Founded in 1896, Lutheran Hospital is one not only one of Ohio City's oldest institutions. It is also one of the largest, its campus covering an area from Franklin Boulevard south to Jay Avenue, and from West 25th Street west to West 28th Street. The hospital has also had a major impact on historic Franklin Circle.
Organized by the Evangelical Lutheran Hospital Association, the hospital was first sited in the Beckwith House, located on the northwest side of Franklin Circle at 247 Hanover (West 28th) Street. That house was built by M.E. Beckwith, one of Cleveland's earliest professional photographers. (In the mid-nineteenth century, Beckwith operated a "photographic parlor and art studio" at the corner of West 25th Street and Detroit.)
In 1898, the hospital moved across the Circle and purchased the Marcus Hanna mansion at 2603 Franklin Boulevard. Hanna was the man who engineered William McKinley's successful 1896 presidential campaign and, as a result, became known as a political king maker. His mansion had been built in 1869 on land deeded to his wife by her father, Daniel P. Rhodes. A wealthy west side industrialist, Rhodes lived next door on the southeast side of the Circle at 2609 Franklin. Hanna and his family lived in their mansion on Franklin from 1868 until 1890. (In the latter year, they moved to the far west side into a new mansion at 10400 Lake Avenue, The area would later become known as Cleveland's Edgewater neighborhood.)
In 1922, Lutheran Hospital razed the Hanna Mansion (and the Warmington mansion east of it) and built in their place its first hospital building. In 1948, the hospital expanded west, in the process razing Daniel Rhodes' Franklin Circle mansion, which had been serving as the home of St. John's Orphanage since the death of Rhodes' widow Sophia in 1909.
In the decades that followed, Lutheran Hospital expanded its Franklin Boulevard campus an additional number of times, as a result of major projects in the 1960s and 1970s. Now well into its second century of operation, Lutheran Hospital, which became part of the Cleveland Clinic system in 1996, continues to be a large and vibrant institution in Ohio City and continues to have an imposing presence on historic Franklin Circle.
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