'This used to be the place to be:' Emerald Valley Golf Club comes down (VIDEO)

LORAIN — It took the Kucirek family more than a year to build Emerald Valley Country Club. Sixty years later, a wrecking crew took it down in less than a day. The long-vacant clubhouse at 4397 Leavitt Road met the crunch of an excavator early Wednesday morning, with the grandson of the couple who started the business at the controls. Joseph Kucirek, with his sisters Kourtney and Kelly watching nearby, dug the excavator bucket into the side of the building, pulling off a metal railing that surrounded an outdoor seating area. The crew from Great Lakes Deconstruction soon took over, driving the machinery through the concrete slab and cinderblock walls until only the old pro shop remained. Kucirek finished the structure off, clawing through the side of the building until the bricks and weather-worn roof caved in. He said he did not want a stranger tearing down the legacy his family built. "It's hard to see that pro shop go," Kucirek said after stepping down from the excavator's cab. "... It's the end of an era." His sisters agreed. Emil and Emily Kucirek, local developers, built the nine-hole golf course, driving range and clubhouse in the early 1960s on several acres of former farmland. The couple, later joined by their son, Joseph, ran it for decades until the family sold the property in the early 2000s. "This used to be the place to be," Joseph Kucirek said. "This was talked about all the time." His father was a well-known PGA member and taught now-pros like Eric von Hofen and Dave Emerick. In a 2005 Golf Course Management profile, von Hofen recounted how the elder Joseph Kucirek caught him selling lost golf balls hidden in brush to course patrons — much to the pro shop owner's chagrin. Instead of calling the police, Kucirek hired von Hofen and took the teen under his wing. Von Hofen now manages the Mountain Lake Corp.'s links in Florida. Emerick, who was inducted in the Lorain Sports Hall of Fame in 2017, started his golf career at Emerald Valley at 10 years old in the early 1970s. He went on to relocate to California in the 1980s and played on the PGA mini-tour into the 1990s, including qualifying for the National PGA club Pro Championship. The once iconic course has been vacant for nearly 20 years. Before crews started the demolition, Joseph, Kourtney and Kelly walked through the building, remembering their grandmother Emily tending bar late into the night and summers spent treating the entire golf course as their playground. Kelly Kucirek laughed, remembering they used to help "mix drinks" for patrons — serving soft drinks from behind the bar when they were barely tall enough to peek over it. She looked in the now-vacant room where a full commercial kitchen used to be, and ventured to the water-logged basement and out to the adjoining garage. The corner of the garage was where her father, Joseph Kucirek, in full polyester golf wear, was known to weld and tinker with tractors and other equipment. The three of them wandered from room to room, stepping over broken mirrors and window glass, fallen ceiling tiles and dodging tufts of hanging insulation. "Seeing today, it looked 100 times worse than the last time (I saw it)," Kelly Kucirek said. In what was the pro shop — their father's pride and joy — they stopped. "I remember dad would have us hold his shirt when he would get ready out of the shower, so he wouldn't mess up his hair," Kelly Kucirek said with a laugh, miming the stretching motion the kids had to do to help keep their father's coiffure intact. Photos of the old shop showed merchandise on display from floor to ceiling, meticulously displayed by the group's father. Joseph Kucirek remembered his father playing gin with some of Lorain police's finest in the pro shop during the winter — the men's radios would sit on the nearby counter, and the playing cards would be hidden away if a customer stopped in, all while the cops' old Crown Vics sat running in the parking lot. Kucirek himself went into policing, rather than following in his father's PGA footsteps. He spent 30 years with the Amherst Police Department before retiring as chief in 2021 amid an investigation following complaints of low morale within the department. Emily Kucirek died in the clubhouse in 1986 after closing up the bar, her grandson said. She often worked until close at 2:30 a.m. and did not like to drive home after she got into a wreck going to her "Pill Hill" neighborhood home, and often slept on a couch in the nightclub. Her son found her there, Joseph Kucirek said. Emil Kucirek died in 1990 and his son continued to run the course and pro shop for a short while until selling it to the Ritenauer family. After the sale, Joseph Kucirek continued to provide lessons for a few years, his son said. "I'm glad they saved the pro shop for me," he said. "That was my dad's." His sister chimed in, "I still see the windowsill full of all his stuff and him sitting there at the cash register," Kelly Kucirek said. The clubhouse, sitting on a nearly 6.5-acre lot, was added to Lorain's demolition list in January. The Lorain County Land Bank paid an estimated $27,900 for the demolition, Lorain Building, Housing and Planning Director Matt Kusznir said. The property will be assessed the cost of the demolition to be recouped when it is sold. Contact Carissa Woytach at (440) 329-7245 or cwoytach@chroniclet.com.