Carnival of Soul

In the late 1920s, just as the Great Depression was taking hold, Leon Adelson was living at 14th and D streets while working as a meat cutter at Al Sandlovich’s Boston Market at 1330 O St., the west edge of the University Towers Parking Garage today. At about the same point in time, James Lococo opened the Lighthouse Inn restaurant at 3856 Normal Blvd. while also operating the Grand Central Market at 2420 O St.

The following April, Adelson acquired the restaurant, appropriately shaped like a lighthouse, remodeled it and that September advertised it as Leon’s Lighthouse, dining, barbecue and “good music to dance to” although photographs show it as a small building with, one would assume, scant area for a dance floor.

The Lighthouse, on the northeast corner of Normal Boulevard and South Street, morphed into a root beer drive-in, and the city directory showed Adelson listed as a salesman though late in 1933 when he opened the Stop & Shop store, but not two years later he was noted as an assistant department manager at Gold’s Department Store.

By the late 1930s Adelson had opened the Leon Adelson Grocery Store at 1338 South St. and hired Sam Davidson as clerk. By 1942 the store was again named Leon’s Stop & Shop and also housed Leon’s Coffee Shop. 1951 saw a move to the east to 17th and South streets, across the street from Beechner’s Grocery.

Samuel Harvey Rathbone was born in New York City in 1889 but moved to Lincoln as a child, graduating from Lincoln High School in 1907, where he excelled in track and football. Soon known simply as Harvey Rathbone, he again went out for both football and track at the University of Nebraska. In 1910 he was “credited with the [university’s] single game record for touchdowns-seven.” On graduation in 1911 Rathbone became an assistant football coach at the University of Nebraska for two years.

By 1916 his profession had shifted to real estate where he had already promoted an 80-acre development, building a third of the tract’s houses. Also in 1916, Rathbone traveled to Chicago where he purchased a tract of land south of South Street from C. J. Bradfield for his Sheridan Park Investment Co. As he platted the land, he then named the principal street Bradfield Drive. Some of his principles at the time were to later be questioned as the original covenants on lots in his subdivision allowed “no person other than Caucasians race … except as servant … to own” property.

In 1952 the Rathbone Company, then officing at 118 N. 11th St., began developing the retail center on South Street he named Rathbone Village. Leon’s Food Mart, with Sam Davidson as manager, opened at 2200 Winthrop Road as the first store in Rathbone Village. An almost instant success, the store expanded and remodeled in 1956, even becoming an official air raid shelter a few years later.

Leon Adelson died in 1965 leaving Davidson as the store’s head until its purchase by Chad Winters and Roger Toy in 1998. One of Leon’s major independent competitors, Ideal Grocery on South 27th Street, was purchased from the Moore family in 2012 by Winters, Toy and Topher Vohries, but when Ideal Grocery burned in 2016 Leon’s was again a single-store concern.

Rathbone Village grew around Leon’s with Mike Tillman’s Plaza Restaurant in a separate building to the north about 1960. About the same time Skyline Dairy opened a restaurant across the street from Tillman’s and directly west of Leon’s, Schoenbergs Clothing became the “first ladies ready-to-wear store … outside of the downtown business section.” Lawlor’s Sporting Goods and Hardware soon followed as Skyline became Bradfield Drug, and Leon’s opened a liquor store in a separate building in their south parking lot.

Harvey Rathbone, who supposedly coined the architectural term “Tudorbethan” for some of the homes in the development, ultimately built “1,000 housing and apartment units in Lincoln” and his housing development around Rathbone Village became part of the “Boulevards Historic District.” The shopping center continued to develop as every tenant in he five-building complex changed names with the single exception of Leon’s.