Buy a Summer Cottage at Lake Breeze – July 8, 1921

Have you ever been the unwilling recipient of a sales pitch for a timeshare or some other investment? Perhaps you were bamboozled into this unfortunate scenario by accepting a free meal, or some other sneaky incentive.

Apparently this kind of thing has been going on for a long time. That’s what I was thinking when I saw this ad in the Lorain Times-Herald from July 8, 1921 – a hundred years ago this month. 

The ad promotes a “Free Prize Contest and Grand Picnic” at Lake Breeze at Stop 86 on the Lake Shore Electric. It promises 41 prizes to be awarded to winners of a variety of contests to be held at Lake Breeze. Prizes to be donated included a ‘gent’s suit,' ladies dresses, 50-piece dinner sets, one chest of silverware, boy’s and girl’s bicycles, an electric lamp, a coffee percolator, $25 in credit at The Bailey Company Stores, $10 in cash, a $500 lot, a set of cottage furniture, bathing suits, a Brownie camera, and more cash prizes.

The ad also reminds you to bring your bathing suit to enjoy the bathing beach at Lake Breeze. You are also encouraged to enjoy the 20 degrees cooler temperature there.

It isn’t until the very end of the ad that the ad notes, “You are sure to be delighted with LAKE BREEZE you will want to spend all of your summers here. We are making this possible for you. Without placing you under any obligation we will be glad to tell you next SUNDAY just how you can have a pleasant summer cottage at healthful LAKE BREEZE.”

Lake Breeze had been a resort area since the 1870s with the opening of the Lake Breeze House. (Click here to read about it on Drew Penfield’s Lake Shore Rail Maps website.) But by the 1920s, a summer cottage community with convenient access by the interurbans was planned and lots were being sold – the focus of the ad above.

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I wrote about the Lake Breeze resort area before. 

This multi-post series entitled, “Dr. B. W. Donaldson’s Lake Breeze Memories” tells how the resort was popular with Lorain’s early steel plant executives via a series of reminisces. This post shows how the Lake Breeze cottage allotment was still being promoted in 1927, this time by the Sykes & Thompson Company. And this post shows how in 1960, the Lake Breeze Estates housing development was continuing the tradition of trying to get people to build in that area.