Harbor View Motel Part 1

Since the early 1980s, I’ve been commuting to Cleveland each day. During most of those years, my trip to work has been on U.S. Route 6 – either by bus or in my own car. I’ve seen a lot of change along the highway during those decades, and watched the old roadside landmarks of yesteryear slowly disappear.

One of those landmarks was the Harbor View Motel in Rocky River. It was located on Route 6 a little east of Clague Road, and right next door to Bradstreet’s Landing.

The above vintage postcard shows the motel and two of its rooms.

You couldn’t see the motel from the highway, but it had this great sign out front to draw in the tourists (below).

(Dan Brady photo)

The back of the vintage postcard (published by the Ingall Studio in Findlay, Ohio) reads, “Greater Cleveland’s only Lake Front Motel. 15 minutes West of Cleveland, Ohio on U. S. 6 & State Route 2. Beautiful Rooms with Tub & Shower. Air Conditioning - Central Heating, Individually Controlled. Most Friendly Atmosphere. Phone ED-1-9440.”

I could only find one mention of the motel online – an ad in the East Liverpool Evening Review of July 8, 1957. The ad mentioned swimming, fishing, and boating from the motel's sandy beach.

The motel was still fairly new at that point. Using the resources of www.historicaerials.com, I determined that it was built after 1955.

Anyway, after driving by the motel for years, I decided that I wanted to spend a night there before it eventually closed. So in the early 1990s, I hornswoggled the spouse into doing exactly that.

In tomorrow's post, I'll tell you about our stay, and what the property looks like today.

Reidy Scanlan Update

The view on Sunday

Last week, the demolition of the former Reidy Scanlan furniture store finally took place (click here for the Morning Journal article in case you missed it) so it’s a good time to update my earlier post about the building.

I looked through the city directories a bit and found Reichlin, Reidy & Scanlan in the 1905 edition. The furniture and undertaking business was located in the 1700 block of Penfield Avenue (later known as Broadway). Casimir Reichlin, E . P. Reidy and M. J. Scanlan were the names behind the business.

So when did the business move to the Broadway and 21st Street location?

Here’s where the old saying, “Great Minds Think Alike” comes into play. Rick Kurish and Dennis Thompson – regular contributors to this blog with research help and topic suggestions – both sent me the vintage newspaper article (below). The article announces that the firm had purchased the southwest corner of Broadway and 21st Street with the plan to erect the (now-demolished) building there. It dates from January 16, 1913.

Rick also reminisced, “I remember my wife and I buying some of our first home furnishings at the store in the early 1970s. By then it was just named Reidy Scanland, and the funeral portion of their business had moved to a separate building just to the south."

You might also remember in my original post that I had wondered about the prominent sign protruding out from the corner of the Reichlin, Reidy & Scanland building that read, “The Outfit Store” that was visible in that 1936 phone book ad (below).

Well, Dennis did some research and confirmed that “The Outfit Store” was an ad slogan. He wrote, “If you can find a copy of the Lorain High Scimitar, Class of 1924, Reidy Scanlan used the term “The Outfit Store” in an ad on page 85.” He noted that the e-yearbook.com website revealed it was still in use in an ad in the 1927 Scimitar, as well as in the Brookside Leader, Class of 1931 book.

Dennis also sent me a copy of a Slovenian language newspaper from December 20, 1923 with a Reichlin - Reidy - Scanlan ad that used the slogan. The paper was called GLAS NARODA and was the largest Slovenian Daily in the United States.

Here is the ad (below).

My thanks to Dennis and Rick for helping me with this research. (By the way, GLAS NARODA translates to “The Voice of the Nation.”)

Air-Wood Motel on U.S. 40

To close out the week, here's another vintage motel with a great sign, although it was pretty far from Lorain County. It’s the Air-Wood Motel, located on U.S. 40 about 5 miles east of Zanesville, near the I-70 Airport Interchange. I shot the photograph above during a road trip my younger brother and I took on the National Road in the 1990s.

Here's an undated vintage postcard of the Air-Wood (below), courtesy of the CardCow website, in which you can see the distinctive plane-shaped sign in colore.

The back of the postcard describes the motel’s amenities: 14 quiet, clean and comfortable units, as well as free T.V.

A newer postcard (below) seems to downplay the motel in favor of the gift shop both in the photograph and text. After mentioning the motel, the postcard’s mail panel side reads, “Largest Candle and Candle Accessories display in Ohio. Local made Pottery, Glass, and Cement Statuary.”

By the time my brother and I were driving by the motel in the 1990s, it appears that candles and pottery had been shelved in favor of salami and lottery tickets.

Sadly, like the other motels I wrote about this week, the Air-Wood Motel is gone, with only its parking lot (below) left to mark the spot.

I guess all over Ohio, the old mom-and-pop motels, tourist camps and cottages that catered to travelers along the once-congested federal highways are finally beginning to disappear. It’s not necessarily a good or bad thing – just a reminder that time is marching on and nothing lasts forever. 

Dreamland Motel on U.S. 20

Here's another vintage mom-and-pop motel on U.S. 20 that's now just a memory: the Dreamland Motel. I took the above photo with my trusty Pentax K1000, probably about the same time that I photographed the Trail's End Motel, (sometime during the 1990s). I believe the motel was still open when I shot my photo.

According to one realty website, the motel was built in 1952.

The Dreamland Motel was east of Norwalk, on the northeast corner of U.S. 20 and Laylin Road. You can see its ghostly "footprint" below. Just like the Trail's End Motel, only the paved portion of the former motel property remains.

Unlike the Trail's End, however, many photographers were able to shoot the Dreamland Motel’s sign before it was demolished, and there are a lot of photos of it online. You can see a nice color version of it (as well as a lot of other great, vintage Ohio signs) on the RoadsideArchitecture.com website by clicking here.

Special thanks to archivist and historian Dennis Lamont for making me aware of the demolition of the Dreamland Motel.

Red & White Food Store – Milan, Ohio

On the way home from photographing the former location of Trail's End Motel on Sunday, I did a little detour through Milan so I could pick up Route 113.

On my way into town on W. Church Street, I happened to notice the above vintage-looking Red & White Food Stores sign behind the buildings on N. Main that face the town square.  You can see its location in the photo below.

I'd never heard of the grocery store chain, so of course I Googled it. It was (and still is, apparently, in some places) a cooperative of independent grocers not unlike IGA.

1953 Red & White Food Stores magazine ad
(Courtesy of www.flickr.com/photos/retroarama)

You can read a little about the chain's history here. It was very big in small towns, so it makes sense that there was an outlet in Milan.

Part of a 1956 Red & White Food Stores magazine ad
(Courtesy of rogerwilkerson.tumblr.com) 

The presence of a Red & White Food Store in Milan seems to date back to March of 1941. An ad in the Friday, March 7, 1941 Sandusky Register announces, "Another Red & White Store To Serve You - Grand Opening Saturday - Kramer and Lavey, Milan, Ohio."

I found a few more mentions of Kramer's Red & White Food Store in Milan in some Sandusky Registers from 1947 and 48. But those are the only mentions of a Milan store that I could find online.

Vintage celluloid button
(Courtesy oldpolitcals.com)

There still seem to be some Red & White locations scattered around the country, with updated signage. If anyone has any knowledge of when the Milan store closed, please leave a comment.

Trail’s End Motel on U.S. 20

Vintage postcard currently on Ebay

Many years before I started to blog about local history, I was an old road buff. My idea of fun was driving the old federal highways in Ohio and photographing old motels, drive-in theaters, roadside diners and bypassed road alignments. (Regular blog contributor Rick Kurish did the same thing during the same time frame.)  I spent a lot of time on U.S. 40 (the National Road), U.S. 30 (the Lincoln Highway) and U.S. 20.

One of the motels on U. S. Route 20 that I photographed back in the late 1980s / early 1990s was the Trail’s End Motel, located just east of Monroeville. It had a great neon sign out front with an attractive painted rendering of James Earle Fraser's iconic sculpture End of the Trail, which depicted an Indian slumping forlornly on his horse.

The motel was still in business back then, and I grabbed a few photos (below).

A few years later, I happened to be out that way and was dismayed to discover that the classic sign had been given a new paint job that all but destroyed its vintage roadside charm. 

Around 1999, author Dr. Andrew Wood paid a visit to Trail’s End Motel, which he wrote about here. He also photographed the motel’s sign (below) and its new color scheme.

Courtesy Dr. Andrew Wood and www.sjsu.edu

Some time later, I was again driving U.S. 20 and noticed that the motel had closed. Sadly, the property was now covered with parked vehicles, and it appeared that the former motel rooms were being used for storage.

Which brings me to this past Sunday. It was a beautiful day – too nice to sit in front of a TV or computer – so I grabbed the camera and headed out towards Norwalk.

“I wonder what the Trail’s End Motel looks like now?” I mused.

After driving back and forth a few times on U.S. 20 between Monroeville and Norwalk in search of it, I had my answer: real gone, daddy-o.

Yes, the motel had been torn down, and its grounds largely cleared.

Fortunately, the motel's entrance and exit driveways, as well as the paved parking area, were still there to provide a clue to its former location. (Also, a small green sign mounted to a pole in front of the property contained the motel's 2604 numerical address.

Here are my shots from Sunday (below).

So another Ohio roadside icon bites the dust. I guess I’m lucky that I was driving around the state thirty years ago taking pictures, because many of those roadside vistas are gone now, with no evidence – other than old postcards and matchbooks on Ebay – that they ever existed.

Thanks to Rick Kurish for suggesting this post. He was also a big fan of the Trail’s End Motel sign and identified its painting for me as a representation of the famous End of the Trail sculpture.

Lorain’s Tucker Automobile Dealership

Last week I did a post about 939 Broadway, currently the home of Dabu Restaurant & Cocktail Bar, and for many years the headquarters of radio station WLRO. I’d mentioned in my post that there was a used car business at that location run by Arlington J. Popp in the early 1940s.

This triggered the memory of local historian and author Al Doane, who contacted me to point out something very interesting: that Arlington Popp had briefly operated a Tucker Automobile dealership at that same location.

It was pretty brief. An ad for the Tucker dealership only appeared in the October 1947 and October 1948 Lorain Telephone Company directories.

A 1948 Tucker Sedan at the Blackhawk Auto Museum
(Courtesy of Wikipedia)

Now, in case you’ve never heard of it, the Tucker Automobile was a revolutionary car conceived by Preston Tucker and known for its innovative design. 

Despite this, the car had only a brief life due to many controversial factors, and only 51 were produced before the company closed. (Preston Tucker and his cars were the subject of Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988) starring Jeff Bridges and directed by Francis Ford Coppola.)

Al remembered one of the unique features of the car. “As the front wheels turned,” he noted, "the head lights also turned with the wheels.”

This is explained further in the Wiki entry on the Tucker 48 automobile. It states, “The most recognizable feature of the Tucker ’48, a directional third headlight (known as the “Cyclops Eye”), would activate at steering angles of greater than 10 degrees to light the car’s path around corners.” 

Not surprisingly – since so few cars were manufactured – Al remembered that the dealership “was never able to get one of the Tucker autos in their new showroom.”

****

Al Doane was also able to tell me a little bit about J. Arlington Popp. Al reminisced, “Arlington was very much like a midget, very short in stature.

“He was so short that he would place a 2 x 4 to the car pedals so he could touch them and be able to control the car. He lived on Hamilton Avenue just to the west of Lorain High School.”

My mother remembered J. Arlington Popp as well, although she thought he might have been a dwarf. Nevertheless, Mr. Popp sounds like he was very well known character in Lorain, and successful at what he did.

J. Arlington Popp passed away on March 17, 1989 at the age of 75. He lived in Lorain all his life, and there were no survivors.