Tuesday, September 23, 2014

Own a Piece of Avon Lake History

Now's your chance to own a historic piece of commercial property in Avon Lake. The Avon Lake Wine Shop is currently for sale by owner, along with the buildings behind it.

The Arcadia Images of America book on Avon Lake includes some great photos of the building as it appeared in earlier incarnations. Its principal use through the years has been as a grocery store, and the book dates the building back to at least 1915.

One of the photos from the Images of America book shows the store as an IGA in the 1950s (below).

Courtesy the City of Avon Lake and the book Images of America Avon Lake
From that same time period, here's the store's listing (complete with typo) in the 1952 Avon & Avon Lake Directory. (I've included the listing of the Avon Lake Garage as well, since it was located behind the grocery store.)

1952 Directory listing
The grocery store's official Lake Shore Electric Railway stop was Stop 52, and for many years that was its address.

It's fairly difficult researching the Avon Lake Wine Shop building, as the Avon Lake Library has a very sparse collection of vintage directories from over the years. All I could really determine during two trips to the library is that during a brief time in the late 1950s, there was no business listed at that address.  I also found that the Avon Lake Wine Shop was already located there in 1969.

It will be interesting to see if a new owner finds another use for the building.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dan is this the bldg that has a large Aeroplane model outside? rae

Dan Brady said...

Hi Rae,

I don't remember seeing one on the grounds of this place. (I'm not sure if you're referring to the old Kekic gas station on Lake Road that had the Spirit of St. Louis replica on a pole for decades--no one knows what became of that plane when the gas station was torn down!)