From a historical prospective, one step forward in the pursuit of progress often coincides with one step backward with the preservation of history. In just a few short years, from 1970 to 1975, a good section of north Main Street of Livingston Manor was made over. First the post office in 1970, and then the bank in 1971, abandoned largely outdated facilities and relocated to newly constructed, modern-style buildings. A few years later, Schwartz’ Meat Market, the A&P market, along with the mom-and-pop grocery markets of Nelson’s and Adler’s were replaced with the construction of the village’s first modern supermarket. As a result of these relocations, four old-style resident buildings, erected during the 1890s were leveled, forever changing the appearance of this section of the village. 

The original bank at Livingston Manor constructed as a block and brick structure, was erected, as the building’s cornerstone notes, in 1911. When it came time to modernize the sixty-year-old facility, banking officials decided to relocate the operations. During the spring of 1971, work began on demolishing the buildings on the two north Main Street lots acquired for the bank’s relocation, that of Etta Schaff and Isadore Meyerson. The Schaff residence was erected in the late 1880s, originally the residence of David Fitzgerald. Beginning in 1876, Fitzgerald was employed as railroad station agent for the Ontario & Western Railway for the next thirty-three years. He also had an interest in the village’s commerce, being a long-time partner of William Johnston in the general merchandise store and feed business. An addition was added onto the original structure in 1892, of which the rear portion is shown in the Time’s photograph just before its destruction. 

The Meyerson building was built in 1890 by Mahala Osterhout, who came to the Manor from the Hasbrouck community. After erecting the residence, she then planned to build a large summer boarding house within the village. After purchasing the grounds between her new home and the residence of Alonzo Ostrom, now the Brooks building, the erection of a large three-story structure was completed by the end of 1893. To help make the financial ends meet during the off season, Miss Osterhout rented out a portion of the boarding house to Walter Purvis as a bakery. In November of 1994, the building caught fire, presumed due to the bakery operations, causing the largest conflagration known within the village up to that time. Evidence of the building’s fiery demise could still be seen over a century later when excavation for a new water line to a building on the same lot revealed a thick layer of ash, evidence of a catastrophic event long forgotten. 

Many of the older Manor residents know the original 1890 Osterhout residence as later being the dentist office of Dr. Isadore Meyerson. The son of Isadore and Dora Meyerson, bakers whose shop was located on River Street, Doctor Meyerson acquired the building in 1935, and with some alterations made of the first floor, practiced his profession there. The building remained the Manor’s dentist office until the mid-sixties.

George Silverman loved to tell the story of when he was younger, he had reason for an appointment with Dr. Meyerson. While he and other patients were sitting in the office’s waiting room, and with the dentist’s office walls providing little in the way of sound proofing, they all could hear all that was going on in the room next door as the dentist worked on the patient. “Izzy! Ow! Izzy, you’re hurting me! Ow, Izzy, that hurts!” The patient’s obvious suffering did not go unnoticed to those in the waiting room. After a while, when the dentist was finished with the tortured patient, she left the dentist’s chair and entered the waiting room. The distressed patient turned out to be none other than the Doctor’s mother, Dora. Ever the promoter, she didn’t flinch. “My Izzy, he’s such a wonderful dentist! He didn’t hurt a bit,” she exclaimed to the unconvinced audience.