He wasn't called "Black Jack" when, in 1912, he married Helen Mulgrew from West 67th Street and the two newly weds moved into a house at 1377 West 69th Street. In 1912, he was Tommy McGinty, and he was one of Cleveland's best featherweight boxers.

Like world featherweight boxing champion Johnny Kilbane, Tommy McGinty was a second generation Irish-American who grew up in Cleveland's Old Angle and saw boxing as a way out of the poverty that was endemic to the Angle in early twentieth century Cleveland. By 1909, Tommy McGinty, just like Johnny Kilbane, was boxing under the management of the legendary Jimmy Dunn. Also like Kilbane, McGinty moved uptown in the years just before World War I to what is now the Detroit Shoreway neighborhood. However, while Kilbane went on to win the featherweight boxing title in 1912, McGinty's career was cut short in 1911 by an injury he suffered in a fight. Turning lemons into lemonade, McGinty withdrew from the ring and became one of Cleveland's earliest and most successful fight promoters.

In addition to promoting boxing matches in Cleveland, however, Tommy McGinty also promoted gambling, operating a cheat spot at 2077 West 25th Street that was famously raided by Cleveland Safety Director Elliot Ness on July 21, 1936. It was his promotion of gambling that gave Tommy McGinty the moniker "Black Jack" McGinty.

While McGinty's cheat spot on West 25th street catered to a lower economic class, McGinty also provided gambling opportunities to the rich and famous. In 1930, he built the Mounds Club on Chardon Road, just across the Lake County line. The Mounds Club was famous in Cleveland for two decades as a swanky night club that featured lively entertainment, alcohol and gambling. Like McGinty's cheat spot on West 25th Street, the Mounds Club too was often the target of raids by local law enforcement officials.

In 1950, after the State of Ohio had closed down the Mounds Club, Tommy McGinty, now better known as Thomas J. McGinty, took his gambling operations national and, along with several organized crime figures from Cleveland, founded the Desert Inn in Las Vegas. McGinty's ownership of the Desert Inn, as well as his association with alleged organized crime figures Moe Dalitz and Morris Kleinman, soon drew the attention of federal authorities. In 1951, McGinty was subpoenaed to testify before Senator Estes Kefauver's committee on organized crime in America.

McGinty avoided federal prosecution and shortly thereafter retired to West Palm Beach, Florida, where he died in 1970--a long way away from the home that he and Helen Mulgrew shared on West 69th Street in 1912.

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The years 1856 to 1865 were tough ones for all Americans, as the country reeled toward and then fought a bloody civil war over slavery. But they were especially tough years for Maria Quarles Barstow. In 1856, her husband, William A. Barstow, the third governor of Wisconsin, left office under a cloud of a scandal as the result of campaign law violations in his re-election effort. Then came his failure and embarrassment on the battlefield in the Civil War. And finally, just months after the war ended, William Barstow suddenly died, leaving her a 42-year old widow with four boys--ranging in age from eleven to nineteen, to raise.

And that's when Cleveland, and the house at 4211 Franklin Avenue, gave her a reprieve from a horrendous decade. Prior to 1865, Maria had never lived in Cleveland. However, her husband's family were west side pioneer settlers and she came to Cleveland in late December of that year to bury her husband and to start her life anew. Her husband's spinster sister and bachelor brother took her and the boys in--all of them living together in a small house on State (West 29th) Street. Then, in 1868, she had a opportunity to gather her family together in their own home. She rented the new Second Empire style house near the corner of Franklin Avenue and Harbor (West 44th) Street that had just been built by German immigrant carpenter Ferdinand Dryer.

Maria had landed in a good neighborhood. Just across the street from 4211 Franklin lived Hannes Tiedeman, who had not yet torn down his modest house and replaced it with Franklin Castle. Also living on the street a few blocks to the west was Stephen Buhrer, who had just been elected Cleveland's mayor. Up the street toward Franklin Circle lived Henry Coffinberry, a prominent early Cleveland industrialist and son of Judge Coffinberry. Further up the street was coal magnate and real estate developer Daniel Rhodes. Living next door to Rhodes were his daughter and son-in-law Marcus Hanna, who one day would put William McKinley in the White House. Two of Rhodes's sons, including noted American historian James Ford Rhodes, also lived nearby on the Avenue.

Maria Barstow and her sons only lived in the house at 4211 Franklin Avenue for about three years. It was likely financial circumstances that forced her in 1872 to move back in with her husband's family on State Street. But perhaps the three years in the new house on Franklin Avenue were long enough to stabilize and rebuild her family, and introduce her sons to Cleveland's business elite. Frank Barstow married a daughter of Stephen Buhrer, becoming not only connected to this Cleveland political family, but also to John D. Rockefeller, a long-time friend of Buhrer. Likely through this family connection, Frank met Rockefeller and eventually became one of the founders of the original Standard Oil Trust. He amassed a fortune by the time of his death in 1909.

Maria Barstow survived her husband William by more than 50 years, dying in 1916 in Lima, Ohio, at the age of 93. The former first lady of Wisconsin is buried alongside her husband William in Brookmere Cemetery, on the southwest side of Cleveland.

The house at 4211 Franklin has been home over the years to other interesting people, including the vice-president of a large Cleveland industrial business from 1879 to 1883, and an Ohio circuit court judge whose family owned the house for almost 40 years from 1883 to 1920. But in more recent years the house fell into disrepair and faced foreclosure and possible demolition. It was rescued in 2012 by the Ohio City Near West Development Corporation. The stately nineteenth century home now has new owners who have restored to its nineteenth century beauty and grandeur.

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School children walking past the northwest corner of Franklin Boulevard and West 65th Street will someday remember it as where the Rite Aid neighborhood drugstore was located. Adults in the neighborhood remember that it used to be where the old Pick-N-Pay grocery store stood. Only the older residents of the neighborhood remember that up until the mid-1960s the Kaufman Funeral Home stood on this corner. And perhaps there are only a few, if any, left in the neighborhood who remember that, before it was the Kaufman Funeral Home, the grand old house on the corner of Franklin Boulevard and West 65th Street belonged to George August Tinnerman, a German immigrant who launched one of the great industrial enterprises in the history of Cleveland.

George August Tinnerman was born in Bavaria in 1845. In 1847, the year before the 1848 Revolutions which shook central Europe from Vienna to Paris, George immigrated to America with his parents Henry and Sophia Tinnerman. Like his father who was a wheelright, George entered the trades but as a tinner. In 1868, he opened a hardware store on Lorain Avenue--just east of its intersection with Fulton Road. Among the products George sold were cast iron stoves. In 1875, according to his son Albert, George became dissatisfied with the cumbersome cast iron stoves and invented the first steel range--a forerunner of today's range stoves. George became so successful in selling his new steel stoves that, in 1913, he closed his hardware store and began to exclusively manufacture stoves and ranges.

In 1890, as George Tinnerman grew financially successful, he and his family moved from their house on Fulton, which abutted the Tinnerman stove and range manufacturing plant, to a more fashionable address on the northwest corner of Franklin Boulevard and Gordon Street (now West 65th Street). George and his wife Caroline completed the raising of their four children in this house, and, when the children became adults, three of them acquired houses on Franklin Boulevard in the 6000-7000 block--none more than a few minutes walk from their parents' home on the corner of West 65th. Members of the Tinnerman family continued to live on Franklin Boulevard until well into the decade of the 1940s.

In 1925, George A. Tinnerman died and his son Albert H. Tinnerman, who until 1938 lived at 6910 Franklin Boulevard, took over the family business. In 1925, Albert invented a new fastener for stoves called a "speed nut." As it turned out, Albert's invention had application not only in the manufacture of stoves, but also in the manufacture of automobiles and aircraft. In the 1930s, Albert's son, George A. Tinnerman II, convinced Henry Ford to use the speed nuts in his automobiles, and in the 1940s, during World War II, the United States government also began using Tinnerman's speednuts in its aircraft. One source claimed that the federal government's use of the Tinnerman speed nut not only reduced the weight of American war planes, but also cut production time in half.

In 1950, Tinnerman Products-- now a national manufacturer of speed nuts and other clips and fasteners, moved from its original location on Fulton Road to a new state of the arts facility on Brookpark Road in the suburb of Brooklyn. During the decades of the 1950s and 1960s, Tinnerman Products continued to grow under the guidance of Albert Tinnerman and then his daughter Alberta Buttris, a third generation Tinnerman and granddaughter of George A. Tinnerman. In 1969, the company's separate corporate existence in Cleveland came to an end when it merged with Cleveland industrial giant, Eaton Corporation.

Today, the Tinnerman Stove and Range Company building at 2048 Fulton Road is home to Vista Color Imaging, a visual marketing solutions business. The former 100,000 square foot Tinnerman Products headquarters and factory in Brooklyn is now vacant and in search of a new business owner. And at the corner of Franklin Boulevard and West 65th Street, a Rite Aid drug store now stands where the fashionable home of George A. Tinnerman once stood. But, with three other homes of the George Tinnerman family still standing on the 6000-7000 block, you can still feel the Tinnerman presence on Franklin Boulevard.

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In 1886, 69-year-old Abraham Teachout, a fierce supporter of the Prohibition movement gave a speech at the party's annual Cuyahoga County convention which he ended with the words: "The saloons must go but I am afraid I will not see the day." Teachout, who had been the Prohibition Party's district congressional candidate in 1884, did not live to see the age of Prohibition—but it was not for lack of trying. The owner and builder of the Teachout house at 4514 Franklin Boulevard, lived 26 more years after giving that speech, dying in 1912 at the age of 95 years old. America's short-lived Prohibition era would not begin until the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920—some eight years after Teachout's death.

Abraham Teachout, one of Cleveland's wealthy nineteenth century businessmen and a close friend of John D. Rockefeller, was born in western New York in 1817. In 1836, he moved with his family to northeastern Ohio, settling in North Royalton, where the Teachouts are considered to be one of that suburb's early pioneer families. Over the course of the next 20 years Abraham engaged in a number of businesses moving to several cities, including Painesville, Columbus and Chattanooga, Tennessee, before achieving success as a Cleveland lumber merchant. Teachout was one of the first to ship lumber out of the South by rail to urban centers north of the Ohio River. He also was founder of the A. Teachout Co., which specialized in the manufacture of doors, sashes and other related building construction materials. The company, which was eventually headed by three generations of the Teachout family, had its offices on Prospect Avenue (formerly Michigan Street) in downtown Cleveland for many years.

The Teachout House is one of the most interesting houses on Franklin Boulevard. The house has over 5,000 square feet of living area and is notable for its impressive windows and its somewhat onion-shaped cupola. Teachout purchased the land upon which the Teachout house was built in 1883. At the time, he and his family lived on Fulton Road. It is unknown how long the house was under construction, but the family moved into the house shortly after construction was completed in 1887. Abraham lived in the house until his death in 1912. During his 25 years of residence on Franklin Boulevard, the elderly businessman was often seen being driven in his carriage by his African-American carriage driver, Mack Henry, a former slave. After Abraham's death, his widow (who was his third wife--the first two wives predeceased him) remained in the house another decade, selling the house to the Michael and Mary Malloy family in 1924.

Abraham Teachout was a notable supporter of Hiram College. Hiram was founded in 1850 by the Christian Disciples of Christ congregation of which Teachout was a long time member. He worshiped at the Franklin Circle Christian Church  for nearly 50 years and served as superintendent of the church's Sunday school program for 25 years. Abraham sat on the Hiram College Board of Trustees for many years, as did his son Albert and later his grandson David. It was as a result of a $10,000 gift by Abraham Teachout that Hiram College built its first college library in 1900. Prior to the construction of a new library building in 1995, Hiram College's library was known as the Teachout-Cooper Memorial Library. Abraham Teachout and many members of his immediate family and other family relatives are buried in the Teachout family plot at Riverside Cemetery.

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It was never easy to navigate your way to the birthplace of Isaac Campbell Kidd, one of Cleveland's most important World War II war heroes. The little grey house, built in about 1875, was located at 3059 Mabel Court. To get there, you had to know a little Ohio City geography. From Franklin Circle, you drove west on Franklin Boulevard. Then, just after you passed the Robert Russell Rhodes mansion (today, the Rhodes Mansion Apartments), you would turn left onto West 31st Place, and then quickly left again onto Mabel Court, a winding little alley with just a handful of houses on it. The house in which Admiral Kidd was born sat about 100 feet down the alley, on the right side.

So just who was Isaac Campbell Kidd? When the USS Arizona went down during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941—a date which President Franklin Roosevelt said "will live on in infamy"—1171 members of the Arizona crew of 1511 men lost their lives. Among them was Rear Admiral Isaac Campbell Kidd. The USS Arizona was his flagship.

According to eyewitness accounts, when the attack began, Admiral Kidd, who was not aboard the ship at the time, bravely rushed to it and assumed command as the senior officer. As the attack progressed, a Japanese plane dropped a bomb on the Arizona which struck its forward magazine, blowing up the ship. The Admiral, standing on the bridge above that magazine was killed instantly, almost certainly incinerated by the blast. No part of his body was ever found. Only his Class of 1906 Naval Academy ring. And that was found welded to part of the bridgehead, undoubtedly the part where the Admiral's hand rested at the moment of his death. Kidd was posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.

Isaac Campbell Kidd was born in that little grey house on Mabel Court on March 26, 1884. He spent all of his boyhood years growing up on Cleveland's west side. He attended Cleveland public schools and he graduated from West High School in 1902. At his class's graduation, he gave the commencement address, ironically warning against Japanese military aggression in the Pacific. He was recommended for an appointment to the Naval Academy by famed Ohio Senator Marcus Hanna, and attended the prestigious military college, excelling in both football and boxing, and becoming the college's heavyweight boxing champion.

In 1906, following his graduation from the Academy, he served in a number of important expeditions as the United States began to grow its modern navy and strive to become a world sea power. He first served on the USS Columbia during the Marine Expeditionary Force to the Canal Zone in 1906. The following year, he participated in President Theodore Roosevelt's "Great White Fleet," sixteen battleships that circumnavigated the world over a fourteen month period.

During much of World War I, before America's entry, Kidd served on the USS Pittsburgh. The ship patrolled off the coast of Mexico, once it became known that Germany was attempting to induce Mexico to enter the war, promising it Texas, Arizona and New Mexico if Germany should win. Once America did enter the war, Kidd was assigned to a new battleship, the USS New Mexico, which saw limited action, but in 1919 served as the escort of the transport George Washington, carrying President Woodrow Wilson to the Versailles Peace Conference in France.

During the years between the two World Wars, Kidd continued to receive important assignments and rise in the officer ranks. In 1938, he became Captain of the USS Arizona, and two years later—the year before his death—he received his final promotion to Rear Admiral and final assignment as Commander of Battleship Division ONE, which consisted of three battleships, including his flagship, the Arizona. He was serving in that assignment when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

Admiral Kidd's death was not reported in Cleveland until December 11, 1941, four days after the attack. An article in a Cleveland newspaper which detailed his life and death, listed his birthplace as "near Detroit School, 4800 Detroit Avenue." In early 2015, however, it was learned that the newspaper report was wrong, and he actually was born in the house at 3059 Mabel Court--for too long unrecognized as the birthplace of one of Cleveland's most important war heroes. Unfortunately, by the time this became know, the house had suffered extensive damage in a fire during the winter of 2014-2015, and was demolished in April 2015. Like the Admiral himself whose body was never recovered after the attack on the USS Arizona, there is now no trace left of Isaac Campbell Kidd's birthplace in Cleveland.

Research of the various houses that Isaac Kidd lived in while he grew up in Cleveland revealed that none are still standing, so none may be landmarked. There is no school in Cleveland named after him. There is no park in Cleveland which bears his name. The only remembrance of his bravery, his death, and his connection to the City of Cleveland, is a small historical marker which stands outside the grounds of the Coast Guard station, almost hidden by trees, on East Ninth Street just north of the North Marginal Road. Given all that Isaac Campbell Kidd gave to his country, and given his strong connection to the City of Cleveland, the marker seems a very inadequate memorial.

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Some say that Admiral Isaac Campbell Kidd, the highest-ranking officer to die at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, decided to make a career of the Navy because his Irish ancestors hailed from County Wexford, a place on the southeast coast of Ireland well-known for its maritime activities. And that may be true. But a young boy is just as often influenced by the neighborhood in which he grows up, and the Cleveland neighborhood in which Isaac Campbell Kidd grew up--Birch Street (today, West 50th) from Bridge Street to Franklin Avenue, was populated by a number of men, women and families whose work on or near the Great Lakes might well have inspired a boy in his youth to turn his attention and ambitions to the sea.

Kidd's neighborhood was part of two residential subdivisions, the larger of which--the Alottment of Benedict and Root, platted in 1852, in the waning days of Ohio City when that city was still Cleveland's rival on the west bank of the Cuyahoga River. Together with the smaller Dudley Baldwin Subdivision, which was platted in 1863, but then revised in 1869 when Franklin Avenue was realigned to run parallel with Detroit Street, the land which came under development before the onset of the Civil War consisted of more than one hundred acres, covering the area south of Franklin Avenue to Lorain Street, and west of Harbor (West 44th) Street all the way to Courtland (West 54th) Street.

Originally, it was expected that the land would be developed by nineteenth century Cleveland real estate mogul Silas Stone, who developed the large residential subdivision north of Detroit Street, from Taylor (West 45th) Street to Oakland (West 58th) Street. However, Stone defaulted on his contract with Peter Wedell, the land owner, and after Wedell died in 1847, his widow Eliza sued Stone in Superior Court, a local court of equity, seeking relief. Stone was found liable to the widow, and the land in question was sold at public auction in 1849 to Cleveland banker Dudley Baldwin, Wedell's Administrator.

After receiving title, Baldwin turned around and sold approximately eighty-percent of the land to George Benedict, later editor of the Cleveland Herald, but at the time Clerk of the Superior Court, and Elias Root, a Cleveland businessman who was also serving as Sheriff of Cuyahoga County, the office charged with the duty of conducting land sales at public auctions. Despite these irregularities, Baldwin, Benedict and Root, successfully laid out the streets for this new residential area of what was by this time the west side of Cleveland, and sales of lots in the Benedict and Root subdivision, which was developed first, were soon underway in early 1853.

From the start, the two subdivisions attracted many in Cleveland who made their living on or near the Great Lakes. In the 1860 census, of the 18 families living on the block of Birch Street where Kidd would later live, six were headed either by vessel captains, sailors or ship carpenters. By 1880, when there were 42 families living on the block, six families were headed by vessel captains and three by ship carpenters or ship builders. Many of the other families on the block were also headed by men who worked in Cleveland's then burgeoning transportation industry, doing such varied jobs as baggage masters, railroad brakemen, switchmen, street car conductors, and travel agents.

This was the neighborhood into which the Kidd family moved in 1888. And, just five years later, when Isaac Kidd, Jr., was 9 years old, another vessel captain, Charles Miner moved in next door to the Kidds at 107 Birch (1832 W 50th). Miner, recently retired and the father-in-law of Isaac's aunt Minnie--who also lived on the block, no doubt enjoyed spending some time in his last years--he died in 1901, reveling the young Kidd boys with stories of his travels and experiences on the Great Lakes. While Admiral Kidd's own sudden and tragic death in 1941 foreclosed the possibility of him writing his memoirs and crediting growing up on West 50th Street, between Bridge and Franklin, for some role in his career choice, clearly growing up on such a block placed him in close contact with people who would have talked about what life, and life's work, was like on the water.

With the passage now of more than one hundred years since Admiral Kidd left that neighborhood to attend the Naval Academy, many changes have come to West 50th Street between Bridge and Franklin. The street is now paved with asphalt instead of gravel or brick as it was in Kidd's day. The neighborhood's tree population is engaged in a battle with the emerald ash borer, instead of the Tussock moth or Dutch elm disease that earlier-generation trees on the street battled in the first half of the twentieth century. The ethnic population is no longer primarily of English, Irish and German mix as it was in Kidd's day, but is now instead a more diverse mix of whites, African-Americans and Latinos.

And the housing stock on the block for at least the last two decades has been undergoing tear-downs and new construction that is very different from the tear-downs and new construction that Kidd witnessed on the street in the decade of the 1890s. In the process of this most recent rebuilding of West 50th Street, Admiral Kidd's boyhood home at No. 1830 was lost. But there remain many historic houses on West 50th, some that date back to the very beginning of the neighborhood in the 1850s, and some which were the homes of people who undoubtedly played an important role in the career choice of one of Cleveland's greatest and most tragic war heroes. In fact so much still remains on West 50th Street from the time when Isaac Kidd walked the block, that were he here today, he might well gaze down the street from its intersection with Franklin Boulevard, and say, "This is where I grew up. This is my neighborhood."

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Located on the south end of the Stockyards neighborhood of mostly working-class homes, the two story brick Italianate-style house at 7403 Denison Avenue stands out, especially because of its cupola and intricate balustrade craftsmanship. Built in 1866 for Alexander Kimberley, the house is not only one of the oldest in the neighborhood, but it is also one of the neighborhood's few remaining houses of this type of architectural design.

Who was Alexander Kimberley, you might ask? He was not an early Cleveland industrialist like James Farnan who with his family's brass factory wealth built a similarly beautiful Italianate home in the Detroit-Shoreway neighborhood (see Cleveland Historical story: "The House that Brass Built"). Nor was he a large-scale real estate developer like Benjamin Tyler who could easily afford his elegant Italianate summer home on the north end of the Stockyards neighborhood (see Cleveland Historical story: "B. F. Tyler House"). While neither a James Farnan nor a Benjamin Tyler, Alexander Kimberley still found a path to moderate wealth in mid-nineteenth-century Cleveland, one that enabled him to build the beautiful house that is the subject of this story. It's a house which has now stood on the top of the ridge at Denison Avenue and West 73rd Street for more than 150 years.

So how did he do it? Alexander Kimberley was an immigrant from Birmingham, England. When he arrived in Cleveland in 1846 as a nineteen year old boy, the city was just beginning its transition from commercial hub to industrial powerhouse. In the 15-year period from 1845-1860, the urban population exploded from 14,000 to 44,000, a more than 300% increase. Alexander Kimberley decided to make his money by serving that growing population. He began by operating saloons. By 1852, he had opened his first, near the docks at the foot of Superior Street. Three years later, partnering with his younger brother Frederick, he opened a second, this one on Public Square, across from where the County Court House sat at the time. Perhaps he intended this saloon to serve a more genteel clientele than the first. The brothers advertised that their "Arcade Dining Saloon" would feature an "Eating House on the European Plan." In 1857, Kimberley, now thirty years old, capped off his saloon entrepreneurship by opening a third saloon--this one he called a restaurant--on Merwin Street, near West Street, not far from where the Flat Iron cafe sits today on the east bank of the Flats.

There are no records extant to tell us exactly how much money Kimberley made from these three saloons, but it must have been substantial. And, like many of the lower socio-economic classes who began to make money in Cleveland's growing mid-nineteenth-century economy, Kimberley decided to invest in real estate in Ohio City, which soon merged with Cleveland to become the latter city's west side. He purchased a house on Detroit Street just east of Kentucky (W. 38th) Street in 1853, living there and operating a millinery store out of the first floor. In 1859, he made his second investment, a commercial lot on Detroit near Hanover (W. 28th) Street. By the time the 1860 census arrived, Alexander Kimberley was no longer a saloon keeper. It is likely that when the census-taker asked what his profession or trade was, Kimberley responded with some pride, "I am a merchant."

In 1864, Alexander Kimberley purchased eighteen acres of land on the south side of Ridge Road (now Denison Avenue) in what was then Brooklyn Township from Rufus K. Winslow, one of the founders of the Academy of Natural Sciences, later known as the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. The land lay about two and one-half miles southwest of Kimberley's home on Detroit Street. By this time, he was married and the father of two children. Within two years' time, construction of the ornate house in the country which is the subject of this story was completed and the family moved in. When the 1870 census was taken four years later, Kimberley stated that he was now a farmer--most likely a gentleman farmer, because he continued to operate his millinery store in town and invest in real estate in the Detroit Street area of the near west side. Among his most significant projects was the development in 1873 of a commercial building complex on the south side of Detroit Avenue between Hanover (W. 28th) and State (W. 29th) Streets, which he built in partnership with his brother David. The complex featured a number of retail store fronts, two meeting halls, and one building known as the Kimberley Block.

Alexander Kimberley died in 1885 after suffering a stroke. The Italianate house at 7403 Denison was sold a few years later to immigrants from Germany, the Ernst Stern family. The Sterns lived in the house until 1916, when it was sold to a building supply company that used the home as an office. Ever since, the property has been used for commercial purposes, although as late as 1940, the second floor of the house was leased to renters. Most recently, the grand old house served as the home of a waffle house and ice cream store.

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October 22, 1933. The depth of the Great Depression. Thousands of banks have failed over the past four years. The U.S. economy has ground to a near standstill. Nearly 15 million Americans--a quarter of the workforce--are out of work. But there is hope. A new president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was elected last November, and just seven months ago he took office, promising change while telling us that the only thing we had to fear was, well, fear itself. Many believed him and believed in him. Some thought things were already starting to get better that year.

The Meyers family may have been among those who believed Roosevelt. But even if they were not, they must have had cause for hope. Three years earlier, 46-year-old George had moved his dance hall from a little building on the corner of Pearl and State roads to a much larger building on the northeast corner of Althen and West 25th Street in what is today Cleveland's Clark-Fulton neighborhood. Erected in 1905 by Cleveland architect Harry A. Cone, the building had served primarily as the site of an indoor roller rink that had operated under a variety of names. In 1929, a fire destroyed the rink. George and his son Lloyd immediately set to work repairing the interior of the building and constructing Cleveland's largest ballroom floor there. It was 150 feet long by 80 feet wide, and composed of two layers of wood, one Appalachian hardwood maple and the other a wooden subfloor, separated from each other by an air space to give "bounce" to the dance floor. In addition to building a band stand up front, they procured and placed enough tables and chairs around the dance floor perimeter to accommodate 100-200 patrons. That really wasn't a lot of seats when you think about it. The dance floor could hold up to 2,000 dancers, and on a typical weekend night over 1,200 might show up. But you came to George's dance hall--originally named Shadyside Gardens--to dance, not so sit.

And come they did. As the Great Depression dragged on, Americans looked to mass entertainment to take their minds, at least for a while, off the terrible reality of the worst economic period in the country's history. Many went to the movies for this escape. Others turned on the radio and listened to their favorite sport or sports team. But a lot of Americans, and certainly a lot of Clevelanders, went to dance halls. There they listened and danced not to the fast-paced jazz music of the Roaring Twenties, but to a new, slower, more romantic music. It was perfect for dancing. It was called Swing and it was the music that helped Americans dance their way through the Great Depression.

The year 1933 was momentous for Americans, but in the end it was a tragic year for George Meyers and his family. Active in politics, he had run for the office of Councilman for Ward 9 but lost in the spring primary. Seven months later, on that October 22, 1933 date which began this article, George Meyers was struck by a car and killed, as he crossed West 25th Street near his dance hall. Hope in the Meyers family might have died that day too, but it didn't. After burying his father, twenty-three-year-old Lloyd Meyers took over the family business and, with him at the helm, the dance hall not only survived but began to thrive. Four years later in 1937, with his finances in order, Lloyd was finally able to marry his longtime girlfriend, Madalene Wilkinson. That same year he decided, possibly with a whisper from Madalene, to change the name of the ballroom to the Aragon, after the famous ballroom with the same name in Chicago. You can say that the rest is history. You wouldn't be far off.

For the next fifty-two years, the Meyers family successfully operated the Aragon Ballroom at the West 25th Street location, making it one of the best places in Cleveland for ballroom dancing. The biggest names in the big band era performed there. Band leaders like Glenn Miller, Guy Lombardo,Tommy Dorsey, Harry James, Sammy Kaye and Xavier Cugat. Even Lawrence Welk, who credited the Meyers for much of his later TV success, brought his orchestra there. Many famous singers also appeared on the marquee. Dean Martin, Perry Como, the McGuire sisters, and many others. For some, it was where they got their start.

Lloyd and Madalene Meyers, with help in later years from their daughter Donna Mae, kept ballroom dancing alive in Cleveland long after rock-n-roll became the new popular music for the young post-World War II generation. One by one Cleveland's other historic ballrooms, seeing their customer base shrinking, closed. The Trianon at East 98th and Euclid. The Golden Pheasant downtown on Prospect. Mayfair Casino at 1515 Euclid. Danceland just up the street from the Trianon. Luna Park. Even the ballroom at Euclid Beach. When Lloyd Meyers died in 1984, his wife and daughter continued on for another five years before finally bowing to the inevitable in 1989. It was the end of not only Cleveland's last ballroom, but of a very special era in Cleveland history.

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You might not notice this house as you drive south on West 44th Street, first crossing the bridge over I-90 and then approaching the bridge over the Big Four railroad tracks near Train Avenue. But just before you get to that second bridge, take a glance to your right because that two-story brick home at 4403 Fenwick Avenue is special. Not only is it one of the oldest houses in the Clark-Fulton neighborhood and an unusual example of Italianate architecture for the Cleveland area, but it was also built by one of the pioneer founders of Ohio City.

Benjamin F. Tyler was born in Jefferson County, New York, in 1802. He came to Cleveland in 1832 as the principal representative of an investment group from Buffalo, which included New York state judge Philander Bennett, his wife Sarah's uncle. The out-of-state group had entered into an agreement with two Cleveland merchants, Charles M. Giddings and Norman C. Baldwin, to purchase and redevelop Lorenzo Carter's 80-acre farm on the west bank of the Cuyahoga River in what was then Brooklyn Township. At the time, the Ohio and Erie Canal was nearing completion and people everywhere were flush with land speculation fever.

The investors, who became known as the Buffalo Land Company, surveyed the land they had purchased and began draining the marsh lands that lay near the Old River Bed and the shores of Lake Erie. The group developed plans for a ship channel (which was eventually built) that was intended to divert lake and river traffic away from Cleveland to their lands. They laid out the streets for commercial and residential buildings. And, along with Josiah Barber and other large land owners to the south, they organized Ohio City (technically, "the City of Ohio"), achieving city status in 1836 several days ahead of Cleveland. Tyler's partner, Norman Baldwin, became a mayor of Ohio City, while another local partner, Charles Winslow, served as President of Ohio City Council. (Winslow was also father-in-law to C.L. Russell who later famously led the Ohio City forces in the 1836 Battle of the Bridge against Cleveland.)

Tyler, unlike the other investors who were living in Buffalo--then a city eight times the size of Cleveland, decided to settle down and become a permanent resident of Ohio City. He built a home on Detroit Avenue just to the southeast of where St. Malachi church stands today. He and his wife Sarah raised their children there. He built commercial buildings, dealt extensively in real estate, and became a director of the Bank of Cleveland. Importantly, he formed a partnership with Charles Hoyt in 1832 which led to the founding of the Cuyahoga Steam Furnace Co. He also served a term on the Ohio City Council and was a vestryman at St. John Episcopal Church. In the 1850s, as sentiment against the Kansas- Nebraska Act led to the creation of the national Republican Party, Tyler became an early convention delegate of that political party in Cleveland.

In 1856, two years after Ohio City was annexed to the City of Cleveland, Tyler purchased the farm land upon which the house at 4403 Fenwick now sits, as a gift to his wife Sarah. Construction of the house was completed in or about 1859. With an all brick facade, simple box style, and almost commercial appearance, it is different than the usual Italianate style of design built in this era in Cleveland.

Six years after building the house on Fenwick Avenue, Benjamin F. Tyler succumbed to cancer at age 63. He was buried at Monroe Street Cemetery. After his death, Sarah sold the farmhouse to German immigrants and moved into a house on Franklin Avenue. While the house at 4403 Fenwick has had a number of different owners over the past century and a half, since 1963 it has been owned by one Cleveland family.

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The small stone church on the southeast corner of West Clinton Avenue and West 65th Street, almost shrouded with trees, is Bethany Presbyterian Church. It was originally a west side Sunday school mission of the Old Stone Church that evolved into a new parish, which was organized in 1889. For the first five years of its existence, the new parish, which had about 60 members when it was organized, worshiped in rented quarters: first in a building near Pearl (West 25th) and Lorain Streets, and later in the Wieber Block at the corner of Pearl and Jay Street. In June 1894, when, according to its founding pastor Rev. Giles H. Dunning, membership had "boomed," the parish purchased two lots on the corner of West Clinton and Gordon (West 65th) to build a church that would provide it with sufficient space as well as a permanent home.

Construction of the new church began in 1894, with the cornerstone laid on November 4. It was completed in 1895, and dedicated on June 2 of that year. The church, as originally built, was 52 feet by 89 feet, had an exterior facade of stone and brick, and fronted on West Clinton. At the time, church officials planned to add onto the church and construct a grander front facing Gordon (West 65th). That never happened. The new church had a capacity of between 500-600. It was designed by architect William Warren Sabin, who designed several Presbyterian churches in Cleveland, as well as two Cleveland police precinct stations. Total construction cost of the church was approximately $10,000.

This was the neighborhood church where Raymond L. Pianka, Cleveland's long-time Housing Court Judge, worshiped as a boy. His family lived at 6310 West Clinton, just down and across the street from Bethany Presbyterian. Ray's mother was a deacon and a member of the session at the church, and later, so was Ray. According to Rev. Don Gordon, pastor of the church from 1964-1968, Ray Pianka, though just a teenager at the time, was one of the most helpful of his parishioners. He ran errands, assisted the secretary, and brought to the church the neighborhood news--both good and bad. What Rev. Gordon remembered most though about young Ray Pianka was his love of church and community.

Bethany Presbyterian's original parish was composed of Scottish, Welsh and Irish immigrants. The parish peaked in size in the 1940s when it had about 700 members. By the time the Pianka family began worshiping there a decade later, Italian-Americans, especially after the closing of the Church of the Redeemer on West 69th Street, were added to the ethnic mix. By the 1970s, parish membership had declined to about 140. In recent years, however, the church has experienced a renewal as it has become home to neighborhood Hispanic parishioners. In 2014, the parish celebrated its 125th anniversary.

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Boxing in the Old Angle, an historic Irish neighborhood located on Cleveland's near west side, has deep roots, reaching back at least as far as the year 1894 when Brother Salpicious of the Christian Brothers of the La Salle Order founded the La Salle Literary and Athletic Club at St. Malachi school for boys on the corner of Pearl Street (West 25th) and Division Avenue. The Club encouraged boys attending St. Malachi to engage in a number of sports, including boxing. It achieved national attention in 1912 when it sponsored the St. Patrick's Day parade in Cleveland, featuring new featherweight boxing champion Johnny Kilbane, who had learned to box at the La Salle Club in the first decade of the twentieth century.

As young school boys who trained at the La Salle Club grew older, other, more professional places were needed to provide continued training in the sport of boxing. Johnny Kilbane, and others like Tommy Kilbane (no relation), Tommy (later "Black Jack") McGinty, and "Young Brick" Masterson, at first often had to travel out of the Old Angle neighborhood to places like Volk's Gymnasium downtown on Prospect Avenue to train. But in 1910, that changed when Jimmy Dunn, legendary trainer of Johnny Kilbane and other early twentieth century fighters, opened his first professional gym in the Angle neighborhood at 2618 Detroit Avenue--just a block west of the intersection of West 25th Street and Detroit. According to an article which appeared that year in the Plain Dealer, Dunn's new establishment was "fitted up as completely as any gym in the city." Johnny Kilbane was training out of Dunn's Gym at 2618 Detroit when he won his featherweight boxing crown in 1912.

Other gyms sprouted up in the neighborhood, and elsewhere, as the sport of boxing--thanks in large part to Johnny Kilbane's fame, became more popular in Cleveland in the 1920s and was viewed as a way to climb out of poverty, despite official discouragement of the sport from City Hall. Jimmy Dunn's Gym at 2618 Detroit saw a succession of new owners, including Tommy "Black Jack" McGinty, the Frisco Club and others, including former boxer Bryan Downey who, around 1930 closed the gym at this location and opened a new one downtown on Superior. Danny Dunn (a cousin of Jimmy Dunn), who for a short time managed the gym his cousin had founded, opened his own gym just up the street at 2816 Detroit in 1926. It became a neighborhood fixture for over a decade, training many boxers, until it closed around 1941. Its most well-known boxer was Johnny Risko, a Slovak immigrant and heavyweight boxer, who trained at the gym in the decades of the 1920s and 1930s when he was one of the top contenders in the United States for the heavyweight crown.

Shortly after Danny Dunn's gym closed, as well as Bryan Downey's downtown in the same year, a movement appears to have begun in 1943 to bring a boxing gymnasium back to the Old Angle. Prominent among the people involved in the movement was John A. Keough, a third generation Irish-American born in the Angle neighborhood, whose son John M. "Jackie" Keough, a welterweight, was one of the top boxers in Cleveland in the 1940s. In or about 1943, Keough and a partner opened a gym in two rooms and an allotted basement area of the Campbell Block, an historic building erected in 1891 by Alexander Campbell, the grandfather of another famed fighter--Admiral Isaac Campbell Kidd, who went down fighting on the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

Located near St. Malachi Church and just a block north of the intersection of West 25th and Detroit Avenue, the gym was named the "Old Angle" gym, according to one source, by former boxing champion Johnny Kilbane. For much of the next three decades, the Old Angle Gym was THE place to train on the west side of Cleveland. It operated out of the Campbell Block from 1943 until 1949. In 1950, Keough opened a new Old Angle Gym in the Rhodes Building at 1699 West 25th Street. This Old Angle Gym—sometimes also called the Old Angle Athletic Center— remained at that location until 1959, when Keough moved it back to the Campbell Block.

One of the boxers attracted to the Old Angle Gym was James Louis "Jimmy" Bivins, an African American, whose family moved to Cleveland from Georgia in 1921 when he was just two years old. Bivins fought as both a light heavyweight and heavyweight, winning the "duration" title in both weight classes during World War II. After retiring from boxing in 1955, Bivins returned to the Old Angle gym to become a trainer, introducing a whole new generation of kids living in the neighborhood to the "sweet science," including bantamweight Gary Horvath, who won multiple Golden Gloves championships in the decade of the 1960s. Later, after Keough and his partners retired from management of the gym, Bivins and Horvath took over, operating the Old Angle Gym out of the Campbell Block until that building was torn down in 1975. Afterwards, the two operated a boxing gym for several years in the West Side Community Center at West 30th Street and Bridge Avenue, and then Bivins opened up a boxing gym at St. Malachi Church--where it all started, for neighborhood youths in 1979, running it until the mid 1990s.

In the year 2000, in recognition of the contributions which Jimmy Bivins made to the community both as a legendary boxer and as a trainer of young boxers on the near west side, the City of Cleveland, figuratively speaking, returned to the historic intersection of West 25th Street and Detroit Avenue, passing legislation to name the little park on the northwest corner of that intersection "Jimmy Bivins Park." Unknown to city officials at the time, the same park had eighty years earlier been dedicated as a memorial to Bernard "Brick" Masterson, a popular near west side ward leader, who was also associated with the sport of boxing--as a member of the historic La Salle club and as the father of a promising young boxer who, in the early days, trained with Johnny Kilbane in Jimmy Dunn's gym on Detroit Avenue. No matter the inadvertent slight to "Brick." Had he been alive to witness the renaming of his park, he probably would have been honored to share it with a man like Bivins. It would be entirely in keeping with history and tradition at this epicenter of boxing in Cleveland.

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The Campbell Block was for many years one of the most recognizable buildings in the Old Angle neighborhood on Cleveland's near west side. It was actually at one time two separate buildings located just east of Pearl (West 25th) Street, between Vermont and Viaduct Avenues. Both were built by Alexander Campbell and both came about as a result of the construction of the Superior Viaduct, Cleveland's first high level bridge, which opened to traffic in 1878. In the course of planning construction of the west side approach to the Viaduct, the City had purchased an eighty foot wide swath of land (part of the Alonzo Carter Allotment) located just east of the intersection of Pearl Street and Vermont Avenue. This purchase split a number of parcels of land and, among other things, created a triangular piece of land with frontage on Pearl Street, Vermont Avenue and the new Viaduct Avenue. During the period 1877-1882, Campbell, a Scottish immigrant who had settled in Cleveland in 1867 and had become a prominent paving contractor in the city, purchased all of the land interests which comprised the triangular area with the intent of constructing a commercial building and hotel on the land.

Campbell's first building, identified on early maps as "Campbell's Block" and located on the eastern part of the triangular piece of land, was a three-story wood and brick building which fronted on Viaduct Avenue. It was completed in 1880. The upper two floors were devoted to apartment suites, while the first floor was divided into seven store fronts for retail merchants, among whom over the years were butchers, confectioners, cigar-makers, barbers, saloon keepers and others. One of those store fronts was home to the offices of the Cleveland Graphic, a weekly Democrat newspaper. And, in 1886, according to the Plain Dealer, this was where Charles Salen, co-owner of the Graphic and County Democrat party leader, organized Cleveland's first amateur baseball league, which played its games on the southeast side at Beyerle's Park (later called Forest City Park) for several years, before moving to Brookside Park on the west side.

The second Campbell Block building—which many Clevelanders still remember—was built in 1892, just to the west of the first building. It was a red brick five-story building that was originally planned as a hotel, but became instead an apartment building with retail store fronts on the first floor. This building had frontage on both Viaduct Avenue and Pearl Street. In 1897, the building received acclaim for its innovative fire escape system—called the "Burden" fire escape, which enabled fire fighters to extract people from a burning building using a wire basket hauled along rails attached to projections from the roof and exterior sides. This new fire escape had been promoted and installed on the building by Isaac Kidd, Alexander Campbell's son-in-law and the father of the future-famed World War II war hero, Admiral Isaac Campbell Kidd. Like the first building, this building also had a variety of retail tenants on the first floor. In the post World War II era, the most famous of these in the neighborhood were J & L Seafoods, Green's Cafe, and the Old Angle Gym.

By the time World War II arrived, Alexander Campbell's heirs now owned and managed the two Campbell Block buildings. In 1948, the first building--said by one County official to be in "very poor shape," was torn down and in the same year the second was conveyed out of the family. Gradually, as the surviving building aged and deteriorated, it emptied of its apartment residents and became--from a revenue perspective, primarily a site for billboard signs. It's three locally famous first floor tenants—J & L Seafoods, Green's Cafe, and the Old Angle Gym, however, continued to operate their businesses there until the very the end. That end came in late December 1975 when a wrecking ball knocked down the building, demolishing the Block that the Superior Viaduct and Alexander Campbell had created almost 100 years earlier.

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In the early 1940s, before he was even old enough to cross the street, young Joe Bachna gazed at Ceska Sin Sokol Hall from his father's photography studio at 4203 Clark Avenue. The three and one-half story building located down and across the street at 4314 Clark Avenue, loomed large, both in the immediate neighborhood and in his imagination. Joe dreamed about the day when he too, like his older brothers Alfred, Rudy and Gilbert, could go to the Hall and become a Sokol member, a gymnast.

At the time that Joe Bachna was growing up in this west side neighborhood of Cleveland which was then heavily populated by Czech, Slovak and German-Americans, Ceska Sin Sokol Hall had been home to a number of west side Sokol organizations for nearly 40 years. The Sokols ("Falcons"), a physical education and cultural program founded in Prague in 1862 to promote national solidarity and pride, was part of the culture that Czech immigrants brought with them to America in the second half of the nineteenth century. The first Sokol in America was organized in St. Louis in 1865, and by the 1870s Sokols were being founded among the growing Czech population living in Cleveland.

In the 1890s, Cleveland's west side Czech Sokols--Nova Vlas ("New Country") and Ceska-Zbavny ("Czech Entertainment")-- began purchasing property and building gyms in the Clark-Fulton area. In 1903, they and a number of lodges, clubs and other men's and women's ethnic organizations pooled their resources for the purpose of acquiring a single large hall for all of their activities. Forming a patronat ("board of managers"), they purchased Hungaria Hall in 1907. The hall, which had been built in 1890 by wealthy Hungarian-American magnate Theodore Kundtz, was renamed Ceska Sin Sokol Hall.

During the the years that followed the purchase, thousands of west side neighborhood boys and girls undertook gymnastic training at Ceska Sin Sokol Hall. They also imbibed the Sokol creed of developing strong minds and sound morals to go along with their strong bodies. They practiced, put on exhibitions, engaged in competitions, and, on special occasions, participated in slets (literally "rallies," but actually festivals), where hundreds and sometimes even thousands of Sokol members performed elaborately choreographed gymnastic routines. The Bachna family became involved in these and other Hall activities starting in the 1920s. Joseph Bachna, Sr. and his wife Angela, immigrants from what became Czechoslovakia, were members of a number of clubs and other organizations at the Hall, and their boys at early ages became members of the Slovak Gymnastic Union Sokol.

While all of the Bachna boys developed life-long relationships with Sokol organizations and with Ceska-Sin Sokol Hall, the relationship that one of them developed was to have an enormous impact on the development of college gymnastics in northeast Ohio. Rudy Bachna, whose competitive career was derailed at age 9 when he suffered a crippling injury to his left hand, founded the gymnastic program at Kent State University in 1959. It was the first such college program in northeast Ohio and it quickly became successful, serving as a model for college gymnastic programs across the country. Rudy trained a number of Pan-American and Olympic gymnasts, including Betty Jean Maycock, who won a gold medal at the 1960 Pan-American games and participated in the 1960 Olympics in Rome. In 1980, in recognition of his contributions to college gymnastics, Rudy Bachna was inducted into the Greater Cleveland Sports Hall of Fame. In 1993, two years after his retirement, he and his wife Janet, also a gymnastics coach, were inducted into the Kent State University Hall of Fame.

Today, Sokol gymnasts still train at Ceska Sin Sokol Hall and are still competitive, much like the Bachna boys were more than a half-century earlier. And while their numbers are smaller, these Sokol-trained gymnasts have continued over the years to contribute to northeast Ohio, sometimes in fields other than gymnastics. In 1969, when 17-year-old Peter Sikora, a west side Sokol member of Ceska Sin Sokol Hall, suffered a trampoline accident at St. Ignatius High School that left him a quadriplegic for life, his days as a gymnast were over. But in the Sokol tradition of developing a sound mind as well as a sound body, Peter went on to college and then to law school. He became a lawyer and then a Cuyahoga County Juvenile Court judge in 1989, where he served for 23 years until his death in 2012. Like Rudy Bachna, Judge Sikora too found a way to contribute to his community despite his physical limitations, just as his early gymnastic training at Ceska Sin Sokol Hall would have taught him to do.

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By all accounts he was a very serious young man. Born in Cleveland in 1882, Charles Emil Ruthenberg was the son of German immigrants and the youngest of nine children--the first and only child in the family to be born in America. He grew up in a working class neighborhood of Germans and Bohemians on the west side, in a house on W. 85th Street which is still standing today. As a boy, Charles was a model student who aspired to become a Lutheran minister. But his studies led him to question the fairness of capitalism to the working class in America, and as a young man he became active in politics, running for Ohio Governor in 1910 as a Socialist, when he was just 28 years old.

Described by one reporter as "tall, blonde [and] good-looking," Ruthenberg ran for a number of other political offices in Ohio in the 1910s decade, including several runs at mayor of Cleveland. In the city's 1917 municipal elections, as the Socialist Party's candidate, he received more than 27,000 of the 100,000 votes cast in the five-man race.

When war broke out in Europe in 1914, Ruthenberg protested against America's entry into that war, which he contended benefited the wealthy at the expense--and very lives, of the working class. He became embittered--some might instead say that he became hardened, when America nonetheless entered the War. He became even more so later by the treatment he received at the hands of police, politicians and the general public when he continued to speak out against the War. In 1917, Ruthenberg was convicted in a federal court for obstructing the draft, and spent a year in prison, where he was tortured by prison officials. He emerged a radicalized man.

Just months after his release, Ruthenberg led a peaceful march in downtown Cleveland on May 1, 1919, in celebration of the working class and the Russian Revolution. Red was the theme of the day, as red banners and red flags were carried. Some even wore red ribbons. It all turned violent when enraged war veterans, who literally saw red, attacked the marchers. Then the police joined in the melee. Dozens of people were injured, and two killed. Ruthenberg and 124 other marchers were arrested, and he was inexplicably charged with assault with intent to kill, although the charges were later dismissed.

After this event, Ruthenberg spent little additional time in Cleveland. In September 1919, in Chicago, he co-founded the American Communist Party, becoming its first Executive Secretary. Already a targeted individual, this new office insured that Ruthenberg would be constantly harassed by law enforcement officials who were fearful of the "Red Scare" to the point of panic. For the next eight years, there was never a time, according to a biographical article written in 1937 by his son Daniel, that he was not either under indictment or in jail, earning him the sobriquet of "America's Most Arrested Man."

In March 1927, at the age of just 44 years, Ruthenberg died suddenly of a ruptured appendix, while his appeal to the United States Supreme Court from his latest conviction in a Michigan court was still pending. Ruthenberg was cremated and his ashes carried overseas to Russia where he was interred in the Kremlin Wall, becoming one of only a handful of Americans to have ever been accorded this honor.

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You have to be fairly old to even remember City Hospital. Founded in 1837, just one year after Cleveland became a city, it was Cleveland's first public hospital. In 1958, after 121 years in existence, and as a result of the growth of Cleveland's suburbs and recognition that the services provided by the hospital had become county-wide, it was transferred to the Cuyahoga County Hospital System, becoming Metro General Hospital. Today, it is the main campus of the MetroHealth System.

City Hospital had its origins in the great cholera pandemic of 1829-1837. It struck Cleveland in 1832, when soldiers on the Henry Clay, a ship that was transporting them across the Great Lakes to fight in the Black Hawk War in the West, contracted the disease while their ship was docked in Buffalo. They became sick as the ship sailed to Detroit, which, at least according to one Cleveland historian, stationed armed men on its docks to prevent the soldiers from disembarking there. Compelled to seek medical help elsewhere, the ship headed to Cleveland where the soldiers received treatment. Unfortunately, the cholera soon spread, killing 50 people within several months, which was at that time about five percent of the population.

In the aftermath of the epidemic, Cleveland created a Board of Health, and, in 1837, the Board took over the former Cleveland Township poorhouse, converting it into an institution that was initially called the City Hospital, but later became the Cleveland Infirmary. For a little more than a decade, the hospital operated out of the poorhouse, a two-story ramshackle building on the northwest corner of Sumner and Clinton (East 14th) Streets. It was located on the same grounds as Erie Street cemetery which prompted Mark Gottlieb, a journalist who wrote a history of University Hospitals, to note that that was "appropriate," because, in those days, people who went to hospitals usually died shortly thereafter.

In 1851, as Cleveland grew and in response to another cholera scare, the city purchased an 80-acre lot in Brooklyn Township along Scranton Road as the site of a proposed new and larger City Infirmary. Plans were drawn and, in 1855, the city completed construction of an Italianate-style red-brick building which had five stories, including its basement and attic. The land on which the new infirmary sat had formerly been the Brooklyn Township poor farm. That the first two sites for City Hospital were places where the community's poor had been housed provides an insight into society's perception in that era that a close relationship existed between poverty, morality, sickness and disability.

For the next three decades, medical treatment was provided in this building on Scranton Road, which became known as the "Middle House," because of the many annexes and wings that were added onto each side of it over the years. However, the building still served as primarily something other than a hospital during this time period. It was home--sometimes for decades, to an assortment of Clevelanders who were destitute, sometimes because of mental illness, sometimes because of disability, and sometimes simply because of poverty and advanced age. While some efforts were made to separate residents based on the condition which had brought them to Middle House, often the poor, the mentally ill, the disabled, the elderly poor, and even juvenile offenders lived in close proximity to one another and to actual hospital patients.

In the final decades of the nineteenth century as medical science entered the bacteriological era and as the medical profession became, well, more professional, major change came to City Hospital. Slowly it transformed itself from an institution serving society's destitute into a medical treatment facility. In 1889, a second building with the capacity to treat 200 patients was erected on the Scranton Road campus, just north of Middle House. While the latter building and its multiple annexes continued for several more decades to provide what were considered charitable services for the poor, the disabled, the mentally ill, and others, the new building, which was officially designated as City Hospital, served exclusively as a place where sick and injured patients received medical treatment.

In 1890, the quality of the medical services provided at the hospital began to improve markedly when, at the instigation of Cleveland mayor George Gardner, the Board of Health took first steps to begin ceding authority for hospital policy and procedure to a medical staff composed of a number of respected area physicians who were engaged in different fields of specialization. Among those early City Hospital physicians were Dr. George Crile, who would several decades later co-found the Cleveland Clinic, and Dr. Dudley Allen, who had married into the wealthy Severance family and became not only one of Cleveland's great surgeons, but also one of its great philanthropists.

As the twentieth century arrived, City Hospital was on a fast track to becoming one of the largest and best hospitals in the United States. The campus grew immensely during the first three decades of the century. In 1913, while a new multiple building complex was under construction, the hospital became affiliated with the medical school of Western Reserve University, further enhancing its professional standards. By 1937, which marked the one hundredth anniversary of its founding, City Hospital was the country's sixth largest hospital, with sixteen hospital buildings and 1,650 beds on the Scranton Road campus. It had come a very long way from its beginnings in the city's poorhouse located on the grounds of Erie Street Cemetery.

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You're driving south on West 65th Street in your Ford Model T, sometimes called a Tin Lizzie. You pass St. Colman Roman Catholic Church on your left, then the Cleveland Trust bank building on the corner of Lorain Avenue, and just a little later Gordon Elementary School on your right. You're behind a trolley on this cold Monday morning, January 24, 1927. Traffic is moving even slower than usual. You wonder what the holdup is ahead.

Then you hear it . . . the sound of hard hooves on red brick street. You don't see them at first. But as you get closer to Clark Avenue and the Big Four Railroad tracks, you catch a glimpse of the herd-- brown, black and white splotches of color, a dozen or so head of cattle, coming your way, weaving through traffic. The steers pay no attention to the rules of the road. Some are trying to make it to the middle of the street, others want to turn back, but the drovers with their long sticks are there to guide them, keeping them close to the curb. As you proceed past the intersection, you reach the herd, taking in the smell now as well, and you carefully pass by.

The herd is on its way to the slaughterhouse of the Long Dressed Beef packinghouse on West 68th Street, where the individual cattle will become steaks, roasts and other beef products for Cleveland's meat-hungry population. But after you have passed them and the flow of traffic on West 65th has improved a little, you and your traveling companions don't give the cattle or the fate that awaits them any further thought.

For the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, it wasn't unusual for motorists like these to encounter herds of cattle, flocks of sheep, or a drove of hogs, all on their way from the Cleveland Union Stockyards to nearby slaughterhouses-- sometimes more elegantly referred to as "abbatoirs." On a daily basis, buyers from Swift & Company, Ohio Provision, Theurer-Norton, Webb Beef, Gibbs, Inc., and the other meat packers and renderers whose buildings stretched around the Stockyards like a giant inverted "C," would come to the yards. There they dickered with commission agents of the farmers who had raised the cattle, sheep and hogs in Ohio, Michigan and elsewhere and had then transported them by rail to Cleveland's Union Stockyards for sale. Buyer and seller squabbled over quantity and price per pound. And, when a buyer was finally sure that he hadn't been given a "bum steer," a deal would be struck. All that remained then was to transport the animals purchased to the meat packer's slaughterhouses. Given their geographical proximity to the Stockyards, the easiest way to accomplish that was to simply walk the animals there.

And so west side motorists, like those traveling south on West 65th Street on January 24, 1927, had to deal with these walking cattle, sheep, and pigs that slowed down traffic. But their inconvenience was minor compared to what people who lived in the Stockyards district had to endure. Residents of the Isle of Cuba, the Czech immigrant neighborhood located just east of the stockyards and packinghouses, dealt daily and constantly with raucous animal noise and horrific stench. Moreover, every so often animals would escape, and residents would come home to find cattle, hogs or sheep munching their lawns, trampling their gardens, breaking fence posts, and sometimes even endangering their children.

The meat packers and renderers of the Stockyards District, as well as the stockyards themselves, certainly did create neighborhood nuisance. But as Cleveland's third largest industry, they also employed thousands of Clevelanders. It all ended--jobs as well as nuisance, in the late 1950s through early 1970s, when first the packinghouses abandoned Cleveland as a regional meatpacking center and then the Stockyards closed.

Today, the ruins of the old packinghouses still stretch along the east side of West 65th Street between Clark and Storer Avenues, but now you have to look at an historic photo or talk to a long-time resident of the Stockyards neighborhood to understand a little bit of what it was once like to see cattle ambling their way down the streets of Cleveland's west side.

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As you drive west on Franklin Boulevard, between West 58th and West 65th Streets, it is surprisingly easy to miss the house at 6016 Franklin, despite its high pitched roof, its multiplicity of windows, dormers and entrances, its towers and other interesting architectural details, and despite the fact that it is one of the largest houses in the neighborhood. Situated on the north side of the street between two more noticeable brick apartment buildings, you might just unknowingly pass by it. But you shouldn't. It was once the home of one of Cleveland's most prominent nineteenth century architects, and it is worth the time to stop and admire. And, see if you can discern the Latin inscription on the house's gable. It seems to sum up the architect's beliefs about family and religion.

Forrest A. Coburn, the designer and original owner of the house at 6016 Franklin Boulevard, was born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1848. When he was 14 years old, his family moved to the Cleveland area, initially settling on Coe Ridge (Lorain) Road in Rockport Township, but later moving to the west side of Cleveland. In 1866, at age 18, Coburn entered the work force as a bookkeeper, but soon found his life work when in 1868 he was hired to be a draftsman in the downtown offices of Joseph Ireland, one of Cleveland's great early architects. Coburn worked for Ireland, and later Walter Blythe--another important early Cleveland architect, until 1873, when he left town to study architecture in New York. In 1875, he returned here an architect, working at first in Blythe's office, but in 1878, leaving that employment to form a partnership with Frank Seymour Barnum, who later became the architect for the Cleveland School Board, designing many of the districts early twentieth century school buildings.

Coburn and Barnum, which initially had offices in the Hardy Block on Euclid Avenue--just a stone's throw from Public Square, quickly became one of the city's best and most prolific architectural firms. Perhaps most telling of how quickly the firm rose to prominence was its selection, in 1881, to design the catafalque for President James Garfield, when his body lay in state at Monumental (Public) Square from September 24-26, before being transported to and buried at Lake View Cemetery.

During the last two decades of the nineteenth century, according to the records of the Cleveland Landmarks Commission, Coburn and Barnum designed at least 143 buildings in the Cleveland area, a number of them considered to be among the best designed in the city during this era. One--the Blackstone Building, on the southwest corner of Seneca (West 3rd) Street and Frankfort Avenue, which was built in 1881 by Jacob Perkins and demolished in the early 1960s, has been cited by one architectural historian as a leading example of the work of the new class of post-Civil War architects in Cleveland who, in the last several decades of the nineteenth century, produced some of the city's grandest downtown buildings.

The firm was also known for its residential designs. It designed 20 of the mansions on Millionaires' Row, including the Howe Mansion, which today is located on the campus of Cleveland State University and known as Parker Hannifin Hall. The firm also designed a number of houses and churches on the west side of Cleveland that are still standing, including the Spitzer-Dempsey House at 2830 Franklin Boulevard, the Sarah Bousfield ("Stone Gables") House at 3806 Franklin Boulevard, the George Warmington Duplex at 4906-08 Franklin Boulevard, the John Pankhurst House at 3206-08 Clinton Avenue, the Thomas Axworthy Houses at 3802 and 3804 Clinton Avenue, and Olivet Baptist Church at 5022 Bridge Avenue. The firm also designed a number of cultural institution buildings in University Circle and elsewhere, including the still-standing Olney Art Gallery on West 14th Street in Tremont.

The influence of Forrest Coburn extended, however, far beyond the nineteenth century Cleveland area buildings that he designed. Two of the architects in his office, Walter Hubbell and Czech immigrant W. Dominick Benes, after Coburn's death, started their own firm--Hubbell and Benes, which designed a number of Cleveland's best known early twentieth century buildings, among them the West Side Market (1907-1910) and the Cleveland Museum of Art (1917). Another architect in the office, John H. Edelman, later moved to Chicago and became the mentor of a young Louis Sulllivan, the architect who would eventually become known to the world as the father of the American skyscraper.

For much of his early career, Forrest Coburn had lived in a simple house at 86 Root (1901 West 47th) Street, but in 1887 he purchased several lots on Franklin Boulevard and began drawing up plans for the large house at 6016 Franklin Boulevard. Completed in 1890, the house was designed as a duplex, with the Coburn family living in the larger "half" of the house, and the smaller "half" rented out. Forrest Coburn lived in this house for only seven years, dying--it was said-- from overwork in 1897 at the age of 49. After his death, his widow and children continued to reside in the house until 1912 when it was sold out of the family. In 1942, the house was converted into a seven-suite apartment building, which it remained as until 2002, when, after an extensive renovation, it was converted into a four unit luxury condominium. It is now, once again, one of the jewels of the Franklin-West Clinton Historic District.

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Situated at 690 Lakeview Road in Cleveland's historic Glenville neighborhood, the E. A. Schellentrager House, known to the Schellentrager family as "Evergreen," was built in 1893. It was designed by one of Cleveland's most prolific late nineteenth-century architects, Fenimore C. Bate. Bate was very possibly Cleveland's most successful architect of houses designed in the Queen Anne style. Bate is also notable as the architect who designed Grays Armory on Bolivar Avenue in downtown Cleveland.

Ernst August Schellentrager, for whom Evergreen was built, was an immigrant from the Thuringia region of Germany who came to Cleveland in 1864 as a 14 year old. By 1867, he was employed as an assistant pharmacist in a downtown drug store. Just six years later he opened his own drug store on St. Clair Avenue--at what today would be 3361 St. Clair. He operated his drug store from that downtown Cleveland location for 46 years.

In addition to operating his drug store and being father to nine children, E. A. Schellentrager was a Cleveland community activist. He served on the Cleveland School Board for 14 years from 1878 until 1892. He was compelled to resign his position that year when he and his family moved to Glenville, then a suburb of Cleveland. While on the Cleveland School Board, Schellentrager headed the German instruction committee. He also served as Board President in 1886.

Schellentrager was an early leader in the efforts to promote the professionalization of the pharmacist practice in Ohio. He was an active member of the Ohio and Cleveland Pharmacists' Associations, and was one of the founders of the Cleveland School of Pharmacy. He served as President of the Cleveland Pharmacy School for 22 years--from its inception in 1882 to 1904. In 1908, the Cleveland School became one of Western Reserve University's colleges.

E.A. Schellentrager lived at Evergreen for 11 years. In 1904, the same year that he stepped down as President of the Cleveland School of Pharmacy, Schelletrager sold the two-acre estate to a real estate developer. The family moved to a house on East 115th Street, where E. A. lived until his death in 1926.

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Many people don't know the difference between a Christian Scientist and a Scientologist--other than perhaps to hazard a guess that Tom Cruise is a member of one or the other of these two religious groups. Clevelanders do, however, know a beautifully designed church when they see one. The Fifth Church of Christ, Scientist, located until 2016 on the southeast corner of Lake Avenue and West 117th Street, was not only one of Cleveland's most beautifully designed churches, but, as it exterior sides formed an octagon, it was also one of the city's most uniquely-designed churches.

The Fifth Church of Christ served as the home of a Christian Science congregation from 1927-1989. Christian Science is a Christian religious sect that was founded in 1866 by Mary Baker Eddy, a New Englander who was influenced by the religious fervor of America's Second Great Awakening. Soon after the religion's founding, Christian Scientists began to appear in Cleveland. In 1891, Christian Scientists built their first church in Cleveland on the corner of Kennard (East 46th) Street and Cedar Avenue and appropriately named it the First Church of Christ, Scientist. Three additional churches--named the Second, Third and Fourth Churches, were built on the east side of Cleveland during the period 1891-1914.

In 1915, Cleveland's Christian Scientists crossed the river and formed their first west side congregation. The congregation--appropriately named the Fifth Church of Christ, had as its first permanent house of worship a church built on the northeast corner of West 58th Street and Franklin Avenue in 1889, home originally to the Franklin Congregational Church. That church served the Fifth Church of Christ congregation for ten years. In 1925 the congregation purchased land for a new church to be located on the southeast corner of Lake Avenue and West 117th Street, just across the municipal corporation line from Lakewood. Architect Frank W. Bail (who also designed the majestic Cuyahoga County Juvenile Court building on East 22nd Street in Cleveland and the elegant Lake Shore Hotel (now LakeShore Towers) on Edgewater Drive in Lakewood) was hired to design the new Fifth Church of Christ.

Bail, a talented architect, began his design of the new Fifth Church of Christ much like other Christian Science churches built in the early twentieth century-- an ornate temple in neoclassical style. However, Bail modified the traditional round temple style of these other Christian Scientist churches, giving the new Fifth Church of Christ an octagonal shape, making it unique among the sacred structures of Cleveland. Bail also utilized some unusual materials for the church's exterior, including Birmingham buff sandstone and Nebo marble. Construction of the new church was completed in 1927 and thereafter it served the Fifth Church of Christ congregation for more than 60 years.

In 1989, the Fifth Church of Christ church closed its doors and a grocery store chain, which purchased the church, threatened to demolish it. When nearby residents protested, then Ward-17 councilman (and later Cleveland Housing Court Judge) Raymond Pianka led an effort to have the church declared an historic landmark and to enact legislation to protect it, and other historic landmarks in Cleveland, against "demolition by neglect." The grocery chain eventually bowed to the community pressure and, in 2002, donated the historic sacred structure to the City of Cleveland.

Although Ray Pianka's efforts in the 1990s saved the church from destruction then, the historic building on Lake Avenue was once again threatened with demolition in 2014. And this time, there was no one around to save it from the wrecking ball. The City of Cleveland contended it did not have the funds to repair and maintain this unique historic church and sold it to a local developer who proposed to build a mixed use development on the site. A ground roots community effort was made to save at a part of the historic structure, but that ultimately failed because of estimated preservation costs. In October 2016, the Fifth Church of Christ Scientist was torn down.

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When James and Fannie Horwitz experienced the unspeakable heartbreak of losing a child--their 2-year-old son Aaron in January 1865, they undoubtedly found some consolation in burying him in the new Jewish cemetery out in the countryside, west of the Cuyahoga River in Brooklyn Township, on a charming little lane called Peach Street (later to be renamed Fir Street). The cemetery had just been opened that year by the Hungarian Aid Society (HAS), an organization formed in Cleveland in 1863 by Morris Black, Herman Sampliner and others, for the purpose of providing aid, including burials, to Hungarian Jewish immigrants. Aaron Horwitz was the organization's first burial at the new cemetery.

Aaron's father James (or Jacob as he was known in Europe) was a Vienna-trained medical doctor, and his mother Fannie a sister of Michael Heilprin, a brilliant Hebrew scholar. Both men were Polish Jews who lived in Galicia, an area of historic Poland that had been "annexed" by Austria in first partition of that country in the late 18th century. In 1848, both men had become ardent supporters of Lajos Kossuth and the Hungarian Revolution. And when the Hapsburgs defeated the insurgents and Kossuth fled Hungary, both men also did the same. Horwitz, immigrated to Cleveland, via Sandusky, practicing medicine before turning to business enterprises. Heilprin went instead to New York, where he became a celebrated Hebrew scholar, a friend of Horace Greeley, and mentor to the young poet Emma Lazarus. Several sources attribute the inspiration for Lazarus' 1883 poem "The New Colossus" to a meeting she earlier had with Michael Heilprin. Heilprin was both inspiration to Emma Lazarus and the uncle of an unfortunate young boy who was the first person to be buried at the new Jewish cemetery in Brooklyn Township.

The cemetery where Aaron Horwitz is buried we know today as Fir Street (or Fir Avenue) Cemetery. The second oldest Jewish cemetery in Cleveland, it is actually three small, separate historic cemeteries which are located on a rectangular-shaped piece of land bounded on the north by Fir Avenue; the east by West 59th Street; the south by Bayne Court; and the west by West 61st Street. The center cemetery, where Aaron and other members of the Horwitz family are buried, was owned by the HAS until 1963 when the land was deeded to the Jewish Community Federation (JCF) of Cleveland. While the first burial took place there in 1865, permission to operate a cemetery on the grounds was not officially granted by the City of Cleveland until 1880, several years after the section of Brooklyn Township in which it was located was annexed to the City.

The western cemetery was established by Anshe Emeth, the largest and oldest conservative Jewish congregation in Cleveland. It was founded by Polish Jewish immigrants in 1859. The Congregation made its first purchase of land on Fir Street in 1877, the same year that it was granted permission by the City to establish a cemetery on its grounds there. Anshe Emeth, in the twentieth century, merged with Beth Tefilo congregation to form Park Synagogue Anshe Emeth Beth Tefilo Congregation.

The eastern cemetery may also have been founded by Polish Jews, although there is some mystery surrounding the identity of the two Jewish organizations which owned the land in the nineteenth century. Chebra Kadisha, which acquired the land in 1866, was identified in the conveyance deed simply as a "religious organization." Thirteen years later, in 1879, through its trustees, it deeded the land to the B'nai Abraham Cemetery Association, an organization for which no records appear to exist. Chebra Kadisha may have been an early congregation which later merged with other congregations to form what became, in the twentieth century, the Heights Jewish Center (HJC). Or, it may have simply been a "burial society."

Among the locally famous residents of Fir Street Cemetery are: Herman Sampliner (1835-1899), founder of the B’nai Jeshurun Congregation; Harry “Czar” Bernstein (1856-1920), owner of Perry Bank and the Perry Theatre, and city councilman allied with Mark Hanna; Moses A. Adelstein (1813-1903), organizer of Cleveland’s first Russian synagogue and first free Jewish cemetery, Lansing Cemetery; Isaac Goldman (1858-1919), Cleveland’s first Jewish building contractor; Fanny Jacobs (1835-1928), founder of Park Synagogue’s sisterhood; Rabbi Gershon Ravinson (1848-1907), a 10th-generation rabbi who became a leading scholar of Talmud; Reverend Elias Rothschild (1858-1914), a kosher butcher with a reputation for offering meals and beds to the down-and-out. Rothschild is believed to have saved the Hebrew Free Loan Society when it ran into financial difficulty.

This final resting place of so many locally famous Clevelanders, as well as families with heart-wrenching stories like the Horwitz's, Fir Street became an inactive cemetery in 1971, after the last burials there took place. In the decades that followed, the condition of its grounds steadily deteriorated, in part due to acts of vandalism and in part because the Cleveland Jewish community had moved east, leaving the cemetery geographically distant from its founding congregations. The condition of Fir Street Cemetery troubled Cleveland Housing Court Judge Raymond J. Pianka, who been interested in the history of the cemetery, and the strange inscriptions on its gravestones, ever since he was a young boy attending Waverly Elementary School, just a block away from the cemetery. In 2007, he and a stalwart group of neighborhood residents collaborated with Park Synagogue and successfully formed a coalition of funding, organizations and volunteers that, over the next two-year period, renovated and restored the cemetery, cleaning its grounds, fixing broken grave stones, planting trees and hundreds of tulip bulbs, and repairing the entrance gate and signage. Since the completion of these repairs and renovations in 2009, the cemetery has been maintained by Park Synagogue Anshe Emeth Beth Tefilo Congregation with financial assistance from the JCF. Fir Street Cemetery is now, once again, a source of pride not only for Cleveland's Jewish community, but also for the Detroit Shoreway neighborhood.

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Franklin Circle, the centerpiece of one of Cleveland's rare radial street designs, was surveyed in 1836--the same year in which Ohio City became a city and Cleveland's chief commercial competitor across the Cuyahoga River. The land for the Circle, which lies at what is today the intersection of West 28th Street, Fulton Road, and Franklin Boulevard, was donated to Ohio City by Josiah Barber, a Connecticut pioneer who came to the Western Reserve in 1818 and settled the area just west of the Cuyahoga River and just south of the Lake. Today this area lies at the heart of the Ohio City neighborhood.

As originally laid out, the Circle was called Franklin Place or Franklin Square, and was informally utilized for several decades as an open farmers market. Later, after Ohio City was annexed to the City of Cleveland, Cleveland moved that "west side" market in 1859 to the northwest corner of Pearl (West 25th) Street and Lorain Avenue, and eventually in 1912 to the northeast corner of that same intersection where it has been known ever since as the West Side Market. The City then built on the Circle the west side's first public park, which featured a water fountain surrounded by an iron fence. In 1872, Franklin Boulevard was extended through the park as part of a renovation by the City of Cleveland. At about this time, the park was remodeled with a rock garden and, for years thereafter, was known as Modoc Park. In 1907, a combination of streetcar tracks and newly constructed apartment buildings contributed to almost destroy the park-like setting of the Circle, which thereafter became known simply as Franklin Circle.

From the mid-nineteenth century until the early twentieth century, Franklin Circle was surrounded by some of the grandest mansions on the west side of Cleveland, including those of Marcus Hanna, Daniel Pomeroy Rhodes, James Ford Rhodes, and Robert Russell Rhodes. Today, the Circle is still a pleasant area of the near west side with a park-like ambiance. However, most of the great mansions of the Circle are long gone. They have been replaced by multifamily and institutional buildings, including Lutheran Hospital and the Masonic Temple, which in the early twentieth century joined Franklin Circle Christian Church as the predominant buildings on the Circle.

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The origins of the founding of Franklin Circle Christian Church, located at 1688 Fulton Road, lie in America's Second Great Awakening, an early nineteenth century movement which was characterized by a resurgence in religious enthusiasm and a diversification in Christian religious groups. Northeastern Ohio became a center of this new religious fervor and home to a number of new Christian religious groups, including the Mormons (Kirtland), the Shakers (Warrensville Township), and the Amish (Holmes County). In this era, as Cleveland State University history professor David Goldberg taught his graduate history students, Ohio beckoned to religious enthusiasts much like a century or so later California would beckon to altruistic baby boomers.

The Disciples of Christ, which founded Franklin Circle Christian Church in 1842, was another new Christian group that grew out of the Second Great Awakening and found fertile ground for its new religion in northeastern Ohio. The Disciples of Christ were adherents to the religious philosophy of Thomas and Alexander Campbell, father and son ministers, who urged Christians to put aside the doctrinal differences that divided different sects and return to the principles of the primitive Christian Church. In 1848, the parish built its first permanent church on Franklin Circle. It was large and cavernous and was known to its parishioners as "God's Barn." Three decades later, the parish hired the noted Cleveland architectural firm of Cudell and Richardson to design a new church on Franklin Circle--on a parcel of land just south of "God's Barn." The new church was built in the years 1874-1875 and has become one of the oldest and best known landmarks on the near west side of Cleveland.

Franklin Circle Christian Church and the Disciples of Christ have a long history of promoting education and engaging in social activism in northeastern Ohio. In 1850, the Disciples of Christ founded the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute, which later became known as Hiram College. Future United States President James A. Garfield was a student at the new college in the early 1850s and returned to it in 1858 to become President of the College. In 1857, Garfield also served as pastor at Franklin Circle Christian Church. The Church's members also included fervent supporters of the nineteenth century Temperance and Prohibition movements. Long time parishioner Abraham Teachout, a lumber merchant who lived on Franklin Avenue, was the church's Sunday School Superintendent for 25 years in the late nineteenth century. In 1884, he ran for Congress on the Prohibition ticket and remained a fervent Prohibitionist until his death in 1912.

Franklin Circle Christian Church continued to engage in educational programs and social activism but by the twentieth century it was serving a constituency very different from the Franklin Boulevard neighborhood of the nineteenth century. By the twentieth century, the neighborhood had become home to many working class and immigrant families. The Church's outreach programs ministered to the needs of that new community well into the twenty-first century.

On January 19, 2025, Franklin Circle Christian Church held a commemorative worship service, in which its pastor and members of its congregation announced that they were leaving the church building which had been home to their congregation since 1875, and were forming a "Mosaic Faith Community" with St. Paul Community Church at 4427 Franklin Boulevard and Harbor and Bridge, a non-profit corporation affiliated with the United Methodist Church. Services for the Mosaic Faith Community have since then been held at St. Paul Community Church.

On April 20, 2026, Franklin Circle Christian Church sold the church and associated buildings at 1688 Fulton to a limited liability company with the name of 1688 Fulton LLC. While the limited liability company's articles of incorporation do not indicate an express purpose for the property it purchased, it is interesting to note that, before selling the property, Franklin Circle Christian Church, in June 2025, filed with the Cuyahoga County Recorder a document titled "Release of Deed Restriction." The document purports to remove a restriction of exclusive use of the church land for "Sunday School and Church purposes . . . " that was imposed by an early parishioner, Albert Reuben Teachout, who donated a substantial amount of the land at 1688 Fulton upon which the church and affiliated buildings stand.

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On the northwest corner of Walton Avenue and Fulton Road there is a little red brick house that is one of the oldest houses in the Clark-Fulton neighborhood. It is also all that is left of Henry Hoffman's dream to build a great brewery in Cleveland.

In 1845, eighteen-year-old Hoffman immigrated from Hesse-Cassell, Prussia (now central Germany) to the United States. He initially settled in Independence, Ohio, where he married, started a family, and worked as a farmer on land he owned. Sometime just as the Civil War was winding down, and for reasons lost to history--although perhaps it was because of the death of his first wife, Hoffman moved to Cleveland. He remarried in 1865 and, in 1868 at age 41 and with his dream in mind, he purchased a large lot of land that stretched along the west side of Rhodes Avenue (Fulton Road) from Walton Avenue nearly all the way to Erin Avenue. By 1870, he had built and was operating a small brewery on the land in a couple of commercial buildings he had constructed. He had also built, and he and his family were living in, that little red brick house. Today we would say that he was now living the dream.

According to Cleveland directory records, Hoffman's Brewery was one of more than a dozen operating here in 1870. Many, if not most, of these breweries were, like Hoffman's, owned by German immigrants and were built to serve neighborhood "needs." Within a few years, however, Hoffman had enlarged the brewery and, in 1878, he added a new brick saloon. This was, according to one industry publication that called him one of Cleveland's prominent brewers, so that his customers might "get a glass of lager without interruption to the men at work in the brewery." Hoffman must have felt that he was well on his way to becoming as large and as successful a brewer as fellow German immigrant Carl Gehring, whose fast-growing brewery was located just a mile away on West 25th Street, a block south of where the West Side Market stands today.

And why shouldn't Hoffman have felt that way? He had enlarged the capacity of his brewery so that it could produce 8,000 barrels (248,000 gallons) of German lager beer per year. He was carefully grooming his son William to help him further grow the business. He was a leader in several important Cleveland fraternal organizations. And, in 1874, he had been elected Councilman for Ward 12. This was the west side ward which encompassed almost all of what today are the Clark-Fulton and Stockyards neighborhoods of Cleveland

As it turned out, Henry Hoffman did not become the next Carl Gehring. Just two years later, in 1880, the local newspapers began reporting that Ward 12 Councilman Hoffman was very ill. And, on November 23, 1880, he died. The cause of death was said to be stomach cancer. Hoffman, who had just been re-elected to Council the previous year, was only 53 years old.

A grand funeral was held in Cleveland for Henry Hoffman. Resolutions of condolence were passed by City Council. Flags flew at half-mast in Public Square (then called Monumental Park). A moving eulogy was delivered (in German) by Rev. Klein at the service held at the Zion Church on Jennings Avenue (West 14th Street) in what is today the Tremont neighborhood. And, with his fellow councilmen serving as pall-bearers, Hoffman was buried at Riverside Cemetery with all the pomp and ceremony that his position as member of City Council and leader in the business community then warranted.

After Hoffman's death, his son William and a partner attempted to run the brewery, but within two years they were hopelessly in debt and were being sued by a number of creditors. The little red brick house and the brewery, ice house and all, were sold to one of those creditors, Miller Spangler, a millionaire maltster. Spangler used part of the brewery building for storage of his malt and rented the rest of the building to others. He also rented out Hoffman's little red brick house. A few years later, the brewery and nearby ice-house mysteriously burned to the ground. What was left of those buildings was later razed. Then, new houses were built on the land where the brewery once stood. Eventually, there was no trace of Henry Hoffman's dream left standing except for the little red brick house on the corner of Walton and Fulton.

In the decades that followed the fire, the house was initially used as a store. Then it was converted into a two-family dwelling. Later, an addition was built on the south side of the building, and various small retail businesses operated out that part of the house, while the rest of the house was used as a residence. Finally, the house's last resident sold the property in 1990 and, since then, it has been used exclusively as the retail business office of a local locksmith.

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The "Cathedral of Bakeries." That's how one incensed customer in a letter to the editor referred to Isabella Brothers Bakery in 1976, when a Plain Dealer writer failed to mention it in an article that purported to list the best bread bakeries in Cleveland. Perhaps, though, the paper's omission was excusable. While the bakery was still producing its locally famous Italian breads, its best days had already passed, as large chain grocery stores were slowly putting it and many other small local bakeries and neighborhood stores out of business.

Italian breads. If you are of Italian descent--or even if you are not, and you grew up in the Detroit-Shoreway neighborhood, you undoubtedly remember the delicious Italian breads sold by Isabella Brothers Bakery. The business was founded in 1914 by Anthony Isabella, an immigrant from the Campania region in southern Italy. Arriving in Cleveland in 1908, Anthony settled on West 69th Street, north of Detroit Avenue, where a colony of Italian immigrants, which included several of his father's sisters and other relatives, was already forming. It is said that the view of Lake Erie from the north end of West 69th attracted these immigrants to this street--once the home of the notorious McCart Street gang, because it reminded them so much of the Bay of Naples back in their homeland.

Anthony Isabella initially found work, like so many other Italian immigrants living in the neighborhood, at the Joseph & Feiss men's clothing factory on West 53rd Street. However, he didn't stay there long. He had apprenticed as both a butcher and baker in Italy and he soon went into business with a cousin (and future brother-in-law) Robert Mazzarella, the two men starting up a grocery store and a bakery at 1256-58 West 69th Street in 1914. It was really the perfect location. Not only did the two-story red brick building provide sufficient space for a grocery on the first store, living quarters for both men and some of their relatives on the second, and a bakery in a small building at the back, but it already had the name "Isabella" carved in stone upon it. Because the building had been erected in 1910 by one of Anthony Isabella's uncles.

In 1920, Anthony Isabella was joined in Cleveland by his younger brother A. Dominic, known to the family as "Mimi." The two brothers then formed Isabella Brothers Bakery, which continued for another decade to bake bread out of the building at 1258 West 69th. Meanwhile, Anthony's former partner, Robert Mazzarella, took over sole operation of the grocery store, later moving it in 1933 to the northeast corner of West 69th and Detroit where it became a neighborhood fixture for decades.

During this era of the early twentieth century, as the Italian population on the street grew to the point where virtually every person living there was either an Italian immigrant, or descended from or married to one, an incredible retail community developed on West 69th Street. Italian immigrants, whom historians have noted were more apt in this period to become first generation retail business owners than immigrants from other ethnic groups, opened up numerous shops on the approximately one-half mile stretch of residential street between Detroit Avenue and the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern railroad tracks. In the 1930 Cleveland city directory, ten such shops on the street were specifically listed, but the actual number was undoubtedly much higher than that. The 1930 federal census suggests (by identifying a number of residents as owning their own shops or stores) that perhaps as many as 30 such businesses were operating out of the seventy-plus houses and apartment buildings on the street. This number included up to ten barber shops, possibly six shoe-maker/repair stores, five groceries, two bakeries (Isabella Brothers and its neighborhood competitor Fiocca Brothers Bakery), two candy stores, and an assortment of other retail businesses--even a pool room. There had also at one time been several saloons on the street, but of course none were listed in either the census or city directory in 1930. Prohibition had driven them underground.

Isabella Brothers Bakery thrived in this retail community, not only selling its twenty different types of Italian bread to residents on West 69th and other nearby streets, but also making deliveries to homes in other Italian neighborhoods on both the west and east sides of town. Anthony Isabella's son Joseph, who in 2015 was still living on West 69th street, remembered those deliveries--how his father or uncle would drop him off in front of a house; how he would enter the house--regardless of whether the customer was home or not, and how he would place the customer's bread order in the bread box in the kitchen, and then leave.

With the growth of the bakery's business well underway, Anthony Isabella and his wife Carrie decided in 1930 to purchase a parcel of land up the street at 1370 West 69th and there build a new a modern new bakery building. The Isabella family continued to bake and deliver Italian bread from this new address well into the 1980s, as the next generation of Isabellas--Anthony's two sons, Louis and Joseph, gradually took over the reins of the business. But, as noted earlier, large chain grocery stores, eventually forced Isabella Brothers Bakery out of business. The historic West 69th Street bakery closed its doors for good in 1988. Today, the former bakery building is the home of Esperanza Threads.

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