Monday, February 13, 2012

Kekic's Gas Station Then and Now


A few days ago I posted a few articles about Kekic's Gas Station in Avon Lake. The same day I got a nice email from Tony Tomanek, who grew up in Avon Lake and whose family owned and operated Ted's Place, the small business currently known as Close Quarters Pub (which is just a few doors down from where Kekic's was located).

Tony emailed me the great photo (above) of Kekic's gas station (circa 1930s), which came from the online Cleveland Memory Project (here) by way of the Avon Lake Public Library. It was part of a wonderful collection of photos donated by Barney Klement, who had been a building inspector for the city of Avon Lake.

Incidentally, this photo and many others are in the wonderful new Arcadia Publishing book on Avon Lake by local author Gerry Vogel. You can buy it here.

And here is the "now" version of the above scene, which I photographed last week on the way home from work. (I took Route 6 just to grab this shot before the predicted snow.) Like I said in my post, sadly, there is no indication that the small station and its well-known Spirit of St. Louis model plane sign were ever there.


I was surprised to see that at one time, Kekic's was a Sinclair station!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great before and after shot. Driven by many times and would never have known. Gas Station, Grapes, with the poles of the LSE in the background, the good old daze.
Dennis

Immanuel Llorens said...

It seems like the area didn't change that much. My grandparents will feel happy to see this, especially since the Sinclair refilling station was famous back then.

Here I came across this blog:

http://anaheimhistoricalsociety.blogspot.com/2012/02/anaheim-for-urban-archeologist.html

It has before and after photos of the gas station then and now.