Property Record
614 N 3RD ST
Architecture and History Inventory
| Historic Name: | Rilling Electric Co. |
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| Other Name: | Dee's Toddler Towne |
| Contributing: | Yes |
| Reference Number: | 68969 |
| Location (Address): | 614 N 3RD ST |
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| County: | Marathon |
| City: | Wausau |
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| Year Built: | 1934 |
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| Additions: | |
| Survey Date: | 19832017 |
| Historic Use: | small retail building |
| Architectural Style: | English Revival Styles |
| Structural System: | |
| Wall Material: | Brick |
| Architect: | Oppenhamer & Obel |
| Other Buildings On Site: | |
| Demolished?: | No |
| Demolished Date: |
| National/State Register Listing Name: | Not listed |
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| Additional Information: | A 'site file' exists for this property. It contains additional information such as correspondence, newspaper clippings, or historical information. It is a public record and may be viewed in person at the Wisconsin Historical Society, Division of Historic Preservation. Half-timbered elevation. Cross gable. This Tudor Revival commercial building features a shingled roof, half-timbering, decorative bargeboard, and a pendant in the dormer peak. A skirt roof with exposed rafters separates the first and second story. The building is a distinctive visual element in the intact block face. After a fire destroyed an earlier building, Martin Rilling built the existing structure. Architects Oppenhamer and Obel maintained offices on the second floor. Looking like a bit of merry old England in downtown Wausau, these two Neo-Tudor commercial buildings owe their existence to a terrible fire. In January 1932, a blaze raged through four buildings of the 1890s, including Mrs. J. W. Coates’s Quality Shop, a fine-housewares store. Coates commissioned architect Joseph Jogerst to create a picturesque Neo-Tudor front for her building. Though most popular for residential architecture in the United States, the style had been used for local shopping districts in England for a generation. Besides, Coats sold English bone china and other European imports. The slightly projecting upper story of 620 North Third Street features false half-timbering with brick nogging laid in a random pattern. Above the second-story windows, a pair of half-timbered gables, filled with stucco, feature scalloped bargeboards and wooden pendants. The first story is unusually intact. The entrance is deeply recessed, with display windows angled inward on either side, a configuration designed to lure pedestrians into the shop. Above the storefront, a prism-glass transom projects natural light to the back of the store, a necessity in the days before fluorescent lighting. Once the Quality Shop acquired its new English-style facade, electrical contractor and appliance dealer Martin Rilling followed suit. He asked architect Irving Obel to replace the ruins of the old Eunson Building with a Neo-Tudor fantasy to match Coates’s next door. Builder Herman Seehafer completed the new two-story building (at 614 N. Third St.) in 1934. A broad, half-timbered cross-gable shelters two triplets of windows. The spaces between the half-timbering in the gable are filled with stucco, textured to mimic wattle and daub. A wave motif runs along the heavy bargeboards, which meet at a large wooden pendant, and a fancy plaster crest enriches the tie beam. As in the Quality Shop, the second-story walls below the gable are decoratively half-timbered, with brick nogging laid in various of patterns. A pent roof, supported by exposed rafter tails, shelters the original display bay window between two entrance doors. |
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| Bibliographic References: | (A) Interview, Rilling's daughter, 1978. (B) Buildings of Wisconsin manuscript. In Aucutt, Hettinga & Jansen, "Wausau Beautiful" (2nd ed., 2010), 39. |
| Wisconsin Architecture and History Inventory, State Historic Preservation Office, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, Wisconsin |