Paige’s Sohio Car Wash – Dec. 1970

I’m not sure why, but car washes continue to show up regularly on this blog. 

And here’s another one, which is the subject of the article above, which appeared in the Lorain Journal on December 6, 1970. It was owned by Pete DeSantis (a cousin of Pete DeSantis the potato chip distributor) and was called Paige’s Sohio Car Wash. There was a relationship between the car wash and Sohio Corp., who issued discount tickets for it at its service station.

The article notes that the car wash property used to be part of the DeSantis coal yard. When he got out of the coal business, DeSantis became a land developer. He built an Open Pantry convenience store on part of his land; he also leased part of it for the well-remembered Mister S restaurant, and part for a Sohio service station.

What’s interesting to me is that I’ve driven by the car wash building countless times in my life, and I’ve always thought that it had to be something else before it was a car wash. It just doesn’t look like one. My guess was that it was some kind of bank.

And that’s the same observation made in the article, that the building “looks more like a branch bank than a car wash.”

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Longtime blog contributor Jeremy emailed me to remind me that the car wash on Broadway had a lookalike sister outlet at 2115 W. 21st Street – also called Paige’s Sohio Car Wash – that I had forgotten about. Both eventually dropped the ‘Sohio’ affiliation in their name.

And as Jeremy remembered, the car wash on Broadway became Charleston Car Wash by 2000.

These days, I’m not sure if the building on Broadway is still being used for anything – but it still says “Car Wash” on it, so maybe it is.