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My Cleveland History

We solve family mysteries and provide depth and context to your history. We tell the story of how they lived, and how they had fun.

We meticulously trace your roots to uncover the stories of your ancestors' contributions to CLE's rich tapestry.

05/11/2026

Today 7018 Union Avenue is a fenced lot at the corner of East 71st, next to J.J. White Products, which acquired the parcel from Slavic Village Development in 2017. For decades this corner was home to the Ohio Cocktail Bar, known around the neighborhood as the OCB.

The building’s first story starts with Alois Žák, who came to Cleveland from Bohemia in 1882. Trained as an iron worker, he ran a hardware business on Union Avenue for about 23 years beginning in the early 1900s. By 1915 he was at 7018 Union, one of the city’s dealers for Reed roasters, and he advertised in Svět, the Bohemian daily he had helped found, offering gas and combination stoves, garden tools, and paint of every kind. He was still selling housewares here in 1924.

In 1925 Žák lost his sight. He taught himself to type and learned Braille, using his iron working skills to build his own typing stand and a board to guide his handwriting. For seven years he wrote a humor and advice column in Svět under the name Majk (Mike), full of stories about the old settlers and the village he left behind. Some readers took the writer for a widow, and when one invited “the Widow” to dinner, Žák showed up with his wife. He wrote funeral speeches and obituaries for old settlers, taught reading for the Society for the Blind, and in 1936 wrote the 40th anniversary history of the Bohemian National Hall at Broadway and Meade, which he had helped organize. He belonged to nearly every Bohemian group in town and figured he knew at least 3,000 people.

By 1926 the store at 7018 Union had become Leder’s Hardware, run by Rudolph Leder. Prohibition ended in December 1933, and by 1937 the Ohio Cocktail Bar was open at 7018 Union. It would stay in one family for decades: Frank Woronowicz, then his daughter Geraldine and her husband, Joseph “Pepik” Svihlik, a World War II Marine veteran.

Alois Žák died on May 20, 1951, at 87. Five weeks later, his old storefront had its most dramatic day. On Friday, June 29, Geraldine, then 25, was cashing customers’ paychecks out of the kitchen, a common service at neighborhood taverns in those days. Two women came in just before 1 p.m. Two men followed about 20 minutes later, and the group put on a flirtation act. Around 1:45, one of the men followed Geraldine into the kitchen and held a revolver on her while one of the women swept about $5,000 into her handbag. The gang herded Frank, Geraldine, and three customers, all neighbors from East 70th Street, into the basement. Then they emptied $1,200 from the register and took another $300 from Frank’s pockets, $6,500 in all. One customer, Edward Kopansky, slipped out the back door in time to see the getaway car pull away. Police found it abandoned near East 71st and Grand within three hours; it had been stolen that morning. Days later, Oscar Lee Smith, 24, was charged with armed robbery after Geraldine picked him out of a police lineup as the man who slapped her during the holdup.

Not every OCB story was a crime story. In 1960 the Cleveland Press reported that Spike, a bulldog who hung around the bar, howled so loudly at certain jukebox records that Joe and his brother Bob had them pulled from the machine.

In August 1963, four young men who had been drinking for hours lost control of an old Dodge at East 71st and Union. The car hit a utility pole and then the side of the bar. The 19-year-old driver lost a thumb. Nobody inside was hurt, but every bottle came off the back bar and the lights went out.

Early on Sunday, November 28, 1982, two gunmen burst into the bar announcing a holdup. They had walked right past a police cruiser parked outside. Inside, two patrolmen were talking with an off-duty detective, and gunfire broke out. Geraldine first thought the shots were firecrackers before fleeing to the basement. Both gunmen were wounded and arrested, and a regular customer was shot in the chest but survived. Geraldine told the Plain Dealer it was the fourth robbery since 1951, the same year she had been slapped and held at gunpoint, and the first time anyone had been hurt.

Joe Svihlik died in 1996, and Geraldine sold the property in 1998. It passed through several owners before the county land bank took it in 2012. Geraldine died in 2005. Both she and Joe were waked at Fortuna Funeral Home on Fleet Avenue and buried from Our Lady of Lourdes.
The building that had held Žák’s hardware store and nearly half a century of OCB stories was still standing in 2011. By 2014 it was gone, leaving the empty corner you see today.

05/11/2026

One week from tonight! On Thursday, November 12, I’ll be hosting author Dave Eifert at the Music Box Supper Club for a Cleveland Stories Dinner Party on his novel Cleveland Curse, Volume One. It all begins the night before the Browns’ 1964 Championship, when Art Modell meets a mysterious stranger with a contract to sign.

Take a look at this photo from late in the 1965 season. Jim Brown has just scored on a 5-yard run to put the Browns ahead of Washington 24-16 with under two minutes left, and a fan in a stocking cap walks right out onto the field to shake his hand. Try that today!

What nobody in the stands knew: it was Jim Brown’s last game at Cleveland Stadium. He ran for 141 yards that day, and the touchdown was his 20th of the season, tying the NFL record at the time. The following summer, at the peak of his career, he retired while filming The Dirty Dozen in England.

Brown was gone at 30 years old. Coincidence? Or the curse at work?

Free admission, table reservations required. Doors at 5:00, stories at 7:00.
https://musicboxcle.com/event/cleveland-curse/

04/11/2026

Years ago, before it was called Slavic Village, a visitor asked me, “Does every corner around here have a couple of bars and a funeral home?”

Not quite, but by the late 1930s there were more than 20 funeral homes in and around the neighborhood, most within walking distance of St. Stan’s, Sacred Heart, St. Hyacinth, Our Lady of Lourdes, Immaculate Heart of Mary or Holy Name.

They were family businesses in every sense. The parlors were downstairs and the kids grew up upstairs. Husbands and wives ran them together, and sons came home from mortuary school (and sometimes law school) to join them.

Marek on Broadway was called the oldest Bohemian funeral home in Cleveland, run by three generations from 1890 until 1991. Mosinski’s, steps from St. Stan’s, had a big painted sign on the side of the building advertising its ambulance service. And Bican Bros. has been on Fleet Avenue for more than a century and is still serving families there today.

That’s just a few of them. My column in this month’s Neighborhood News covers more than a dozen funeral homes and the families behind them, from Golubski, Fortuna and Nosek to Komorowski, McGreal and Kornowski, where Klara Kornowska was billed in 1924 as Cleveland’s only licensed woman embalmer. It also has more vintage photos and old Polish-language ads, plus the story of an undertaker who had a street named after him.

Read the full article here:https://theneighborhoodnews.com/wp-content/uploads/simple-file-list/2026/11-04-26.pdf

02/11/2026

Today the corner of Scranton and Buhrer is a parking lot. For the better part of a century, though, a two-story frame building stood here with a storefront on the street, and for most of that time the storefront was a tavern.

In the 1920s it was a meat market and delicatessen. An ad in the paper asked for a young man to drive the delivery truck. In the late 1920s the owner tried to sell it as a “prominent corner” for a gas station. Nobody bit, and the old building stayed.
When b**r came back in 1933, the corner was Charlie’s Lunch, one of the places that proudly sold Leisy’s b**r and Kessler’s Private Brand Wh**ky. By 1937 it was the Scranton Tavern, and it kept that name for more than fifty years.

Cleveland’s Board of Zoning stopped here for a photo in 1941. The photo shows “Sam Uhrin’s Scranton Tavern” painted across the awning, with “6% Beer” and “Liquor” in the windows and a LIQUOR B**R sign hanging down the street. Attached to the side of the tavern is a little brick grocery advertising Quality Meats and Salada Tea. Two months later the state suspended Sam’s permit for 20 days for refilling wh**ky bottles.
The Scranton Tavern had its share of trouble. A newspaper looking into teenage drinking found that boys from nearby Lincoln High were being served there, with a pinball machine going and a card game in the corner. Another night, while owner Jacob Eichmuller was tending bar for about 20 customers, thieves carried his 500-pound safe out of the back room and 75 feet to a waiting car. The jukebox was loud enough that nobody heard a thing. The safe held $5,010. Police later found it on a lawn across town, beaten open with a sledgehammer.

In the 1970s owner Chester Lubowicz, 59, found a robber pointing a revolver at him. The robber had held up three other West Side bars that same night and was stuffing $87 from the patrons into his pockets. Lubowicz pulled his own .38, fired once, and ended the spree. A few years later, a man who had been asked to leave came back with a r***e and fired through the door and window into a room of about 25 people. Two patrons were wounded, and the man was shot by police.

But most nights at a corner bar weren’t like that. Most nights were regulars, the jukebox, and the softball team. The Scranton Tavern played in the Innerbelt men’s league, and the last score I found is from 1990. It’s the last mention of the tavern I’ve found.

In 1996 a neighboring church bought the property, one of several parcels it picked up around the corner. At some point the tavern and the grocery attached to it both came down. In 2004 the lots were combined and paved over for church parking. Today a fence, some shrubs, and a parking space mark the spot where Sam Uhrin’s customers used to stand around and talk at Scranton and Buhrer.
Images

Cleveland Public Library, Board of Zoning Appeals 1941
Cleveland Citywide Property Survey, 2022, City of Cleveland / Western Reserve Land Conservancy

30/10/2026

5801 Detroit Avenue: Free Lunch, Snake Dancers and the Happy Dog

Most people who walk into the Happy Dog at West 58th and Detroit come for the hot dogs, the tater tots, and whoever is playing that night. Few know they’re standing on one of the most fought-over bar corners on Cleveland’s West Side.

Around 1910, saloonkeeper Pat Gallagher ran into Cleveland’s new anti-free lunch law. The law was meant to stop saloons from luring in drinkers with free food. Gallagher’s answer was to charge a tenth of a cent for a wiener and a piece of rye bread, or ten lunches for a penny, and tell the city he was within the law. The Retail Liquor Dealers Association took him to police court, and a jury found him not guilty. The free-lunch crowd celebrated.

The building was a home as well as a business. An old classified specifically asks for a strong German girl to help with housework, offering a good home and good wages.
Prohibition didn’t close the corner. It just changed the sign. In the 1920s it was a “soft drink” bar and lunch counter with a barber shop. That same year, federal agents raided the Clifton Boulevard home of Patrick “Paddy” Joyce, a cafe manager and politician who had run a saloon at 5801 Detroit for years. They seized several thousand dollars’ worth of liquor, including 23 quarts of bottled-in-bond rye. The government later admitted its warrant was faulty and agreed to give it all back. When b**r came back in 1933, so did the ads: restaurant, pool room, b**r license, “A-1 location.”

A city photo from June 1947 shows the old corner building and then John Y. and Anna Socotch took over the corner. The old building sat empty for a while, and one day John went down to the basement to find that someone had hauled away his 500-pound furnace. In 1948 the Socotches put up the yellow brick building that still stands today, with a bar planned for the ground floor and rooms upstairs.

The neighborhood said no! Under headlines like “Bar-Choked Area Fights New Spot,” residents and local churches argued the area had more than enough taverns. Anna fought back in court for six years and lost. While the case dragged on, the bar sat empty. The Socotches advertised the ground floor for two doctors’ offices and a dentist. The county appraiser’s card from those years shows the bar vacant, the five-room apartment upstairs vacant, and just two single rooms rented, at $10 a week.
The break came in 1960. William R. Krause moved his liquor license to the building. After twelve years, the lights finally came on. The first ads went out for barmaids for a “new modern lounge bar.”

It became the Yankee Bar and that was where the action was. It had go-go girls five nights a week and featured Lebanese music by the “Sounds of the Cedars,” with an oriental dancer named Katina.

And then there was Queenie. She was the Yankee Bar’s exotic dancer, and she danced with snakes, including a cobra named Satan and a garden snake named Gore. The Plain Dealer reported that her act had patrons howling.

The fun had its limits. In 1966 police charged John with violating a 1934 city ordinance against s*x discrimination at public dances, because he let girls in free on dance night but charged the boys. That same year a juvenile court judge found him guilty of contributing to the delinquency of an underage girl he had hired as a go-go dancer.
By 1981 the corner had a rough reputation. A community activist described it as a wild-west corner, with windows shot out and two people murdered in two and a half years. Voters in the surrounding precincts, from West 58th to West 74th, decided to go dry. The bar owners went to court to try to overturn the vote.

Anna Socotch lived to 93. She had fought for this corner for half a century, and her family sold the building in 1998.

The next chapter started small. In the 1990s, Don Schurger bought the building and opened the Happy Dog with Billy Scanlon. It was a dry bar, likely because of that 1981 vote. They served vegan food, booked jam bands, and used one-day liquor permits to hold fundraisers for Cleveland Public Theater. Don and Billy canvassed the neighborhood to lift the restriction, and around 2005 the bar finally got its liquor license. The old Dog Star sign from their years still hangs at the top of the stairs leading down to the Underdog.

On August 1, 2008, a group led by Sean Kilbane bought the bar, with Sean Watterson as one of the partners. A year later they brought in Eric Williams of Momocho as a partner, and the hot dogs arrived: a paper menu where you pencil in your own toppings, from Froot Loops to SpaghettiOs.

Today the Happy Dog is one of Cleveland’s best small music rooms, booking local bands and touring acts. It’s also a real neighborhood gathering place. It hosts talks and community events, including City Club of Cleveland forums from time to time. When COVID-19 shut venues down, Sean Watterson helped lead the national fight to keep independent venues alive as vice chair of the National Independent Venue Association.
I was honored to speak there during the release of my tavern book, Cleveland Neighborhood Taverns: A Pub Crawl through History.

For more than a hundred years, 5801 Detroit has been a place for working people from the neighborhood. A century after Pat Gallagher sold wieners at ten for a penny, people still come to this corner for a hot dog, a drink, and a band. Anna Socotch fought for twelve years to open a bar here. She would probably be glad to see it still going!

29/10/2026

Today there’s nothing at the corner of East 59th and Mound but a mowed lot, a single tree, and a line of back fences. Most people would walk right past it. But for the better part of a century, a two-story frame building stood here, with a storefront on the ground floor and living quarters upstairs. Over the years it sold pianos, groceries, and a lot of b**r.

In the 1920s it was the Arnosk Music Store. In December 1925, just before Christmas, Arnosk was one of the Cleveland dealers selling Acme loudspeakers. Back then, a radio in the front room was still something new for most families. By 1929 the business was listed as the Arnosk Piano Co.

By 1947 the storefront was a neighborhood grocery run by Mrs. Emelia Kotkowski. That summer, City Council banned trucks from the side streets between Fleet Avenue and the Wheeling & Lake Erie tracks. Police arrested more than 100 delivery drivers in the first few weeks of August. A Cleveland Press reporter went out to see how the neighborhood was handling it. He found b**r trucks and a potato chip truck still making their rounds. Mrs. Kotkowski told him her store was still getting its regular meat, milk, and grocery deliveries. A couple of women on the street told him they figured the ban was really meant to keep out the big trucks hauling oil and slag.

By the 1950s the building had become the Catholic War Veterans Hall, a club for Catholic veterans with a bar inside. In July 1957 a young woman walked in and asked the bartender for a $5 loan to pay her cab fare. When he said no, she went into the restroom and shot herself. She survived and was transported to St. Alexis Hospital.

By 1959 the bar was Richie’s, and that May its liquor permit was suspended for 21 days for illegal possession. A year later the bar was advertised for sale, pitched to anyone who had dreamed of running their own business. The terms were $2,000 down and $120 a month in rent for the bar and the living quarters upstairs. That was how a lot of these places worked. You poured b**r downstairs and raised your family upstairs.

The next owner gave the place the name people remember. A photo from December 5, 1961 shows Joe’s Bar with its sign across the front, a Schlitz sign in the window, and a BAR arrow over the side door. A mid-1950s Chevy is parked at the curb, and Pete’s Shoe Service is next door. Houses with front porches stand on either side. A week after that photo, the Cleveland Press reported that the owner, Joseph Janieszewski, had won his appeal for a music permit after the city’s commissioner of assessments and licenses turned him down.

By June 1964 the building was for sale, advertised as the former home of a vets club and tavern, with a large store and four rooms upstairs. After that, the record gets quiet. In July 1976 someone held a weekend garage sale there with clothes, jewelry, furniture, and antiques.

In March 2005 it showed up in the classifieds again as a “nice handyman special.” The ad described a single home with glass block windows, two bedrooms upstairs, a big back yard, and a large open space downstairs. The numbers from that year tell their own story. In January 2005 the property sold for $10,000. In March it was advertised at $45,000. In June it sold for $80,000. Less than three years later, it was in foreclosure, and Deutsche Bank took it back. In 2009 it changed hands for $600, and then for $1,651. The same thing happened on street after street in Slavic Village during those years.

The building was boarded over and filled with glass block and finally torn down sometime after 2017. Since 2022 the lot has belonged to the City of Cleveland’s land bank.

Photo-1961- Cleveland Public Library
Photos: Cleveland Citywide Property Survey, 2015 & 2022, City of Cleveland / Western Reserve Land Conservancy

28/10/2026

The Browns are off to a 5-2 start, winning games on the final drive! Has the curse finally lifted? I have my doubts, but hey, we can always dream. 🤞

Come find out where it all may have started. On Thursday, November 12, I’ll be hosting author Dave Eifert at the Music Box Supper Club for a Cleveland Stories Dinner Party on his novel Cleveland Curse, Volume One. This is free but you need to make reservation to save your space! https://musicboxcle.com/event/cleveland-curse/

The story begins the night before the 1964 Championship, when Art Modell meets a mysterious stranger with a contract to sign... Could a deal with the Devil explain decades of heartbreak?

We’ll have some crazy stories to share, because when it comes to the Browns, the truth is often stranger than fiction. Here’s one example.

25/10/2026

There is a patch of grass on a small triangular lot at the corner of East 79th and St. Clair. Since this stretch of St. Clair was once such a hub for immigrant families and factory workers, you know something had to be on this corner. For most of the 20th century, 7901 St. Clair was a neighborhood tavern, and the stories that came out of that little two-story brick building were enough to fill part of a chapter in my book, Cleveland Neighborhood Taverns: A Pub Crawl Through History. The Gordon Park Café is just one of the corner bars I cover in the book, along with neighbors like the Cascade Lounge and the Doo Drop Inn right at the same intersection, and plenty of other taverns where working Clevelanders spent their evenings. Here’s the story of this one.

In 1915. William Kopper, who already held a saloon license at the corner, applied to transfer it to Weiser & Chapek. With the growing industry and population that surrounded the tavern Weiser advertised for experienced bartenders who could also handle the lunch counter and speak different languages. Then Prohibition hit. By January 1920 the place was for sale as a “soft drink” stand with a restaurant in the rear. The ad pitched it as a “transfer corner,” where streetcar riders changed lines, close to the park and large factories. In 1930 it was offered for sale or rent as a barber shop. After repeal, the corner went back to being a bar. By the 1940s it was the Gordon Park Café, named for the lakefront park just up the street. It kept that name for over four decades.

Frank Nagode took over around 1953, and he became the face of the place. In December 1954, a burglar forced the front door and discovered that Frank didn’t keep all his cash in one spot: $50 in the register, $171 in two cigar boxes, $300 in a paper bag, and $10 and a revolver in a drawer. The burglar found all of it anyway.
The 1960s were rougher. On March 10, 1966, a masked gunman walked in while Frank and his wife Aileen were waiting on customers. He fired at Aileen as she ran for the back, and she locked herself in the restroom. That gave Frank time to grab his .45 from behind the bar. The two men traded shots from about eight feet apart. Frank was hit in the thigh, the robber was hit four times, and a customer was grazed by a ricochet. The wounded man’s uncle, a local minister, drove him toward the hospital.

Less than a year later, on a Thursday night in February 1967, two gunmen came in through separate doors. They were after the cash Frank kept on hand to cash paychecks. One held a gun on Aileen while Frank wrestled the other and was shot in the back and head. He survived, and the robbers left with nothing. Afterward, Frank installed security doors and, like many tavern owners in the area, a buzzer to screen visitors.

The worst night came on June 20, 1982. Frank and Aileen, who by then lived behind the bar, had just gotten home from a week’s vacation in Canada. Shortly before midnight, Frank heard noises. Two 16-year-old boys had climbed into the vacant apartment upstairs and cut through the ceiling tiles into the closed bar. Frank came in with a 12-gauge sh***un and fired three times. Both boys were unarmed, and both died. Frank, then 57, was charged with murder and indicted. In August, the same grand jury reversed itself and dropped the charges. The Call and Post put it simply: “Everyone in the Gordon Park Café killings was a victim.” Frank sold the tavern a short time later.

The building went up for sale again in 1990. By 1996 it was the California Club, hosting reggae and salsa nights. By 2001 the same address and phone number were also showing up as Club Odyssey, which advertised seafood and soul food in the window. The listings stop around 2002. The building was still standing in 2009 and was gone by 2011.

19/10/2026

Come on out Thursday to the Bohemian Hall. Hosted by the Cleveland The Rotary Club of Cleveland

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