You can see a school indicated in the 1896 map detail above, located at the end of Oberlin Avenue where North Ridge Road and Cooper Foster Park road crisscross.
But how did the school become the Old Stone Villa?
It was explained in this short article that appeared in the Amherst News-Times on July 22, 1938.
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NEW NIGHT CLUB TO OPEN TONIGHTThe Olde Stone Villa, a new night club, will open tonight (Thursday) in the former stone school house at the corner of North Ridge Rd. and Oberlin Av. Sam Ross, former owner of the LaPorte Inn, is proprietor of the new place.
The building has been re-built. It lately was occupied as a gasoline filling station operated by the Kolbe Bros. but was destroyed by fire some time ago, leaving only the stone walls standing. Using these stone walls as a base the architecture has been changed to represent an early American Inn.
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The opening of the Old Stone Villa was also announced in the pages of the Thursday, July 21, 1938 Lorain Journal (below).
And by the time of the 1938 Lorain City Directory, the Old Stone Villa settled in for a listing that would appear for more than thirty years.
2 comments:
As a kid in the 1950s I was always intrigued by the building. The fact that it started life as a school house I never would have guessed! The fact that it burned down and was rebuilt using existing walls explains a lot. We never ate there as kids, but I was later there a few times when it was a florist. Look forward to the rest of Linda's story.
...We used to eat there on Easter, and I had no idea the place was as old as it is!
Mike
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