Spang's Bakery Ad – April 29, 1925

Drew Penfield sent me the full-page ad shown above announcing the opening of the new Spang Bakery plant in Lorain months ago – so I saved it until I had a good reason to post it.

The ad appeared in The Plain Dealer on April 29, 1925 and has a nice capsule history of the company.

The first Spang bakery plant was located at 2701 Barber Avenue in Cleveland, the same street where the family business originated in 1887.

Lorain was chosen to be the site of the first expansion of the Spang business outside of Cleveland, with a bakery established in the city in 1922. Its success led to the construction of the plant.

Lorain's plant – formally known as the Lorain Spang Home Bake Bakeries – was the second largest in the Spang chain.

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While preparing this post, I decided to check the Lorain newspapers to see how the bakery plant opening was reported locally. After failing to find even a mere mention of the new plant in the Lorain Times-Herald during the late April 1925 time period, I was ready to pack it in – when I remembered that Lorain had two newspapers at that time.

Much to my surprise, The Lorain Journal devoted a whole section to the plant opening. In the near future, I'll prepare some of the material for posting here.

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More on the Spang Barber Avenue Plant

Detail from April 1925 newspaper ad

I was also surprised to find out that Barber Avenue in Cleveland was only about 5 minutes from where I work on W. 58th Street. It's located right off W. 25th Street just north of its intersection with I-90.

It was easy to drive over there on my lunch hour a few days ago to take a few shots of the former Spang plant.

The long building is located in a residential neighborhood on a very narrow street. In fact, the building runs almost the whole length of the street.

I didn't duplicate the angle exactly (I had to shoot it from memory) but it was pretty close. Plus, I didn't have a lot of room to work with.

Here's my "now" shot (below).

Proceeding west towards the taller portion of the plant, you can still see a little hint of the building's past right on the building (below).