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. 

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3 comments:

  1. PatrickApril 24, 2020 at 10:28 AM

    I used to caddy at Elyria Country Club and used to go over the rainbow bridge everyday. When they rebuilt the bridge, they moved the the rainbow bridge to the right hand side of the road. I have always wondered why they did that.

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  2. Dan BradyMay 6, 2020 at 9:35 AM

    Yes, it’s always an interesting process when a bridge is replaced. The new one is built next to the old one, and a new road alignment is built to direct traffic onto the new bridge. Then the old bridge is usually torn down. In this case, the old bridge was of historical interest and design so it was left standing. I hope that some historical group finds a way to keep it from deteriorating more or it may end up get demolished at some point.

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  3. Scott BaileySeptember 15, 2020 at 7:05 PM

    I worked at the Lorain LK through high school when I graduated in 1977. There was a Motor Inn built behind the restaurant around 1975. LK owned both properties. I worked there as well. Wish I could find a picture of the old place

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