

Knowing what an address has been is part of knowing what it is worth to the people who live near it. The Weiss Group works in Butler every season. If you own a home here and want to talk through its story, its condition and its value, we would be glad to sit down with you. Schedule a Free Consultation.