Monday, September 16, 2013

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).



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6 comments:

  1. Drew PenfieldSeptember 18, 2013 at 1:27 AM

    Happy to see that ad came in handy for you!

    ReplyDelete
  2. guvNovember 6, 2013 at 2:37 PM

    Do you have any other old photos of the J Spang Bakery on Barber?

    ReplyDelete
  3. guvNovember 6, 2013 at 2:40 PM

    Hello! Thanks for your info on the Spang Bakery on Barber Ave in Cleveland. I am a distant relative and am interested in other photographs of the building in its early years. Please let me know if you have or have seen anything.

    Kindly,

    John McGovern

    ReplyDelete
  4. AnonymousMay 2, 2014 at 5:10 PM

    My dads sister was married to Carl Sprang my name is Brady Conelly

    ReplyDelete
  5. George G. Krozser IIIOctober 25, 2015 at 6:43 PM

    I almost bought the Horse Drawn Spang Bakery Wagon in 1973. I was 15. It was $75.00 I didn't have the money and my father said it won't fit in the gsrsge. It was in a garage in the Woodhill ave. Area. A week later My uncle saw it on a flatbed going downtown. Someone bought it. It exist somewhere but I don't know where.

    ReplyDelete
  6. AnonymousOctober 21, 2017 at 12:49 PM

    My grandfather worked for Spang Bakery, delivering baked goods in a horse-drawn wagon and, later, in a motorized vehicle. His route was in Old Brooklyn. As a little boy my dad rode with him on occasion, and reported that the horses pulling the bakery wagon knew the route without any prompting from my grandfather. My dad also remembered how my grandfather was so used to years of driving the horses that he would say "whoa" when he hit the brakes on the motorized truck!

    ReplyDelete