64 S Mason St

From the National Register nomination

One-story reinforced concrete building with a flat roof that was made into a parking deck ca. 1960. The large window, entry, and center drive-in openings on the front (west) elevation have lintels with arced ends; the piers and lintels have textured stucco finishes; and the roof has a heavy molded concrete lip. This elevation presumably had industrial metal-frame windows originally; now the windows are tinted plate glass. In the drive-in bay are partly visible the conical caps of the concrete supports that support the roof on the interior. The impressions of formwork are visible in the concrete of the north wall. A concrete ramp at the southeast rear corner rises to the parking deck. Along the north edge of the deck is a one-story roof-top addition. The east end of this addition is the original section, constructed in the 1930s or early 1940s as a paint shop. It has a metal-sheathed gable roof with stepped brick gable parapets. To this was added a long row of cinder block garage bays. Above the building rises a 1980s metal sign reading "Joe Bowman Chevrolet" illuminated with white and yellow incandescent bulbs. Ed Chapman purchased the location in the mid-1920s and by the end of the decade he and his partner Owen Maphis had constructed a factory for the making of gas storage tanks. Elmo Hosallook of Nielsen Construction Co. superintended the project. Colored chips of glass were mixed in with the concrete as a decorative finish (this has since been painted over). In the 1930s the Lineweaver Motor Co., a Chevrolet dealership, occupied the building, followed by R. A. Chapman's People's Chevrolet in the late 1930s (R. A. Chapman was no relation to Ed Chapman). Dale Wegner's Chevrolet dealership occupied the building from the mid-1950s until 1984 when Joseph Bowman acquired it. Wegner added the roof-top garage bays in the early 1960s. Now ABC Auto Service. (Joseph Bowman; Harrisonburg, Virginia, ConSurvey City Directory, 1955, 19)