Drive around some of Lorain's older neighborhoods, and often you'll see an old, one-story brick building sitting right on a corner, next door to the houses. I've seen a lot of these structures around Lorain over the years, and they're usually home to a mom-and-pop grocery or liquor store. But I always wonder what business was in there, decades before.
Above you see an ad for one of these types of places: D & L Tavern, located on the corner of Lexington and W. 26th Street. It ran in the Journal on January 13, 1965.
It's interesting because it refers to itself as "Lorain's Most Modern and Sunken Bar." I seem to recall someone contacting me at some point to see if I remembered the name of some sunken bar.
At right you see a Google Maps view showing where 2522 Lexington is located.
Anyway, how long had D & L Tavern been there? I found this ad from the Lorain Journal of December 5, 1947. As you can see, Nick Dziama and Peter Lasichak were the proprietors.
D & L Tavern's owners believed in advertising. Here's an ample sample of ads from through the years.
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| April 2, 1948 |
6 comments:
Pretty good-sized building. Lorain must have been a convivial place in those days, with all the corner bars. I have to wonder though, is it a sunken grocery?
Corner bars, corner grocery stores, neighborhood schools a great time to grow up. I do miss all the choices for fish frys we had.
My favorite corner bar was a place called "He's Not Here" on the east side of Lorain in the 70's i believe. My grandfather once told me that when he was growing up, everything you needed was in your neighborhood - groceries, hardware, tavern, newspaper stands, laundromat, and even a pay phone before phones were in every home. You only used your car to go to work or visit family. Sounds like a much slower time.
Our family's favorite corner market was Fred's Groceries located at the corner of 5th Street and Brownell. My mother sent me to Fred's frequently for food staples. The great thing about Fred's is that he would sell grocery items on credit. At the end of each month a customer would settle up the bill with Fred. That made a kid's assigned errands to Fred's an object lesson in trust.
P.S. Nowadays "trust" is just the name on a bank.
The D+L sure had a thing for kolbasa.I bet that whole area reeked of it.It's nice that the building is currently a corner grocery store for the neighborhood but you can tell by the roll down steel window curtains that it is a rough area.Too bad somebody like The Kielbasa Kid (Big Chuck) isn't patrolling the streets making it safe for everyone in drug infested central Lorain.
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