Renovation project gives new life to historic home

Jonathan Rach is trying to preserve the uniqueness of the Marne Avenue house in Monongahela.

An abandoned home in Monongahela is being given new life through new ownership and a little bit of hard work.

Jonathan Rach, a director and writer in Los Angeles and a Ringgold graduate originally from the Mon Valley, bought the property as another source of income, and he wants to restore it to its original state.

The 1010 Marne Ave. house has a vast history. The property was purchased by Michael Bowman in 1872, and the home was built the same year by Monongahela architect John Blythe, according to Kelly Linn, a curator at the Monongahela Area Historical Society.

“Blythe is credited with designing a great many buildings in Monongahela including the AME Church, the Presbyterian church, and the Longwell House, which currently serves as the headquarters of the Historical Society,” Linn said.

Bowman, born in Bavaria in 1824, arrived in Monongahela with his wife Christna around 1847. He sold the property in 1883 and moved to Pittsburgh, according to Linn, and Bowman continued his trade in partnership with Jacob Renzihausen on Smithfield Street.

“When he arrived here he was likely already a wealthy businessman as noted by the purchase of a home on Main street in 1855 for the remarkable sum of $2,000,” Linn said. “He is advertised in the Daily Republican Newspaper in the 1850s through the early 1880s as a merchant tailor who specialized in ‘ready made goods.’ His ads always included the caveat that he was a cash-only business and never extended credit for his merchandise.”

Linn said Bowman died in 1900 and was buried in Monongahela Cemetery. Years after his death, many owners of the property have come and gone.

According to Rach, it was the first house in the Mon Valley area to have an indoor HISTORIC HOME •A2

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00068370 bathroom as well as the first to have a lighting system with gas piping throughout. He said it was also the largest home in the Valley at the time.

Many things about the house are interesting, such as a hidden room off the bathroom. The architect was known for helping people in distress, and the room could never be detected from looking at the mansion because it’s tucked away between floors.

“It also had the tallest windows for its day, something guests would marvel about considering the technology at the time for making sizable sheets of glass — many first-of-its-kind things,” Rach said. “In 1931 around the time of the Great Depression and stock market crash, that neighborhood housed all the wealthy people of the time and their mansions and they lost it all.

“This house, occupying an entire city block of surrounding land, the owner had to sell off his lot to houses and the city allowed him to convert it to rental units to save the house from being torn down since no one could afford to buy such a grand mansion and he could no longer afford it.”

When the pandemic hit, Rach came back to the Valley to take care of his mother. He inherited a duplex and bought a couple rentals from there, having no concept of the housing price difference compared to Los Angeles.

“I just came from the Los Angeles area, and coming back to the Valley, I was just like sticker shocked in the opposite direction,” Rach said. “I was like wait a minute, this entire house is this much money and the other house is that much money. I just couldn’t believe it, and my friends in Los Angeles were like what?”

When Rach acquired the place recently, people told him the top third floor had not been entered in over 20 years.

“It was on the market and she was like ‘Oh my god we gotta get it and respect it and bring it back to its original as original as you can,’” Rach said. “We had to move furniture to even find access. The last owner of the house was a lady from Colorado they say was a gypsy and she filled the rooms with antiques — hoarding the way the rooms were filled with many antiques from floor to ceiling. She was unfortunately killed in a car crash in Colorado, and that’s how the house went on the market.”

The home is tucked away in the hills, and Rach said only local residents know where it is. It’s hidden behind trees and much smaller now compared to when the house occupied a whole block.

“It’s just so freakish because it’s like this landmark 1800s, three-story mansion and the first of many hidden in these people’s backyards,” Rach said.

The house had renovations done in the 1930s, according to Rach, where they tore out the stairwell in the middle of the house and put in kitchens and bathrooms — making it a six-unit apartment building inside.

Rach said a lot of the beauty of the house is gone, but the woodwork in the rooms, the original molding, the fireplace and the original windows are all still intact.

Rach has been approached to restore the house because it’s a “gem of the Valley” that has been neglected for decades. Heplans to make it as original as possible.

“It all has been upgraded at one point, but basically we want to really clean it up and all the kitchens were in bad shape, so we are going to put new kitchens inside,” Rach said.

Bailey Fitch of Fitch Plumbing in West Newton is the plumbing contractor on the project. He said Rach is working with a team of people to remodel the entire building.

“It’s definitely an interesting building — one of the oldest I’ve ever worked on,” Fitch said. “The plumbing in there I know said it was the first house to have a bathroom and I was trying to figure out where it would have been in there.”

Between the second and third floors, there is a fourfoot cavity that they found during renovations. Fitch said it was pretty neat to see and it made the piping of the house easy.

“To be completely honest, it’s really hard for me to turn down work, even if I’m really busy and especially for Jon,” Fitch said. “He’s a pretty good guy and a pretty good property owner to work for. So usually if it was a newer customer, I would have turned the project down honestly because it’s such a big project, but since it was Jon I kinda toughed it out and since it wasn’t as bad as I thought when I first was looking at it, I thought ‘Oh man this is going to be a nightmare.’

“It’s been updated throughout the years, and it looks like they kept up on it pretty good. Surprisingly, nothing too crazy has sprung on us yet. Whenever we first started, he kinda put me in a time crunch, but we made it work.”

The house should be done in the next few months, according to Fitch, who said there haven’t been any problems so far.

Fitch said all the plumbing in the house was done in the 1930s or ’40s when the possible remodel happened because all the pipes were cast iron or copper. The pipes are still good to this day, and they only added a couple pipes to accommodate a new layout to the house, which will continue to have apartments inside.

“So it definitely hasn’t been remodeled at least till the ’50s, which is pretty cool to think that it was a single-family dwelling at one point, but they came and added all the apartments so I’m sure that original bathroom was probably removed and then they laid it out in a new style,” Fitch said. “That place is very old. It’s kind of surreal that this was the first house in the Mon Valley to have a toilet inside, and you can only think about it in perspective, you know.

“When you do think about it, this place was ancient and kinda historic at the same time. I’m pretty sure everybody had houses or stuff like that back then. So it’s pretty interesting. Definitely a cool property and definitely one of the cooler ones I’ve worked on.”

“It’s just so freakish because it’s like this landmark 1800s, three-story mansion and the first of many hidden in these people’s backyards.”

JONATHAN RACH