Thornburg Trailer Sales was also conveniently located directly across from Robby's Mobile Home Park and Lakeview Mobile Homes Park on the south side of West Erie.
Here’s a portion of the 1959 Lorain city directory listings for West Erie Avenue. It's interesting to see addresses attached to each business, rather than the old Lake Shore Electric/bus stop numbers.
Note the listing of Beth-Shan Trailer Court. It was located behind the Beth-Shan Motel, which would later become Shoreway Motel.
Here's the 1960 phone book listings for "Trailer Parks." It appears that the shift to attracting permanent residents, not tourists, was well underway. New listings include Sommer's Mobile Homes Park (by the Ohio Turnpike in Elyria).
This 1960 page of the Lorain City Directory showing West Erie Avenue addresses from the Beachcomber Motor Lodge just west of Leavitt to the Lorain Drive-in Theater is kind of fun to look at. (Kolbe Road’s intersection with West Erie is indicated in the wrong place, however.)
Besides the trailer parks and businesses which I’ve highlighted in yellow, there are other things of interest, including the listing for The Palace, which sold ice cream at the same 3829 West Erie Avenue address as this building (photo courtesy of the Lorain County Auditor website).
But getting back to the trailer parks. Using the numerical addresses from the 1960 City Directory page, I’ve plotted a few of them on this current Google Map. As you can see, they were on both sides of what is today known as Anchor Lodge Retirement Village. I’m assuming that both trailer parks were eventually loss to the expansion of Anchor Lodge.
And here’s a final phone book listing for “Trailer Parks,” from the 1963 telephone book.
Lastly, here's an aerial view showing that Robby's and the other trailer parks were still there as late as 1969.
As longtime blog reader and contributor Rae noted in her comment last week, today there is no evidence that Robby’s Mobile Homes Park ever existed in that portion of West Erie Avenue from the West 21st Street underpass to Leavitt Road.
And with the closing of Lakeshore Mobile Home Park (along with the demolition of the Shoreway Motel and its trailer park in 2017), there are very few traces at all of the businesses that once offered overnight accommodations to weary U. S. 6 travelers.
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| The gates to the now-shuttered Lakeshore Mobile Home Park |
7 comments:
My parents lived at (what was the Beachcomber Motor Lodge) when they first moved here from Tennessee to work at the Ford plant!
Hi Mark! I'll bet they had a regular booth at Howard Johnson's. I wonder if they ate a lot of clam strips?
https://www.thefooddictator.com/howard-johnsons-fried-clams/
Interesting. Although I had surely been down that stretch of West Erie Avenue many times as a kid I had no recollection of the two trailer parks located between the Elyria Waterworks and Anchor Lodge. It just shows how soon things can recede from memory and disappear. Bringing this history back to present readers is one of the things that makes reading your blog so enjoyable. Thanks.
Glad you liked it Rick! It's funny driving through that area today, with the huge Sprenger complex and apartments next door, not to mention the huge lakefront homes nearby, knowing it was a trailer park haven for many years.
In the late 70's my mom had a friend that lived in the Lakeview mobile home park. We visited her often. I remember a pizza shop being at the location of the ice cream shop. I can't recall the name, maybe Little Italy?
Dave Beko
Hi Dave,
Looks like your memory is fine, I found one online mention of Little Italy Pizza at that address.
In the mid 1980s I had a friend who lived in the Lakeview MHP just west of the Waterworks. We watched as Robbies was dismantled for expansion of Anchor Lodge. There were some very cool, 1950s styled trailers that were dismantled (demolished) on site because they couldn't be legally moved over the road.
The same fate eventually fell on Lakeview, but I can't say exactly when.About 1992 or so. Anything older than 10 years was left for demolition, I'm told.
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