It appeared on the front page of the Journal on March 23, 1969 and provides a fascinating history of how South Lorain neighborhoods changed with each wave of post-war immigration.
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South LorainA Last Look at an
Old Neighborhood
Part 2
She spoke from the tiny, frame, three-room house she owns on a fenced-in half-lot across the street from the Kimbroughs.
“This whole block was all foreigners – mostly Hungarians and Slovaks – when I was little,” Mrs. Geiger recalls.
Her parents, George and Rose Hirka, were natives of Hungary.
“I was born in the house next door on April 20, 1899,” Mrs. Geiger said.
Strelka:
“...there were doctors in South Lorain but very few babies were delivered by them... babies were born at home then and the husband was assistant to the mid-wife, even if only to boil the water...”
Sitting in a torn vinyl chair two inches from a gas space heater in her small kitchen, Mrs. Geiger recalled some of her childhood on the block.
“I remember chasing after the one-horse police wagon when we were little,” she said. “We would hear it coming down the street everyday. Clang-clang! Clang-clang!
“A man would have an argument with his wife and shoot her, or there would be a stabbing.”
Wells:
“...It was a pretty tough territory... I was shot at and everything you can think of... I went on all kinds of raids, knocking doors down and hauled people out...”
Most of the violence, Mrs. Geiger said, occurred across the street where several barracks-like, two-story, red brick buildings stand, stark reminders of the past.
“I remember those buildings were put up for the workers,” Mrs. Geiger said. “Men and their families were coming from all over to work in the mill.
“SOME PEOPLE in those buildings. They would put five or six beds in one room and rent it out to boarders. There was a lot of fighting over there.”
But violence was not the order of the day on the block, as Mrs. Geiger will stress.
“People were happy in those days,” she says. “There was a lot of dancing and singing.
“I remember my uncle. He used to sit on the porch here and play his accordion. We had grapes growing on arbors on the front of the house. Everybody had gardens.
“My mother. She had geese and ducks and we had two cows. We used to take them out to pasture where Thew Shovel Company is now. It was all woods there then.”
Strelka:
“...the crow of the rooster, crackle of hens, the quack of ducks, the squack of geese, the coos of pigeons, an occasional moo of a cow and the clip-clop of horse hoofs... there were the everyday sounds.”
For Mrs. Geiger and many like her, those early days in the neighborhood were happy ones. But they are gone now. All that remains is the memory – wispy as the steel smoke hanging over the community.
Today, South Lorain is different.
WITH THE great demand for labor following World War I, a large number of Mexicans came to work in the steel mill.
“The people who lived here in the beginning. Almost all of them were European,” Mrs. Geiger said. “When they first came here they didn’t have nothing. But they saved. And finally they saved enough to move to better parts of the neighborhood.
“Every time a European family left this block, a Mexican family would move in.”
Mr. and Mrs. Martin Cornejo moved into the 1500 block of East 30th Street in 1936. There are natives of Mexico.
“The block was all Mexican then,” Mrs. Cornejo recalls. “I can remember only one Puerto Rican family.”
A son, Gerry, 34, remembers a happy childhood on the block. Like Mrs. Geiger before him.
“We used to build bonfires and roast potatoes on an empty lot where Neighborhood House is now,” he said.
“Those were the days when everybody knew everybody. At night, people would come outside and talk to each other.
“US KIDS would play kick the can in the street, or maybe we’d steal some corn from the neighbors and roast it.”
The Cornejos lived on the block until after World War II. Then another big change took place.
Hundreds of Puerto Ricans began arriving to work in the steel mill. Another war had created another huge demand for labor.
Like the Europeans before them, and for the same reasons, the Mexicans started moving to other parts of town.
Today, seven out of ten people living on the 1500 block of East 30th Street are Puerto Rican.
LIKE MANY of his people, Louis Garcia, 46, came to Lorain from Puerto Rico on contract to work in the steel mill.
“I remember signing a contract in Puerto Rico to come here and work,” Garcia says. “I arrived in this country June 8, 1948.”
A bricklayer’s helper, Garcia rooms at 1508 East 30th.
Like a human being, a neighborhood has a soul. It is made of the people who live there, and those who have lived there in the past.
It is this soul quality that makes people care for their neighborhood as though it were human.
“It’ll tear my heart out when urban renewal rips this neighborhood down,” says Mrs. Geiger. “Regardless of how poor I am or how run-down this house is, I can’t picture myself anywhere else. This neighborhood has been everything to me. My childhood. My growing up. And my growing old.”
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Grace Geiger passed away on May 7, 1982. Her obituary noted that she was a long-time resident of Lorain and was formerly employed at the American Ship Building Co. and U. S. Steel, Lorain-Cuyahoga Works.
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Courtesy of Dennis Thompson (and Dennis Lamont), here's a great 1924 aerial view of the area discussed in the article. (Click on it for a larger view.) 
And here's the same view today.
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