The Colonial Hotel Part 2

Back in late December of last year, Jim Mihalek – formerly of Lorain – was nice enough to send me some great newspaper clippings, one of which was about a fire at the Colonial Hotel on the night before it was about to be demolished due to urban renewal. The Lorain Journal article was dated March 14, 1978

Jim told me in an email that his family used to drive by the Colonial when they went to visit his grandmother, who lived in the high-rise on Seventh Street. "I remember when they tore down the Colonial. I picked up a couple of bricks from it."

Unfortunately, Jim didn't grab what surely must have been the most tempting artifact. "I was not brave enough to try and snag the HOTEL sign that was lying in the rubble!" he humorously noted.

Anyway, special thanks to Jim for the article, which appears below.

Fire Mars Last Night of Colonial Hotel
By M. R. KROPKO
Journal Staff Writer

THE COLONIAL HOTEL was alive with activity again in its last night standing in Lorain. But it wasn't a happy occasion.

A fire gutted portions of three floors of the building as firemen climbed stairways and scoured rooms to battle a fire of suspicious origin.

The three-story brick structure, at 303 Fourth Street in Lorain's urban renewal project area, has been vacant for nearly six months, awaiting the arrival of a demolition crew. It has stood there since the early part of this century, and at one time was regarded as one of the top hotels in the city.

The demolition is scheduled to begin today.

The fire has been officially referred to the department's fire prevention bureau for investigation, but the demolition plans have not been delayed.

Firemen at the nearby number one station were alerted to the fire shortly after 7:30 p.m. by a pedestrian on Fourth Street, firefighter John Petrillo said last night.

"THERE WAS someone pounding on the garage door. It was a middle-aged woman, and she said the hotel down the street was on fire. My first impression was that it must be the Antlers, but when I looked down the street at the Colonial, it was all red," Petrillo said.

Assistant Chief Andrew Torok said firefighters found one of the first floor rooms on the west side of the building completely involved in flames.

The front door was locked, and some firemen forced it open as others busted out windows on the Reid Avenue side of the building.

Torok said the only window broken out before firemen arrived was the window of the room that was ablaze.

DENSE SMOKE filled the area as the firefighters soaked the fire. Torok said the blaze quickly spread from the first floor room up pipes and walls in to second and third floor rooms directly above.

The fire did not present problems the firefighters might have faced once at the Colonial. All rooms were vacant and no utilities service the building.

"The building was not in bad shape, considering it's part of urban renewal. All the stairs were still there, and there were no holes in the floors, except for the ones we made," fire Lt. Clarence Jenkins said.

The Elmar Demolition Company of Elyria in January was awarded a $35,990 contract to demolish the Colonial Hotel and Moose Hall buildings. A message from Safety Director Richard Koba's office instructed the firemen to be aware of street closings today near the intersection of Fourth and Reid because of the demolotion.

No estimate of damage was made because of the demolition plans. No injuries were reported.

****

It's funny to look back and realize that forty years ago, urban renewal seemed like a good idea. All it seemed to accomplish in Downtown Lorain is produce a few unappealing buildings and lots of vacant lots.

I look at the sad Meridian Shopping Plaza – with the tiny, hole-in-the-wall Post Office, the internet café, dollar store and budget grocery store – and wish that the Colonial Hotel had never been torn down.

The Colonial Hotel Part 1

Last week I mentioned the Colonial Hotel in the post with the 'then and now' photos of Fifth Street looking west. In the photo, you could see it off in the distance beyond Ted Jacobs.

Do you remember the Colonial? I only have a vague recollection of it.

The earliest listing in the city directories that I could find for it was in the 1912 edition as the Colonial Apartments. It began being listed as the Colonial Hotel in the 1919-1920 edition.

Above is a pretty good photo of what it looked like (Click on it for a larger image.) The photo and caption above are from an article in the Monday, April 13, 1925 edition of the Lorain Times-Herald. The article was about the reopening of the hotel after it was wrecked by the June 28, 1924 Lorain Tornado.

Much of the article on microfilm was illegible due to poor reproduction quality, but it noted, "Practically all the remains of the old hotel are the outer walls. A new lobby, new rooms, new equipment have been installed.

"The front wall has been extended to the sidewalk, providing a lobby containing 1,700 square feet of floor space. Asbestone, a fire-proof material, has been used for the floor.

"One of the fire-proof features of the Colonial are the solid brick walls encasing the front and rear stairways. Every room in the building is located within 50 feet of one of the stairs."

It sounds like everything was done to keep it from being damaged in a fire, which turned out to be somewhat ironic in view of the last days of the hotel, some fifty-three years later.

Tomorrow: the end of the Colonial Hotel

Kutza's Pharmacy

Courtesy Jack Tiller

Jack Tiller has quite a collection of Lorain memorabilia. And luckily for us, he has been very happy to share it with us through this blog. He's sent me photos of his Lorain bottle collection, and came up with a photo of an Arvay's Potato Chip can when I needed it. And now he has turned his attention to a well-known Lorain pharmacy of the past: Kutza's Pharmacy.

He sent me the image above, in which he combined his collection of Kutza bottles and artifacts with a great image of the former building at 1302 Broadway. Nice work, Jack! (Jack is taking it easy after some surgery and I wish him well.)

This 1962 Kutza's ad (below) says that the company had been serving the Lorain area since 1907.

1962 phone book ad

The company disappeared from the city directory around 1967.

Here's Jack's beautiful shot of the building, which is just south of the Frank Nardini railroad underpass. The building appears to be the home of Haven Church Fellowship.

Courtesy Jack Tiller

Jack has sent me photos of some of his other Lorain collections as well, which I appreciate very much. Rest assured you will see them here. Thanks, Jack!

Guest Blogger: Steel Mill Adventures Part 2

Here's the conclusion of my brother Ken's reminisces about working at the steel mill in the late 1970's and early 80's.

Steel Mill Adventures Part 2

By Ken Brady

Continuous Buttweld Mill at National Tube Co. in Lorain - 1960
(Courtesy Clevelandmemory.org)

After I moved around and became a millwright apprentice, there was more time for exploring. You could work in a mill where they had an active line, and you would see all kinds of old machinery in old sections that weren't being used anymore – huge old defunct lines. One of them was parallel to the Continuous Weld Mill, but set way down in the ground.

The stairs down to it were chained off, but another apprentice and I took some flashlights and went down there one night when we were bored. We went to the end of the mill, out of sight, and found a door that opened to a tunnel and went down into it. We followed it past old offices and stuff (most of the doors were locked), went through intersections, made turns and got lost.

The tunnels went on as far as you could see. There were more of the old posters and stuff, but we started worrying about getting in trouble for being gone so long.

We finally found some stairs that went up, followed them, hoping for an unlocked door at the top, but it was locked. We stood there wondering what the hell we were going to do, and the door opened! It was a pipe-fitter we both knew! We had come up the back way into his workshop.

He was amazed we had come up there, and said that he had only opened that door once and looked down it, and had never opened it again until that day.

We had to go up another flight of stairs just to get up to ground level, and we were in the wrong building! We had to cross a couple of wide yards to get back to the CW Mill, but at least we had picked up a bunch of old, old tools along the way in the tunnel. Our pockets were full of them, and they went into our tool lockers.

****

Around 1982, I think, they closed the CW Mill and we apprentices were sent to another department in the rolling mill. They posted the schedules on Thursday, if I remember right, on a wide wall for all of the crews to see. And one Thursday, they had drawn a line through the schedules diagonally, all of them, and had written the word LAYOFF. Thousands of workers laid off just like that.

Management had to open up a whole new unemployment office in the otherwise falling apart shopping center at 21st and Leavitt Road just to process all of us. We were told to show up there on a certain day, and there we all were, in a huge line stretching across the parking lot. I felt bad for the thirty- and forty-year-old guys. I was only twenty three or twenty four, and I could go out and get another job, but those guys – old men, I thought then – what the hell were they going to do?

As for me, I ended up in the Army.

****

When I got out of the Army in 1994, I tried to put together a resume. I had some questions about the time I was at U. S. Steel, and also wanted to get some kind of proof that I had worked there.

In those pre-internet days, I called information in Pittsburgh, and the operator told me that U. S. Steel was now called USX. After calling around and talking to dozens of people, trying to come up with records for Lorain-Cuyahoga works for the early 1980's, I was finally directed to the Archives Section. There, I talked to a gravel-voiced old geezer who told me he would research it.

After about a week, I got a letter in the mail, just stating that I had been a laborer at the mill between certain dates. Not much use.

Years before, we used to say, "What's good for U. S. Steel is good for the U. S.A." and make jokes about it at the mill. Now U. S. Steel no longer existed!

Ken of course was referring to when U. S. Steel was renamed USX Corporation in 1991. Since 2001, it has gone back to its old name, United States Steel Corporation.

Special thanks to Ken for sharing his anecdotes!

Guest Blogger: Steel Mill Adventures Part 1

Today and tomorrow, I have my first guest blogger – my brother Ken. He worked at the steel mill in the late 1970's and early 80's, and I asked him if he would write about some of his experiences, since I was blogging about the history of that iconic Lorain institution. So he came up with what you see below. It sounds like he had quite an interesting time!

Steel Mill Adventures Part 1
By Ken Brady

Courtesy CardCow.com

Lately, my brother Dan has blogged about the beginnings of the steel mill, which has always interested me. My experiences at the mill, though, were right before what became the bitter end for so many workers there.

When I was at the mill, I worked in the Pipe Mills hot end, the Rolling Mills, Galvanized, Pipe Mills finishing end, and then was a Millwright Apprentice, all in less than five years. You could jump around in the mill if you watched the job postings.

In the summer of '78, I worked in the Rolling Mills Inspection department – checking the billets for cracks and/or imperfections. They used a technique called magnaglow, in which a solution was sprayed on the pipes. Then, you would examine the billets under black light to look for cracks (if any), mark them with chalk, and then "scarfers" would melt the cracks off with scarfing torches. They had an automatic section on kind of a ferris wheel, with tarps covering the sides so it would be dark, and that was a prized job – so of course, I didn't work there. Business was still booming, and the automatic, easy process couldn't handle the volume.

So they came up with a manual process. There were two large racks that would hold four billets (fifty foot long square end pieces of steel, about six by six inches wide). We would have to mix up the solution in big vats, and then spray it on the pipes, pull a huge tarp like a shower curtain from both ends, then walk around with handheld black lights, marking the cracks. Then the craneman would take them and put them on the floor a little farther down for the scarfers. (The scarfers in this case were two jerks who we called Frick and Frack, who only enjoyed their own company and wouldn't talk to the rest of us, except to complain that we were going too fast or too slow.)

The interesting part was that we had to set up operations in a building that hadn't been used in a long time. I remember two of us from inspection walking up to the building on day one of the project with the foreman. When we got to the door, it had a huge rusty chain and lock securing it. We couldn't cut the lock with our bolt cutters, but were able to cut the chain. Then we couldn't get the door open, and the foreman sent us back to maintenance to get a chain come-along to force it open.

When we finally got into the huge building, everything was dark and dirty, and I was amazed to see bomb casings – World War II bomb casings – everywhere, lying on pallets all over the place! We made jokes about being blown up, and a few of us were a little nervous.

After they installed a huge magnetic crane, the craneman made quick work of the casings, dropping them in a railroad car to go to the Hot End to be melted down.

There was an office area, probably the foreman's offices, with World War II-era posters on the walls. I got in trouble for rummaging in one of the offices that was open. There were papers from 1946 in there, and stacks and stacks of old records. I suppose when the war ended, they just padlocked the building and walked away from it, never thinking that it would be thirty years before anyone would come back.

It struck me as strange that a building could sit there so long. It had an old creepy look and was way back from the huge main buildings, kind of between the rolling mills and pipe mills, closer to the river. There was a graveyard back there too, but it was behind a fence and padlocked, so I could never get at it.

In a week, all the bomb casings and old junk were gone, and water and power were turned on. The vintage posters remained on the walls and in the locker room, exhorting us to higher productivity for the war effort. Nobody thought it was that strange.

Tomorrow: More adventures at the steel mill – tunnels and layoffs

The View Down Fourth Street Then & Now

Here's a great photo from the archives of the Black River Historical Society that should bring back some pleasant memories of Lorain's heyday. It's a vintage shot looking west at Fourth Street from Broadway.

1960's newspaper ad

The Flame Cafeteria at the left side of the photo was at 400 Broadway, and it first appeared in the city directory in the 1969 edition. It succeeded another cafeteria at that location, the Muth Cafeteria Restaurant.

Along that side of the street in the photo are both some well-remembered businesses and some that I've never heard of. At 115 Fourth Street was the Price Insurance Agency, and at 129 was Lynn's Self Serve Department Store.

At 209 Fourth Street was the well-known Ted Jacobs women's clothing store. And the tall building in the distance, after the Ted Jacobs parking lot, was the Colonial Hotel.

And here's the 'now' view from this past weekend (below). Of course, the traffic light is long gone, along with most of the traffic. I had no trouble taking the shot on Saturday morning; no pedestrian walked into the shot, and only one lonely car interrupted my photo.

Currently occupying the former Flame space is the Deja Vu nightclub. The former Lynn's was most recently Club West Fitness for many years, but is now vacant. The Ted Jacobs building is currently home to an office of the Ohio Department of Jobs & Family Services. And after that is the Meridian shopping plaza.

I've mentioned taking trumpet lessons along with my brothers on Saturday mornings in the late 1960's and early 1970's, and the view from Alex Visci's original music studio on the other side of Fourth looked down at this strip of businesses. I don't remember the Lynn's store at all, but I do recall that a drug store was in there after that.

****

UPDATE (July 1, 2016)
Fixed the title of this post (originally had it identified as Fifth Street. See, you can live in the Lorain area for more than 50 years and still not know your way around!

1961 Model Home on G Street Then & Now

Ever since I saw the scene in the movie Back to the Future in which the Michael J. Fox character has been transported to the 1950's, and is dumbfounded to be standing at the entrance to the not-yet-built Lyon Estates, I've been fascinated by vintage ads for Lorain housing developments. There's something kind of cool to me about seeing early drawings or plans for real estate projects that are now decades old.

Since I look at a lot of newspaper microfilm from the 1950's and 60's at the Lorain Public Library, I see a lot of ads for brand new housing developments and model homes, since that was Lorain's great postwar growth period.

I thought the ad for the bi-level model home shown above in the May 6, 1961 Lorain Journal was somewhat interesting. I lived in 1950's and 1960's ranches on the west side of Lorain while growing up, and a 1940's colonial on the east side after I got married – but I've never lived in a bi-level or a split level. But at some point those styles were pretty popular. I wonder if anyone still builds them?

Anyway, on Sunday I drove over to where this model home is located (near the intersection of Missouri Ave. and G Street) and was happy to see that it is still a handsome home. It has a pretty nice size lot (and a good looking lawn too, thanks to all the rain we've had recently).