The Marblehead Mile (Article 10) - Lorrie Halblaub

In this series we are taking an historical look at an area that covers approximately a mile of Main Street in downtown Marblehead. Heading east from the Village limits, we will discover the facts and the stories of how Marblehead became what it is today.

The next block of Main Street Marblehead goes from James Street to Frances Street and is home to three businesses and our local library. This land used to house Greisser’s Coal and Fuel Oil Company.  It was also one of the locations of the Post Office. At the time Gladys Dorko was the Postmistress and needed a wheel chair so the entrance was ramped for her.  In the photo, you can see that Gene Norden took over the space where the post office was and the rest of the building became a restaurant called Casa Roma.  At first it was run by the Malfara family, whose patriarch came from Italy to work in the quarry.  Then the restaurant was run by the Fontana Family. One of their waitresses was Missy Zywiec Skinner who bought it, and turned it into the first location of the Galley Restaurant.  Next to the Galley was a building that was the perfect summer business….an ice cream shop. At one time it was called the Pitz Stop, but is now known as the Dairy Dock. 

Casa Roma

 Then around 2007, things changed drastically for this area if Main Street.  A man named Bob Keller bought all the businesses except the Dairy Dock. He tore down the Galley Restaurant building and the restaurant moved farther east on Main Street. He remodeled the house on the corner into Bruno’s Pizzeria. He then built a small building that was called Victory Café, now known as the Coffee Express. Lastly, he built a building that was to become a restaurant, but the deal fell through.  That building sat, finished on the outside but unfinished on the inside, until 2016. That year the Ida Rupp Library in Port Clinton bought it and turned it into the Marblehead Peninsula Branch Library, which opened in 2017. At last, the Peninsula had a library. A library with a coffee shop to the west, an ice cream store to the east, and a view of the lake to the north!  It doesn’t get any better than that!

Behind this library to the north is James Park. The park was once a part of Ottawa Street with houses on it, but when the James family donated the land to the Village, it became a recreation area for baseball, basketball, soccer, a playground, and a memorial to the area’s veterans.  The rest of the area called Jamestown from Main Street to Lake Erie is full of houses and three churches; St. Joseph Catholic, St. John Lutheran, and the First United Church of Christ-Congregational.