Adele's Lounge Bar, Cleveland

12/31/2022

Travel back in time to the sixties, and the epicenter of Cleveland’s counterculture scene may well have been 11605 Euclid Avenue, where a small and humble bar was nestled in an ordinary storefront built in front of a turreted Victorian rooming house on the north side of the street between East 115...

05/28/2017

Paola Maria Savarino, Adele's regular and subject of the 1965 Geoffrey Cook poem, "Adele's Lounge Bar (To Paula Marie S.)," passed away this past March. She was a beloved and remarkable woman. Photo is from 1965. Obit here:
http://www.currentobituary.com/obit/205185

12/29/2016

Panel from the first Dealer McDope comic, "The Doings of Dealer McDope" (1969), by underground cartoonist Dave Sheridan of Fabulous Furry Freak Bros fame. The inscription on the shopping bag gives Hessler Rd as the "new location" of Adele's. Does anyone know if the bar actually relocated there after the fire that claimed the original building? Image submitted by Mark Burstein, who is doing research for a book on Sheridan.

10/08/2012

[The following was sent to me by Steven, whose father Marty was co-owner of Adele's with his friend and business partner Sam. Marty was a Holocaust survivor. He passed away in 2004. There are some great anecdotes in Steven's submission.]

My father was Marty. Here is a a little background on my father. He never spoke about the Holocaust because he wasn't one to dwell on the past. My father and his brothers left Poland in their late teen years when the N***s occupied the country.

My father left Poland and joined the Russian army. Although my father was wounded during the war, he was still healthy enough to travel to Munich Germany to begin the next phase of his life. In Germany he sold goods on the street before coming to the USA.

My father was not a perfect man. He had as many faults as the next person, maybe more. However, he never felt sorry for himself even though he lost his youth and a great deal of his family members to the war. Luckily, all of my father's brothers survived the war as well.

Sam and my father went on to own a few more businesses together up until the early nineties. All together their partnership lasted about 30 years give or take. There was so much screaming between them you wouldn't know deep down how much they cared for each other. I guess you don't stay in business for thirty years unless you have a deep commitment to the other. On a sad note, Sam has passed away as well.

As for Adele's, as you know, there was quite a diverse demographic of patrons who frequented the bar. Something most people don't know, one night some bikers came to the bar. After getting too rowdy my father told them to get out. A couple of weeks later someone put a bomb in his car. Thank god he heard it ticking, it never went off. My father always suspected those bikers put it there.

Another person who worked at Adele's was Rita. She was the waitress at Adele's. She had a strong german accent and talked very fast. She just passed away a couple of years ago. The one interesting thing about Rita was every time I would run into her she would always discuss Adele's.

I'm not sure there will ever be a time in history or a tavern where a college student, professional, biker, hippie, doctor, lawyer, police, etc could all sit at the same bar have a drink and for the most part get along.

03/10/2012

There's some interesting discussion of Adele's in this blog entry:

"Then there was Adele’s Lounge Bar, the last and perhaps most improbable unit of the block’s bohemian triad. Well predating both the Coffeehouse and Headquarters, Adele’s was then managed by feisty part-owner Martin Prengler, and his tavern was already undergoing its uncomfortable but inexorable transition from a funky neighborhood watering hole to a volatile nexus between Cleveland’s hippie and biker subcultures."

I had no idea that Marty's last name was Prengler. In fact, it never occurred to me that Marty even had a last name. I vaguely recall hearing that Sam took off for parts unknown sometime late in 1966.

Had you been an eagle soaring high above University Circle of an early winters night four decades ago, you might have observed a remarkable phenomenon. For from that lofty station you could have espied clusters of young Clevelanders, both city dwellers and suburbanites, stealthily converging on the…

03/01/2012

"Where Police Who Are Particular Congregate." At the time this edition of The Buddhist 3rd Class Junkmail Oracle was published, June 1967, it appears that the scene at Adele's was growing a bit tense.

http://images.ulib.csuohio.edu/cgi-bin/showfile.exe?CISOROOT=/general&CISOPTR=5423&filename=5962.pdf

02/25/2012

Nice to see a little activity here. It's reassuring to learn that there are at least a few of us still around. Check out my tribute website: http://world.std.com/~thirdave/adeles/adeles.html

A few other alums have contributed their recollections there.

Adele's, Adele's Lounge Bar, Cleveland, Euclid, Cleveland bohemian hangouts

07/31/2011

Adele's reference: "Then in January '67 I ran away again. I'd gotten in the habit of going to bars after work. One happy hour evening I ran into a couple of characters I knew, Tim and Skip, in Adele's Bar. They told me they were about to set out for San Francisco. Skip had an old broken down Fiat. I asked them if they had room for one more. They said sure, come on along."

...So, it's early in the year 1966. I'm 22 years old and I have no idea what I'm doing. I've just broken up with my wife Dana. She went back to Cleveland and I stayed in New York. My big career as a commercial artist was just one more cardboard cut-out dream forgotten in the dust after many heavenly...

07/31/2011

07/30/2011

I know there are other Adele's alums out there!