Around 1930, Drosos Alahuzos opened a wholesale sponge business in this wood frame warehouse near the Gulf as part of his family's Philadelphia-based business. After his death in 1955, George Kousaleos of the Gulf of Mexico Sponge Company purchased the warehouse and conducted business there until the mid 1970s. Both the Alahuzos and Kousaleos families came to America from Kalymnos, one of a chain of Greek islands in the Mediterranean Sea known as sponge divers' island. Divers brought natural sponges from the coastal waters off Tarpon Springs to the warehouse, where workers washed, dried, clipped, sorted, and packaged them into bales for market. Customers including U.S. Steel and Alcoa bought the sponges for cleaning, cosmetics, ceramics, and medical purposes. After World War II, cheaper synthetic sponges and periodic blights that destroyed much of the Gulf's sponges contributed to the gradual decline of the local sponge industry. The broader industry had grown from efforts begun by Philadelphia native John Cheyney, who formed the Anclote and Rock Island Sponge Company in 1891, bought land on Bailey's Bluff for processing and selling sponge harvests, and in 1896 hired Greek immigrant and sponge buyer John Cocoris to improve productivity. In 1905, Cocoris brought the first sailing and motor sponge diving boats to Tarpon Springs and recruited nearly 500 sponge divers from Greece, whose families and friends helped create Tarpon Springs' distinctive Greek community and its reputation as the Sponge Capital of the World.