When downtown was the place to be Gib Gosser looks back at the glory days of downtown Somerset
By Carla Slavey
In Gib Gosser ’ s view , the heyday of downtown Somerset was in 1961 .
“ I lived just two blocks from Mount Vernon Street , on the 200 block of North Maple Street ,” said Gosser .
He was 10 years old , and according to him , “ I was old enough to be free to come and go as a kid – to Newberry ’ s and Roses and all the activities downtown , all the drugstore soda fountains and restaurants . There was just always something vibrant about downtown Somerset in those days . And for a kid who came from a more rural area , I thought I lived in New York City . It was just a wonderful place .”
But even looking back on that era , and the years that led up to it – the wooden buildings that made of downtown in the mid 1860s , the fire that made way for the brick buildings to go up from the 1890s to the 1920s , and even through the 40s and 50s , Gosser admits that the nostalgic look at the city can paint over some of the problems the people of that time lived through .
“ I love to go sit behind the Hotel Beecher every now and then , and just think about what it was like in the 1920s to build a building in rural Kentucky of that scale ,” Gosser begins . “ It ’ s got
6 • SEKY - Life in Southeast Kentucky September 2022