The Rugen, Park Avenue, Ventnor

The Rugen, Park Avenue, Ventnor  by Michael Freeman.

‘Park View’, the rather grand late-Victorian house that stands at the western end of Park Avenue in Ventnor, is familiar to many older residents as the building that was used to teach the children from Albert Street School during the 1939-45 war. It was built about 1890 by local architect, Theodore Saunders, and was originally named ‘The Rugen’, after a German island famed as a summer resort at the time. Ventnor was very popular with German tourists in the late 19th century, when many Ventnor guidebooks had sections translated into German, and the name of the house was probably chosen by Theodore Saunders’s wife Margarete, daughter of William Spindler, the German industrialist at Old Park, St. Lawrence.

PDF of article available here: The Rugen, Park Avenue, Ventnor