Lost Toledo

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INTRODUCTION

In the thirty-four years that I’ve lived in Toledo, I’ve seen many changes. Old buildings have been razed, new structures have been built, businesses and organizations have come and gone and demographics have shifted. In some ways, the city seems to be a living entity—always on the move, constantly changing.

My tenure in Toledo is just a blip on the city’s timeline. Toledo is a city with a long, rich and fascinating history. The region was part of the Great Black Swamp and home to Native Americans for countless generations. French and English troops began using the Great Trail (now Detroit Avenue) during the French and Indian War beginning in 1754.

Maumee River view, 2013. Author’s collection.

The area became a strategic site during the War of 1812, with battles on Lake Erie and at Fort Meigs. Settlers started buying land in 1817, and Toledo was founded twenty years later with the merger of two villages, Vistula and Port Lawrence.

Toledo is a port city, located at the mouth of the Maumee River, the largest river flowing into Lake Erie. Its waterfront location has played a pivotal role in the city’s growth, from the early settlers who could reach the area by boat to the workers who built canals and railroads and the entrepreneurs who started businesses and opened factories.

There are many wonderful and informative books on Toledo history, and there are dozens of knowledgeable historians. Many of their books focus on specific areas—either a particular industry or sport, a time frame or a person. All are important and well worth reading.

Lost Toledo is somewhat different in that it covers a broad range of local histories, all linked by one common thread: they’ve vanished from the local scene.

There are chapters on famous and beloved department stores Tiedtke’s, Lamson’s and Lasalle’s; the exciting but short-lived Portside Festival Marketplace; the Mud Hens stadiums, where such legends as Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb and Mickey Mantle once played; the Sports Arena, where elephants, rock stars and hockey players all roamed; ethnic neighborhoods where new immigrants found work and friendship; jazz clubs that were known around the world; an auto plant that gave birth to the Jeep; and theaters that were so ornate people felt like they were entering the Taj Mahal.

It is unlikely that there are any other history books that mention Casey Stengel, Tiedtke’s, Rusty Monroe and the Goaldiggers in the same volume. But they are all part of Toledo history. They are all part of Lost Toledo.

I hope you enjoy reading these stories as much as I enjoyed researching and writing them.

David Yonke

Maumee, Ohio

April 19, 2015

1

TIEDTKE’S

A NEW WAY TO SHOP

On a cloudy Saturday in November 2014, hundreds of Toledo-area residents flocked to a local department store to see a slice of history come back to life. The star of the show? A 3,200-pound block of cheddar cheese.

The huge cheese wheel was displayed—then sliced and sold in pieces—at the Andersons store in West Toledo after store officials and executives from the Blade newspaper teamed up to revive a holiday tradition that had ended more than forty years ago with the 1973 closing of Tiedtke’s department store.

The crowd jammed into the Andersons’ aisles, standing shoulder to shoulder amid rows of potato chips, stacks of imported beer and tables piled with baked pies, craning their necks to get a glimpse of the cheese. Before the ceremonial first slice was taken, Paula Larsen, the store’s goddess of cheese, led the enthusiastic crowd in two rounds of Tiedtke’s corny but catchy jingle, Let’s all go down to Tiedtke’s; it’s fun to shop at Tiedtke’s!

After Andersons and Blade officials offered a few words of welcome, the go-ahead was given to the store’s cheesemongers, who began cutting into the five-foot-tall block of aged Wisconsin cheddar. The giant wheel was sliced and diced, cut into pieces and sold to eager buyers for $4.99 a pound.

The excitement and festive atmosphere were not just about a big hunk of cheese, of course. It was more about taking a trip back in time—down memory lane of the sights, sounds, smells and tastes that made Tiedtke’s such a unique and popular place to shop.

Tiedtke’s was more than a department store; it was a place filled with music, aromas and bargains. Toledo–Lucas County Public Library.

A giant wheel of cheese, shown here in the early 1950s, was one of the favorite annual holiday traditions at Tiedtke’s. Toledo–Lucas County Public Library.

Hundreds gathered at the Andersons store in November 2014 to see a 3,200-pound wheel of Wisconsin cheddar, reviving a Tiedtke’s tradition. Author’s collection.

The downtown store was a destination point for Toledo-area shoppers for nearly eighty years, from its founding in 1894 until its closing in 1973.

Clint Mauk, the Toledo Rotary Club’s historian, described Tiedtke’s as not just a big store, it was a meeting place, a mystical community of contented Toledo shoppers, and a beloved institution.

Charles and Ernest Tiedtke, brothers raised on a farm east of Toledo, started with a small storefront at 40 Summit Street, near Monroe Street, investing their combined savings of $350. They called it Tiedtke & Todd, thinking it was more impressive to have another business partner’s name on the sign (even though Todd was just a fictitious figure).

The first customers were crewmen aboard the ships docked along the Maumee River, the broad and muddy waterway that cuts through the heart of downtown Toledo en route to Lake Erie and the Great Lakes. The Tiedtke brothers, typically working from 5:00 a.m. until midnight, would steer their boat alongside the freighters, climb aboard and take orders for groceries and dry goods. Then they would head back to shore, load up the bales and bags and personally deliver the goods to the ships.

Charles and Ernest Tiedtke started their business in 1894 by using this boat to deliver groceries to docked freighters. Toledo–Lucas County Public Library.

Tiedtke & Todd opened its first store at 40 Summit Street in 1894 with an investment of $350 and built its business into a local legend. Toledo–Lucas County Public Library.

Their goal was to sell goods in volume, making a small profit on each article. Even if we only make five cents on an item, if we sell enough, we are going to get there, Charles once told Ernest.

Sales were on a cash basis, and the Tiedtke brothers soon generated enough income to expand their business. They began selling more of their goods on land, hauling dozens of baskets of fruit and vegetables onto the sidewalk in front of their store in the morning and then hauling them back inside at night. They also began delivering groceries to homes in Toledo. By 1909, the brothers had a warehouse on Water Street and a team of horsedrawn wagons delivering groceries all over town.

In 1910, Tiedtke’s moved into a six-story building at 408 Summit Street, just north of Adams Street, with seven acres of floor space. It would be the store’s main home for the next six decades.

Shopping for food in the early 1900s was generally considered a chore, something that had to be done but nothing to get excited about. The Tiedtkes were determined to change all that, making their store a fun place to shop, with a vast array of entertaining sights, sounds and smells, along with discount prices.

In the sprawling new building, Tiedtke’s began roasting its own brand of coffee and grinding the beans in a high-traffic area of the first floor, giving customers a chance to see, hear and smell the coffee. Other stores ground their beans in back rooms or during off hours, thinking that the noise would annoy shoppers. The Tiedtke brothers, on the other hand, thought their customers would enjoy all the commotion, and their hunch proved right: shoppers immediately began lining up to buy bags of their Parkwood brand coffee.

The owners, who often wore white coats like the store’s clerks and enjoyed mingling with customers, brought in bakers of all nationalities, tapping into Toledo’s growing population of immigrants, and had them bake their favorite ethnic breads and pastries. Tiedtke’s added a peanut roaster, which whistled loudly when the steam built up, as well as a noisy and aromatic popcorn machine. The smells were pumped onto the sidewalks outside the Summit Street store, helping lure customers inside.

Tiedtke’s own brand of coffee was named Parkwood after the street in Toledo’s stately Old West End neighborhood, where Charles Tiedtke lived. Whirling fans blew the rich aromas of roasted coffee throughout the store’s ductwork, enticing customers on all the building’s six floors.

Naturally, the aromas made customers hungry, and the Tiedtke brothers realized that it made sense—and profits—to give people a place to eat. So they opened the first of several restaurants inside the store.

They held special direct sales from railroad cars that would pull up on the tracks behind the store, opening their doors to sell fresh fish, meat and other goods at discount.

The store was innovative in numerous ways, including being the first in Toledo with an escalator—a wooden and noisy one—and it was among the earliest stores to experiment with air-conditioning, pumping cold water through first-floor pipes. It didn’t work as hoped, cooling just one small area of the massive building, but it illustrated the Tiedtkes’ foresight and willingness to invest in new ideas.

At Christmastime, model trains chugged across miniature landscapes at a dozen tables set up throughout the store. And shoppers always turned out in droves when Tiedtke’s held its popular holiday toy sales, with prices as low as eighty-eight cents.

All the buzz about the circus-like atmosphere of Tiedkte’s drew visitors from throughout northwest Ohio and southeast Michigan, who made the trip downtown to see—and smell—what everybody was talking about.

Charles, the more conservative of the Tiedtke brothers, once looked down from the second balcony at the hustle and bustle on the first floor and commented to Ernest that it looked like a circus. That gave Ernest, the more creative and daring brother, an idea: to add music that would put customers in a good mood. They started playing songs on a phonograph, but the sound wasn’t of high-enough quality, so they installed a pipe organ.

Charles Tiedtke said that when the organ notes began booming through the store, he could see sales pick up and shoppers start smiling.

A Boston reporter once wrote:

I never had such an unusual experience as going into this delightful place at holiday time and hearing the beautiful Adestes Fidelis booming out of the organ, accompanied by the whistle of the peanut roaster and the crash and grind of the coffee machines. There was caviar on one side of me and icecold buttermilk on the other. There was a carnival spirit all over the store, and it was an adventure just to go into the place.

One employee who worked at Tiedtke’s in the Roaring Twenties said the store could sell as much as ten thousand loaves of bread, two and a half tons of peanuts, two tons of candy and ten thousand packs of cigarettes in a single day. The delivery department, with ninety bright-yellow horse-drawn wagons, handled up to 4,300 orders per day.

Decades later, Toledoans fondly recall the unique appeal of Tiedtke’s.

The initial impact was the aromas, said Gordon Ward, a longtime Toledo TV newsman. The moment you walked into the store, there were these magnificent aromas hitting you. Other stores would try to disguise the smells, but Tiedtke’s used them as a sales tool. I didn’t even drink coffee, but I always wanted to buy some.

Jim MacDonald, a Toledo native who became a columnist for the Orlando Star Sentinel, reminisced about Tiedtke’s and its aromas in a 1975 column:

As you walked in the front door, you immediately smelled the delicious fragrance of freshly prepared hot dogs and hamburgers coming from the standup food counter. Next came a soft whiff from the tobacco department, where cigarettes, cigars and pipes from all parts of the world were sold. Then came the candy department where almost everything sold was made on the premises. You could watch as a machine turned out candy kisses. The bakery department was next. All the breads, pies, cakes, cookies and a huge assortment of rolls had been prepared in the store’s bakery. There also was a coffee and tea department, where, of course, the