St. Luke’s Hospital was founded on Woodland Avenue in 1894 as Cleveland General Hospital. Soon after being renamed St. Luke's in 1906, the hospital spent two decades on Carnegie Avenue before moving in 1927 to a much larger building on Shaker Boulevard in the Buckeye neighborhood that was styled like Independence Hall, where the founding fathers declared “All men are created equal.” The history of St. Luke’s does not match the architectural symbolism of the building as there are many cases of African American patients and staff being mistreated during the 1950s and 1960s. Some Black patients were physically assaulted, went untreated, or were segregated. St. Luke’s questionable history in its dealings with African American patients and staff remains relevant as events today highlight persistent issues that echo those that African Americans experienced decades ago.
The mistreatment of African American patients at St. Luke’s Hospital was common throughout the 1950s. For example, in 1957 a thirteen-year-old girl injured in a car accident was brought to St. Luke’s for medical attention. She was unconscious, but nurses and a doctor told her mother to take her home because, they insisted, she was “drunk.” The girl remained in an unconscious state for several days; however, a private doctor treated her at home. After she did not regain consciousness she was brought back to St. Luke’s, which now admitted her. The girl had to receive further treatment at home and the hospital for more than a year after the accident. She was never able to live a normal life after the accident and poor care from St. Luke’s.
Poor treatment of African American patients continued and in the early part of August 1957, St. Luke’s hospital staff rolled a white patient into an African American ward; however, the white patient had been dead for over a half hour. The woman had received a colostomy right before her death which produced a strong odor. While she was in a different ward, white patients complained about the smell. In an effort to appease white patients, hospital staff moved her to an African American ward, where they left her for over four hours. One patient said, “I’ll bet they wouldn’t bring an alive woman in here and leave her for four or five hours. If they don’t want to integrate the living patients then we don’t want integration because of somebody’s death. Especially when it's a case like this.” Later it became known that there was an empty room where the body could have been placed, but it was on the other side of the hospital.
Another incident, which involved another Black woman, Louise Ottrix, and her daughter underscores the poor treatment of African Americans. Ottrix took her four-month-old baby to St. Luke’s because the baby had fallen and hurt her head. Once Ottrix arrived her information was taken and she was told to wait. According to Ottrix she waited for about twenty-five minutes and then asked if her child could be seen immediately. She was told no and that she would have to wait her turn. After being denied timely service, she decided to leave and went to St. Vincent’s Charity Hospital where the baby was seen immediately. The baby had suffered from a skull fracture.
Protests erupted in February 1963 as a response to the treatment that African Americans received during the 1950s and '60s. The Cleveland Chapter of Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) charged St. Luke’s Hospital with segregating its patients. Arthur Evans, CORE’s protest committee chairman, led a protest where forty people were present with pickets on February 22, 1963. The protests involved people of various backgrounds, including white people. The protesters, most of whom carried posters denouncing segregation policies, circled the entrance of the hospital.
Not only did people protest outside St. Luke’s but prayer pilgrimages were held outside the hospital as well. People from CORE, the NAACP, Job Seekers, Freedom Fighters, and the Afro-American Institute participated in the prayers outside St. Luke’s. Those in attendance prayed to God that St. Luke’s would end its discrimination against those of different races, creeds, or colors. Many people who passed by joined in on the prayer. After the prayers were done people began to hold a traditional protest. Towards the end of March of 1963, CORE ended its protests at St. Luke’s Hospital as its leaders saw improved conditions of integration. St. Luke’s agreed to desegregate its wards and semi-private rooms.
St. Luke’s was not the only hospital during the 1960s to mistreat African American or minority patients. According to medical historian Rosemary Stevens, Blacks all across the country often received meager medical care during the 1960s. Poor African American patients often identified the impersonality and rudeness of large hospitals like St. Luke’s as the reason they avoided seeking health care.
St. Luke’s continued to exhibit problems in its treatment of African American patients and employees. During 1967 four hundred non-professional employees went on strike or tried to unionize. Only two of them were white. Joseph E. Murphy, who was in charge of the unionization push and the strike, believed that negotiations would have been easier if more members were white. Indeed, St. Luke’s was insensitive to its African American workers’ calls for pay increases. The NAACP sent volunteers to join the protests, and Congressman Michael A. Feighan called upon the St. Luke’s administration to recognize Local 47, Building Service and Maintenance Union.
Cleveland Mayor Carl Stokes worked hard to resolve the situation between Local 47 and St. Luke’s; however, by December 1967 he believed that he had “exhausted the maximum resources” of his office. Stokes also said that he could not force either the union or St. Luke’s to the table; however, he wanted to “bring about a settlement amicably and agreeable to all.”
The strike at St. Luke’s would continue to gain more and more attention as it stretched into the early months of 1968. Rev. Randel T. Osborn, an aide to Martin Luther King Jr., announced a plan to apply pressure on St. Luke’s through Operation Breadbasket. The goal of Operation Breadbasket was to increase African American employment across the country. Not long after Rev. Osborn announced pressure would be applied a deal was reached between Local 47 and St. Luke’s. On March 8, 1968, Mayor Stokes announced that the strike was over. The eleven-month strike ended with Local 47 being recognized as a bargaining agent with four hundred non-professional employees. Negotiations on wages and working conditions began soon thereafter.
St. Luke’s troubled past regarding its dealings with African American patients and employees have only become more relevant in today’s world. The troubles that Black patients and employees faced at St. Luke’s such as mistreatment, segregation, poor working conditions, and poor pay only touch the surface of what many African Americans experienced during the 1950s and 1960s and still face today.
]]>You can't walk through downtown Cleveland today without noticing and marveling at the restoration of the beautiful Scofield building, constructed in 1902 on the southwest corner of Euclid Avenue and East Ninth Street. And who hasn't visited Public Square without noticing the imposing 125-foot tall Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument there, dedicated in 1894 to Cleveland's Civil War heroes. But the magnificent mansion of the man who designed these two iconic Cleveland landmarks? Sitting for the last 117 years at 2438 Mapleside Road in the city's Buckeye-Woodhill neighborhood, hardly anyone notices it today. And, sadly, it is slowly crumbling into ruins.
Levi Tucker Scofield, the man who designed the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument and built the Scofield Building, as well as the mansion on Mapleside Road, was a third-generation Clevelander, born in 1842 on Walnut Street, near today's downtown intersection of East Ninth and Superior Avenue. His grandfather Benjamin, a carpenter, came to Cleveland from the state of New York in 1816, and built some of the early-era buildings in what is now the city's downtown. Levi's father William followed in the family business, likewise becoming a carpenter and also a builder who contributed to the early building up of downtown Cleveland. In the 1850s, William purchased property on the southwest corner of Erie (East Ninth) and Euclid Avenue, and in about 1861 built a boarding house there, which also served as his family's residence. Growing up in such a family, it is not surprising that Levi decided to become an architect.
When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Levi Scofield, just 19 years old, left Cleveland to fight for the North. He joined the 103rd Regiment as a private, but was soon commissioned a second lieutenant. By the War's end, he had risen to the rank of Captain. In 1865, he returned to Cleveland and began his career as an architect. His work covered a wide range of building types. He designed mansions for Euclid Avenue millionaires. He also designed school buildings--including the Central High School building on Wilson Avenue (East 55th Street) in 1877. He was an early architect of penitentiary buildings, creating the plans for the Athens, Ohio Lunatic Asylum (1868)--today, housing the Kennedy Museum of Art at Ohio University, the North Carolina State Penitentiary (1870), and the Ohio State Reformatory at Mansfield (1886). Scofield also designed monuments--not just the famous Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument on Cleveland Public Square (1894), but also--and perhaps just as important to his national reputation, the 'These Are My Jewels' monument for the State of Ohio that was featured at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. And, of course, he designed office buildings, including the downtown Scofield Building.
In the 1890s, as the Euclid Avenue corridor in downtown Cleveland was transforming into a commercial district, Levi Scofield decided to move from what had been his boyhood neighborhood of Erie (East Ninth) Street and Euclid Avenue, to the "country"--the southeast side of Cleveland, near today's intersection of Quincy Avenue and Woodhill Road. There on a bluff overlooking the Fairmount Reservoir--which was then a picturesque body of water, he purchased six plus acres of land and designed and built a beautiful residence for his family. The three-story, stone-facade Victorian style house with over 6,000 square feet of living space was completed in 1898. Scofield resided there until his death in 1917.
After the death of Levi Scofield, his family remained in the house until 1925, when it was sold to the Cleveland Catholic Diocese. For the next thirty years, the Scofield mansion served as a chapel, a mission headquarters, and as a convent for the Sisters of the Most Holy Trinity. In 1955, the Sisters sold the property, and the mansion became a nursing home--first Mapleside Nursing and then Baldwin Manor, until approximately 1990, when it closed. Since that time, the mansion has been vacant and has experienced neglect and disrepair. Now nearly 120 years old, the Levi Scofield mansion is on the brink of demolition. There has been much talk in recent years about the Opportunity Corridor and what that new roadway might bring to the Buckeye-Woodhill neighborhood on Cleveland's southeast side, where this mansion still stands. Whether the new corridor will be built in time to bring new opportunity to the historic Levi Scofield Mansion, though, is anyone's guess.
]]>On Sunday, August 2, 1891, the congregation of Hungarian (Magyar) and Slovak parishioners gathered in St. Ladislas Roman Catholic Church on the southeast side of Cleveland for mass. Father John Martvon, the church's Slovak pastor, began the mass in Latin, but when the time arrived for him to give his sermon, he began to speak in Slovak. This touched off a riot at the church. The Hungarian parishioners began cursing the priest, which drew an angry response from the Slovak parishioners. Then, someone yelled, "Kill the Slav priest!" Soon, Slovaks and Hungarians were battling one another in the church, while one of the Slovaks, Jacob Gruss, stood by the altar in front of Father Martvon, brandishing a pistol to keep the threatening Hungarians from harming the priest. Eventually, Cleveland police officers from the nearby Fifth Precinct arrived on the scene and dispersed the crowd before anyone was seriously injured.
The riot at St. Ladislas on August 2, 1891, was the opening salvo in a battle for control of the church which had been built just two years earlier in 1889. The church had been built to serve Roman Catholic immigrants from Hungary—primarily Magyars and Slovaks, who had been moving to the southeast side of Cleveland—near the iron works and other factories, since the early 1880s. While these two ethnic groups were from the same country and shared the same religious faith, they had animosity towards one another as the result of a Hungarian nationalist policy known as "Magyarization," which sought to suppress the language, culture and identity of Slovak and other non-Magyar ethnics living in Hungary.
Throughout the month of August 1891, Slovaks and Magyars continued to wage their battle. The Cleveland police officers who staffed the Fifth precinct station remained on high alert throughout the month, especially after another riot broke out in front of Father Martvon's residence on South Woodland Avenue (Buckeye Road) on August 15. While Magyar parish leaders deplored the violence, they hired two prominent Cleveland attorneys--Martin A. Foran, a former county prosecutor and former congressman, and Joseph C. Bloch, a Jewish lawyer born in Hungary, in an attempt to convince the Cleveland Catholic diocese to award the church to the Hungarians and to instruct the Slovaks to build another church somewhere else.
In the twelve day period between August 6 and August 18, at least four meetings were held in which the warring ethnic groups yelled at each other, pleaded with each other, and tried to convince each other to agree to a deal which would give one or the other exclusive control of the church. In the end, the advantage was with the Slovaks. While the Hungarians had hired two of Cleveland's best attorneys to argue their case, the Slovaks, who had not hired legal counsel, instead relied upon their parish priest Father Martvon and Our Lady of Lourdes pastor Stephen Furdek, both Slovak immigrants, to argue their case to the diocese. It was a winning strategy. The Hungarians saw that the Diocese was not going to award them St. Ladislas so they settled with the Slovaks. They relinquished their claim to the church and built a new church, St. Elizabeth of Hungary, two blocks away. The Slovaks paid the departing Magyars $1000 and St. Ladislas officially became Cleveland's first Slovak Roman Catholic Church.
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