Thursday, April 23, 2020

Elyria L-K Restaurant

Back in March on Election Day (or what was supposed to be Election Day), I posted a vintage L-K Restaurant ad from March 1970. It listed two restaurant addresses at that time: Lorain (Rt. 58 and Cooper Foster Park Road) and Elyria (Rts. 10-20).

Although I remember the Lorain location, I was never at the Elyria one. But as longtime blog contributor Dennis Thompson pointed out in a comment, the former restaurant building is still there, out on Oberlin - Elyria Road (Old U. S. Route 20).

It’s a pretty distinctive building (below), very unlike the boxy Lorain restaurant. An online search seems to indicate that after its L-K days, the building was the home of Brown’s Family Restaurant. Today, however, it’s the home of Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 6273.

Here's a view circa Feb. 2024.
And here’s a vintage photo of the Elyria restaurant circa 1969 – with watermark – courtesy of VintageAerials.com (a subsidiary of Thompson Enterprises). You can see the L-K letters on the building.
Although you can’t see the signage near the highway in the vintage shot, you can get a pretty good idea of what it probably looked like. The empty sign brackets on the “today” shot seem to match up well with this old postcard (below).
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Right out there in the same general area, just a few miles to the north on Oberlin-Elyria Road, is the old and deteriorating rainbow arch bridge