1908 RPPC Elk Restaurant Pullman Cafe Lima Ohio

The Elk Restaurant / Pullman Cafe as seen in a vintage real photo postcard, circa 1908.

Note the date, Fri. Aug, 7, on the circus posters. As per the Ringling Bros. Circus routes for 1908 website, Lima, Ohio was on the schedule for Aug. 7th. 

This 1892 map of Lima's businesses lists: Elk Restaurant, Dan. Freel, Proprietor

According to an annoncement in the Lima News, Dan Freel sold The Elk to Charley Ackerman in Nov. 1894.

Apparently there a saloon and gambling room above The Elk that was raided (see below news clips). Sure wish I could find a whiskey bottle or other neat item from The Elk's saloon. 

Here are the next earliest google-mentions of The Elk Restaurant, showing 1899 newspaper ads:

There was a fire in the Elk's kitchen, January 1902.

Apparently Dan gave up the restaurant biz for the oil biz:

"October 6, 1906: Mrs. Joseph G. Bockmier left Monday for a 3 week's visit with her daughter, Mrs. Dan Freel at Lima, Ohio where Dan Freel is at work in the Lima oil fields."

The Lima News  August 7, 1906 › Page 2  http://bit.ly/1jYvsIQDI

​N

ING ROOM OPENED; Also a First Class Lunch Counter Where All Delicacies Will Be 

​F

ound. The already popular firm 

​o

f Tyson and Scherneble, who not Ion

​g​

 ago opened up the Pullman Cafe, formerly the Elk, take this opportunity of announcing that their dining room a

​nd

 lunch counter are both open to the public, and the best of service is assured, along with all the delicacies 

​i​

n season and the best staple meats

More googling finds that The Elk became The Pullman Cafe in 1906. 

Even though the 1908 photo postcard shows Pullman Cafe on the striped canopy, they are still also calling themselves The Elk. By the above announcement, we learn they had a lunch counter and a dining room. I'd surmise the counter wore the Pullman moniker, and the dining room wore The Elk mantle.

The postcard shows 4 men. Two waiters in aprons, and 2 men in ties -- perhaps the misters Tyson and Scherneble? 

​Later there are 1920s ads for a Pullman Restaurant, Mr. and Mrs. Lewis L. Mack, Proprietors, located located on the SW corner of the public square.​ These later proprietors must have given up the split identity, dropped cafe and elk, and renamed the place the Pullman Restaurant.

1908 Amusement Park Carousel in Hover Park Lima Ohio RPPC Photo ~ Collecting Lima

• A real photo postcard [RPPC] picturing the carousel at Lima's Hover Park, 1908

• "Thursday evening a merry bunch of the Lima telephone operators [went to] Hover Park for an evening's outing. After a good and bounteous supper, the roller coaster, merry-go-round and dancing, besides several contests, afforded plenty of amusement and all had a lovely time." -- The Lima News September 5, 1908 - 

• Hover Park Lake circa 1908
• Photo from Ohio's Amusement Parks in Vintage Postcards - By David W. Francis, Diane DeMali Francis 
• Available here from Arcadia Publishing. They put out a wonderful line of books about local history, illustrated with vintage postcards. 

A little Hover Park history:

Fun at Hover Park: The amusement park opened in 1908 and maintained a roller coaster, dancing pavilion, roller rink, lake for boating, auditorium and concessions.

 And at the turn of the century, area residents flocked to that summertime oasis for the recreational time of their life. 

The park was actually a spot in Lima's south side that had originally been owned by the Hover family. A portion of the garden-spot included a lake, surrounded by tall trees and beautiful grounds. By 1890, the family had decided to open it up to the community. 

A notice in the August 1894 newspaper described the park as "situated within a mile of the center of the city and contains about 20 acres, of which five or more is taken up by a winding lake, ranging from five to 10 feet in depth, its basin speckled by pretty islands and its shores gently sloping to the water's edge. -- The Lima News June 13, 2007 

It's still a park today, but without the rides. http://www.cityhall.lima.oh.us/Facilities/Facility/Details/8

Vintage Lima Ohio Beer Whiskey Bottle Display ~ Collecting Lima

My Lima Bottle Display 

A few photos of the display I did at the 2010 FOHBC National Bottle Show.

It's just some of my Lima Ohio bottles. But only ones that are embossed with the word Lima. And excluding medicines and milks. So it is a group of Beers, Booze, and Sodas, with a fruit jar tossed in. 

Click-the-pix to enlarge.

This is just a group photo post. Eventually I will do posts on the individual bottles and breweries, with history and ephemera. 

The bottles are all embossed. The white paint is temporary/removable, just to help with seeing the embossing.

• Fred Romer / Lima Bottling Works / Lima Ohio -- qt.
• T. Sullivan / Lima, O. -- qt. & 12oz.
• G. Geiger / monogram / Lima, O.

Various Lima Brewing Co. embossings, bottle colors and styles, and sizes.

Various E. Christen bottle sizes, styles, and embossings.

• Rare Lima Department Store fruit jar
• The Quilna Brewing Co. / indian face / Lima, O. -- amber qt.

C. Purtscher & Co / Lima O.

I broke this one setting up the display -- so it's on my MOST WANTED list!

4 different hutch embossings -- too blurry to make out: Christen / Consolidated / Harmon / ??

Consolidated Bottling Co. -- these are clear bottles that were ''nuked'' to become this deep royal purple. Relatively common ''available'' bottles, so no harm. I like them better this color. 

Here's an artsy shot of some of my other Lima bottles, not from my display:

And here's a couple of rare paper labelled Lima whiskeys:

• Brook Club Whiskey
• National Standard Private Stock  / Bottled by National Wine Co.

Sign of the Times - HUDDLE Restaurant Lima Ohio Neon Sign SOLD - Building Torn Down

The Huddle Fine Food Coffee Shop Restaurant

Lima, Ohio

After 62 years in business, the restaurant closed in 2007.

David McClain was the founder of the Huddle Restaurant and was owner and operator until 1980, when he sold it to his daughter Kay and her former husband, Jim. (Info as per David McClain's obituary.) The iconic Lima landmark closed for good in 2007 after more than 62 years in business. Then owner Jim Wende, who operated the business for 27 years, tried unsuccessfully to sell or rent the building.

Below, you can see that someone bought the cool vintage neon sign off the old HUDDLE Restaurant (on Metcalf, in Lima, Ohio). 

Here's the truck parked by the building. They were getting ready to take the sign down. Too bad it was a cold day, or I'd have hung around to get some action shots.

Apparently the property was transferred back to the bank on May 9, 2010:  Huddle Restaurant and Sheriff Samuel A. Crish to Citizens National Bank of Bluffton, 134 N. Metcalf St., $50,000.

Here it is without the sign...

I confess I never dined there, but I have always enjoyed the sign, and I have a couple of neat old restaurant-ware dinner plates in my Lima memorabilia collection.

According to this photo from Bill Stauffer, Lima Senior Class of 1957, The Huddle was a neat-o drive-in/diner:

Here's a couple vintage matchbook covers:

According to the above matchbook, there was a member of the Huddle restaurant chain in Lima, called The Paddle, on Northern Ave [Northland Plaza]. 

Oddly, the Lima 'Huddle' location is not listed. 

Compare the above building photos, and the different design of the 2 matchbooks, and you can see that the Lima Huddle's faux-Colonial architecture did not share the same mid-century-modern/space age/googie style design aesthetic of the rest of the Huddle buildings, like the ones in Los Angeles, California.

However, I found a comment on a site discussing old Lima businesses, that says: "[in] Northland [Plaza], near West Street, was the “Paddle” Restaurant. A great example of “googie” architecture of the era." 

Photo of a west coast Huddle shows Googie style architecture.

Here's a 1974 Help wanted page with ads for both Lima's The Huddle and The Paddle restaurants.

Here are my vintage restaurant china Huddle plates found in Lima:

UPDATE -- here are some more pix of the HUDDLE Restaurant building -- torn down, in rubble... - pix taken on 11-29-2010

Here's an article from the Lima News about what happened to the sign:

Sign Sealed, Delivered

Huddle sign rescued from demolition

October 06, 2010 / Bart Mills

LIMA — The sign stood over Metcalf Street for at least a half century, a blend of neon and oversized iridescent bulbs promising fine food to generations of passers-by.

As one of those passers, Jim Gideon couldn’t bear to see the old Huddle sign lost to history. So when he heard the former restaurant was on the verge of being torn down, he did what any other slightly obsessive man with access to cash and a boom crane would do. He went and got it.

“We understand they’re going to knock the building down so we called around, found out who we needed to pay for it, and spent Sunday taking it down. We have no particular end in mind except to preserve it,” Gideon said.

The Huddle closed its doors in 2007 after more than 62 years in business. The sign itself has been up since at least the 1950s.

The building was sold last month for $78,000 to Shree Lakshmi LLC, which, according to the Ohio Secretary of State’s Office, is owned by Rajendra Patel, who also owns a Knight’s Inn motel in Bluffton. Patel was unavailable for comment on his plans for the property.

Gideon said he was told the new owners planned to tear the building down. He contacted the real estate agent selling the property and made an offer on the sign. He and his son, Brendon Gideon, pulled Brendon’s in-laws, Rob and Dave Frost, into their scheme. Gideon owns Lima Equipment Co. and the Frosts own Fidelity Builders. Between them, they had the equipment and know-how to remove the sign.

Even with the right equipment, the job was no easy one. It took the four men about three hours to move the 10-foot-by-10-foot sign.

“I’d estimate it weighs close to 1,000 pounds. It was no trivial undertaking,” Gideon said.

The crew moved the sign into a warehouse for storage. What they’ll do with it next is still up in the air.

“For now, it’s in the warehouse. We just wanted to make sure it was preserved. We haven’t decided what to do with it beyond that,” Gideon said.

________________________

Currently the lot is scraped flat. But it will be a long time before whatever goes up will evoke the nostalgia that the Huddle does.

Update: they put up a Subway sandwich restaurant in the former Huddle space. Subway didn't last long and that new building sits empty now (2026).

Metropolitan Block Building / Vortkamps Drug Store / Vintage Bottles and Postcard ~ Collecting Lima Ohio

This vintage postcard, circa 1910s, pictures Lima, Ohio's Metropolitan Block Building, erected in 1890. Click the photo to enlarge.

You can see: 

• The Metropolitan Cigar Store
• The HF Vortkamp Drug Store
• ''The Fair'' (no info yet)
• The Republican Party Headquarters.

• HF Vortkamp bottles -the top one belongs to a friend.
• The next two are my Vortkamps medicine bottles.
• The one says German Apothecary, with the Met Block address.
• The second bottle has 2 locations, and tells us Vortkamps was now a Rexall Store.

"In 1902, Louis K. Liggett persuaded 40 independent drug stores to invest $4,000 in a retailers' cooperative called United Drug Stores, which sold products under the Rexall name.  (The "Rex" in the name came from the common Rx abbreviation for drug prescriptions.)"

• Professor Vortkamp seems to have retired around 1920, according to an entry in the 1921 National Association of Retail Druggists Journal (NARD). 

Metropolitan Cigar Store token/advertising premium. 

Proprietor was a Mr. McCoy, but no other info found yet.

• A b&w view of the old Metropolitan Block Building morphed with the colorful 21st century modern stores on the ground floor. 
• Photo created by MotoMedia as seen on the Downtown Lima Facebook page.
• Read a short article about the beginnings of the Metropolitan Block Building. 
• The building was later called the American House, and the Stippich Hardware, and is now called the Met Block.
• It is listed in the National Register of Historic Places, along with several of Lima's other noted buildings.

_______________

H. F. VORTKAMP, pharmacist, whose place of business is
at No. 300 North Main street, Lima, on the corner opposite the Court
House, belongs to the city's representative business men.  He was born
in 1858, at Senora, Preble County, Ohio, and is a son of Bernard
Vortkamp, long deceased, who was a faithful soldier in the Civil War.
   H. F. Vortkamp was reared and educated in Cincinnati and was
graduated from the Cincinnati College of Pharmacy in 1880.  He had
previously creditably passed through the parochial high school at
Cincinnati and before entering the Cincinnati College of Pharmacy had
read medicine in the Cincinnati College of Medicine and Surgery.  After
his final graduation in pharmacy, he engaged in the drug business in
Cincinnati until 1886 and then removed his interests to Milford, Ohio,
where he continued until 1893, when he came to Lima.  He has continued
here in the drug business ever since and has the confidence of the
public; his experience and medical knowledge make his establishment
regarded as the leading one in the city as to reliability.  He is
secretary of the Allen County Association of Retail Druggists and has
held every office in the Association except that of treasurer.  He has
held every office in the Ohio State Pharmaceutical Association from the
lowest to that of vice-president, and has on many occasions been a
delegate to national and State pharmaceutical conventions.  He was
chairman of the Ohio delegation at the national pharmaceutical meeting
held at Boston in 1905.  At present he holds no official relation with
that body, having felt compelled to resign on account of many pressing
private matters of business.
   Mr. Vortkamp is a Democrat and has always been more or less
interested in politics.  He was a delegate to the State convention that
nominated Pattison for Governor, and was the only delegate that remained
all through faithful to his convictions.  He is a member of the Lima
Progressive Association and has served in the Lima City Council.  He has
other business interest in addition to those in Lima, namely: Stock in
the Hollister Drug Company, of Madison, Wisconsin; stock in the Sterling
Remedy Company, of Kramer, Indiana; and stock in the United Drug
Company, of Boston, Massachusetts.
    In 1880 Mr. Vortkamp was married to Carrie F. Fleischman, of
Cincinnati, a member of a distinguished family of that city, and they
have three sons and two daughters, viz:  Harry F., who has just
completed a six-year course at Niagara University, New York; George J.,
who is a graduate of the Ohio Normal University at Ada and has passed
his examination before the State Board of Pharmacy; Charles, who is a
student in St. Rose Parochial School, Lima; Henrietta, who is a Sister
of Charity, now teaching in Denver; and Elizabeth, who is a student in
St. Rose Parochial School.
    The family belong to St. Rose Catholic Church.  Mr. Vortkamp is a
member of the Catholic Knights of Ohio and is vice-president of Branch
No. 23.  His portrait accompanies this sketch.