Former Wilson’s Hardware owner Joe Flyzik, who sold the business to current owners Charles and Toni Venezia, stands center in front of his former busi
For more than a century, a hardware store in the heart of downtown Lansdale has remained a constant. From Spier’s, to Drissel’s, to Wilson’s, from the turn of the century to today – there is Susquehanna and Main, there is the hardware store.
On May 1, however, it will be the end of an era.
Wilson’s Hardware & Locksmiths, located in the historic 217 W. Main St., is closing its hardware business for good. Wilson’s Locksmiths will continue to serve the community, albeit at a different to-be-determined location.
Charles and Toni Venezia, of Worcester Township, purchased the business from Joe and Chris Flyzik in 2015. The Flyziks had owned the business since buying it from Bill Wilson in 1984.
The Flyziks also own 217 and 219 W. Main St. but have decided to sell the 217 W. Main St. location. They are keeping 219 W. Main St., and the lease with tenant Metro PCS, for now.
“The owners of the building decided they are going to sell the building. With them selling the building, we would have no idea if the new owners want us in there or do not want us in there,” Charles Venezia said. “The previous owners then offered us a lease, but it was only month-to-month. You can’t run a business on a month-to-month lease. You can’t do business not knowing what the future is.”
Wilson’s Hardware is holding a liquidation sale, beginning February 17 until April 30. There are contests, prizes and giveaways as well, including Dewalt tools and a grill.
The Venezias notified the community of the closure and liquidation sale in a letter sent out this week. You can read a statement from the Venezia family here, as well as community reaction to the announcement here.
Venezia, a former licensed chiropractor for 32 years who ran a practice in Audubon, is also facing health issues. At his age, he said, he did not want to buy the building, or any building for that matter.
“My son is a locksmith, and we’ve grown that portion of the business and we will keep that,” Venezia said. “The original plan for the store was to keep it for 10 years. I basically retired from (being a chiropractor) to buy the business. The idea was we would eventually have a business for my son.”
Venezia said his son is now a locksmith, but he was not interested in having the hardware store in the future. Wilson’s Locksmith specializes in, among the usual tasks, key duplication service for high-priced car keys that contain chips to operate the ignition.
The plan, he said, was to eventually sell the hardware business and keep the locksmithing side of things.
“With the lease and sale of the building, it sped everything up,” he said.
Chris Flyzik said so many people will miss Wilson’s Hardware.
“We are sorry the Venezias weren’t interested in signing a new lease. The loss of Lansdale’s oldest hardware store is beyond sad. We wish them well,” she said.
Venezia said Wilson’s Hardware was a great store and Flyziks have a great reputation.
“They were happy to see people, and we said we would continue that,” Venezia said. “That’s what we tried to do.”
Relocating an independent hardware store was not an option for Venezia.
“Where are you going to put it? You have (Fisher’s) Ace Hardware on one side, and Lowe’s the other way. We’re in the middle. If everything would have continued with something viable, we would have continued,” he said.
Venezia changed his life path from cracking backs to hammers and tacks after he woke up from a nine-day coma, having already died twice on the operating table during a quadruple bypass.
“I had practiced for over 30 years, and it was pretty intense. I worked six days a week. When I came home (from the hospital), I said to my wife that dealing with insurance and employees and all that, I’ve done that long enough. I want to do something I want to do,” he said.
He searched for a business, particularly one his son could take over when he was old enough to do it.
“What guy wouldn’t want to own a hardware store?” Venezia said. “It’s the ultimate. I love going there every day, I love helping people. They don’t know how to do this or that and you show them, ‘You need to get this part, and this is how it works.’ I didn’t have to deal with any bureaucracy. I was working and helping people.”
Flyzik said they bought the store from Bill and Louise Wilson in 1984. Joe, she said, was replacing windows in their older home one by one, as they could afford them, and Bill Wilson informed Joe that he wanted to retire, and Joe should buy the store.
At the time, Joe was familiar with commercial hardware and locks from working at Krupp Meyers and Hoffman building supply on Walnut Street.
“Joe bought it on a handshake with an agreed upon price, and Bill’s handwritten list of inventory,” Flyzik said. “(Wilson’s daughter Jane Martin) grew up in the store and plans to drive down and say goodbye.”
In fact, Flyzik’s best memories of the store involve family and the help from longtime manager Lenny Diehl. It also involves the sound of creaky wood floors, the smell of old wood in the air, and the noise of grinding key duplicators.
“Our fondest memories were of giving our daughter and so many other local 14-year-old’s their first job and of our grandchildren theirs when they were younger,” she said. “They would run through the store, up and downstairs, sticking plungers to the linoleum, giggling, playing with the chain, or hide and seek, explaining proudly to their friends that ‘all these paint brushes belong to Gram and Pappy.’
“Wilson’s is pretty much the same: the smell of old wood, imagined conversations, a step back in time,” Flyzik said.
Venezia said his family held their own.
“What really hurt us was when they took away parking. Parking was an issue, of course, but then they tore the whole Madison Street up and closed it for a year. That was a problem,” he said. “Then we got hit with the pandemic, which was an issue. There might not have been as many customers as it once was, but we were a niche business: an old school hardware store for the essentials. Wilson’s was, you get in, you get out.”
Wilson’s Hardware’s reputation preceded it, Venezia said, and it was an honor to work there and continue the tradition.
“Wilson’s is an icon of Lansdale. It was well-known. The Wilsons did a great job and the Flyziks did a great job. I hope we did a great job,” he said. “We were out of state, and we told somebody we owned Wilson’s, and they knew of it.”
The Grand Emporium and Jacob S. Geller
According to an article by Lansdale Historical Society’s Dick Shearer titled “Jacob Geller: Master merchant,” by 1900, there were more than 200 different stores and businesses in downtown Lansdale. And downtown Lansdale at that time was maybe three or four blocks.
Location mattered in early 20th century Lansdale – the closest one to the train station wins. (A nice shop window helped). Trains bring people to town, people have money, you want that money. The young town makes money, your town.
If you succeeded in 1900s Lansdale, you were lucky. Shearer said merchants came and went by the dozens. Jacob S. Geller, however, became top dog.
Lansdale was incorporated in 1872 – by the way, people can volunteer to help with the planning of this summer’s sesquicentennial – and six years later, Geller came to town. He had success running general stores in Hoppinville and Kulpsville, Shearer said, before he realized there was money to be made in a railroad town.
Lansdale resident John Kindig sold his business, house and building lots at Main Street and Susquehanna Avenue to Geller. Geller immediately began renovations, and in 1895 constructed a two-story addition on what is now the Lansdale School of Cosmetology. He also made an indoor entrance connecting the business with the house next door.
“It had doorways open to 219 and 217 on the first and second floors back in day,” Flyzik said. “You could shop from one to the next without going outside. An old-time mall! You can still see them from Wilson’s. We loved when the spice smuggler was there – the smell of coffee would fill our store.”
When all was complete, Geller transformed his new money maker into what could today be considered the first shopping mall in the area, seven decades before Montgomery Mall.
Geller called his indoor, open-concept shopping mall The Grand Emporium.
Today, it exists as the Lansdale School of Cosmetology, Wilson’s Hardware and Locksmiths, and a Metro PCS store, at 215 W. Main St., 217 W. Main St., and 219 W. Main St., respectively.
Geller was the guy that could get you anything and everything, according to Shearer. A founding father of Lansdale commerce, Geller dealt in real estate, food, clothing, tools, fuel – you name it.
He was also an undertaker. Yes, he sold caskets too.
Shearer said his sales gimmick was he promised to deliver it at the right time of day, so the buyer’s neighbors knew he or she had good taste.
“He would deliver furniture to your house on a polished black wagon, pulled by two beautifully groomed black horses and a pair of movers dressed in top hats and tails,” Shearer said.
Geller also dealt in dairy – the milk merchant profited on commissions from selling 2,000 pounds of butter a week.
He died in 1916, but his specialized competitors lived on. Geller’s Grand Emporium was sold off to settle his estate. His name remained on the building for a while; the Roman numerals on the second-floor façade for the year 1895 are visible today.
217 West Main Street
The thing with 217 W. Main St. is it has always been a hardware store, ever since about the first quarter of the 20th Century. By the 1930s and even on into the next decade, Spier’s Hardware occupied the space.
Clyde Drissel, father of former North Penn High School biology teacher, high school assistant wrestling coach and North Penn Alumni Athletic Association Hall of Famer Dan Drissel, acquired the business in the 1960s and renamed it Drissel’s Hardware. By then, Shelly’s Own Make Ice Cream & Candy was next door. In the late 1920s, Drissel’s grandfather and uncle ran the Drissel & Badman Furniture and Frigidaire at 213 W. Main St.
“In the late 1920s,” wrote Drissel on a 2019 post on the Lansdale Historical Society Facebook page, “what is Lansdale School of Cosmetology became Drissel and Badman.”
Around 1936, Clyde Drissel bought the hardware store from Spiers. “At that time,” Drissel wrote in the post, “the back section was a barn, and he expanded to the new Madison Parking Lot in the early 1950s.”
In 1964, Drissel’s father sold the business to Bill Wilson, whose namesake carried on under the ownership of the Flyziks and the Venezias.
Flyzik said Wilson’s brother Ray operated the Radio Shack out of 219 W. Main St., until he moved to Montgomery Mall. Humphrie’s Sweet & Treat moved in next, and then Spice Smuggler.
When Spice Smuggler closed, it signaled the coming end to the “old school” businesses of Lansdale. Alas, Wilson’s Hardware, possibly the oldest business in town, now follows suit.
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