Train Avenue on the west side of Cleveland is undoubtedly so named because it follows the tracks of the Big Four Railroad in a northeasterly direction from the old Stockyards near Clark Avenue and West 61st Street almost all the way to the Cuyahoga River. If you travel to Train Avenue's western end today, you'll see on the south side of the street—just before you get to the West 61st Street intersection—several old red brick buildings. Near the top of one are two granite stones, one carved with the word "Bottle" and the other with "Works." On the building next to that, you'll see another granite stone, this one carved with the year "1913." Whether you're a beer lover or not, give yourself a pat on the back, for you have just arrived at the place where the Standard Brewing Company once manufactured Erin Brew beer—one of the most popular beers in the history of Cleveland.

The Standard Brewing Company had its origins in the founding of the Kress-Weiss Brewing Company in 1902. In that year, Stephen S. Creadon, a west side saloonkeeper and second generation Irish-American, entered into an agreement with German immigrant brewer Andrew Kress and several investors to produce a weiss (light wheat) beer out of an old butcher shop located on the corner of Sackett and Louis (West 32nd) Streets, in today's Clark-Fulton neighborhood. Unfortunately, the venture faltered, and Creadon and Kress soon parted ways. In 1904, Creadon, who retained the lease to the brewery building, brought in new investors and Jaroslav Pavlik, a Czech immigrant brewer, and incorporated anew under the name of the Standard Brewing Company. Pavlik brewed lager beer—darker and heavier than weiss beer—and sales quickly took off. The following year, the growing firm recapitalized and moved to a larger facility, an old flour mill located on the north side of Train Avenue near the West 61st street intersection.

Just one year after moving to its new location, the young company faced a serious challenge to its continued existence. In November 1906, J. P. Kraus, a banker with First National Bank which had financed the new venture and controlled most of the company's stock, proposed that its directors approve a sale of their business to Cleveland and Sandusky Brewing Company. The latter was a large regional brewery which had been gobbling up local independent breweries in the Cleveland and Sandusky areas since 1897. Standard Brewing's directors—led by Creadon, whose experiences as a saloon keeper had perhaps persuaded him to stay away from conglomerates—voted to stay independent and rejected the proposed sale. However, Creadon now had to find new financing for his company and find it quickly. His search ended with John T. Feighan, a Forest City Savings and Trust Company banker, who, like Creadon, was a member of the west side Irish community. Feighan's bank, which since 1903 had been located in a new building on the southwest corner of Pearl (West 25th) Street and Detroit Avenue, was right across the street from Creadon's other business—his neighborhood saloon. Soon Feighan became not only a lender and director of Standard Brewing, but also an officer of the company, serving first as its treasurer and then later as its president after Creadon's death in 1921.

Creadon's savvy in the saloon business, Feighan's business acumen, and Pavlik's brewing skills: They were a winning combination. By 1913, new brewery buildings had gone up on both the north and south sides of Train Avenue and the company was now marketing Pavlik's lager under the name of Erin Brew, making it a favorite among Cleveland's west side Irish-American community. According to the company's 1914 corporate report, between the years 1906 and 1913 it almost doubled production, increasing annual output from 40,000 barrels to 75,000 in that period. As it approached the end of that decade, Standard Brewing Company had become one of Cleveland's largest and most successful independent breweries. Then, in 1919, the State of Ohio banned the sale and manufacture of liquor within the state, and one year after that the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was passed, ushering in the era of national Prohibition. Standard Brewing Company, like several other Cleveland breweries that survived Prohibition, converted its manufacturing facilities to the production of ginger ale and other soft drinks. When Prohibition ended in 1933, those breweries were able to quickly shift production back to beer. By May of that year, Standard Brewing Company was once again producing Erin Brew beer for a very thirsty consumer public.

In the 1940s, just after the end of World War II, Standard Brewing Company, under the leadership of John T. Feighan and George Creadon, son of founder Stephen Creadon, entered into a series of annual agreements to sponsor radio and TV broadcasts of Cleveland Indians baseball games. When the Indians won the World Series in 1948, Erin Brew beer went from being the favorite beer of Cleveland's Irish community to being one of the most loved beers in all of Cleveland. Responding to this increased demand, in 1950 the company built an extensive new bottling and canning facility just west of its earlier twentieth-century buildings on Train Avenue. Sadly, this would be the peak of Standard Brewing Company's successful operations in Cleveland.

The decade of the 1950s marked the beginning of the end for Cleveland's brewing industry, as a changing consumer public and improved transportation facilities promoted the success of large national breweries at the expense of smaller local breweries. Standard Brewing Company was one of the last of Cleveland's independent breweries to succumb, selling its brewery facilities to the F & M Schaefer Brewing Company of New York in 1961. Three years after that, Schaefer sold the facilities to C. Schmidt & Sons Inc., a large Philadelphia brewery. By the mid-1960s, Erin Brew was replaced by Standard Premium and soon the once most popular beer in Cleveland was just a memory.

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From 1937 to 1945, Cleveland Municipal Stadium—now the site of FirstEnergy Stadium—was home to the Cleveland Rams for 20 of their 35 National Football League home games in Cleveland, including their triumph in the 1945 NFL championship game as the first Cleveland team since the 1924 Bulldogs to win a pro football title. The stadium was also at the center of the Rams’ collision with the incoming Cleveland Browns, factoring in the Rams franchise's historic decision to depart for Los Angeles in January 1946. The move was not unlike the departure of Art Modell's Browns to Baltimore 50 years later, with Rams owner Daniel F. Reeves denying persistent rumors that the team might relocate before finally citing financial difficulties and a better stadium as his reasons for moving the team to another city.

Lawyer/businessman Homer H. Marshman and former Ohio State and NFL player Damon “Buzz” Wetzel, using seed money from a host of Cleveland investors, founded the Rams in 1936 in the American Football League, with the team playing all of their home games at League Park. But when the Rams fell just short of a championship in the financially shaky AFL, Marshman and Wetzel moved the franchise the following season to the far more established NFL. From 1937 through 1942, the Rams suffered six non-winning seasons under three head coaches as they rotated home games among Municipal Stadium, League Park, and Shaw Stadium.

In 1941 the Cleveland-based owners, fearful they might lose their investments if World War II were to shut down the NFL, sold the franchise to Reeves, a New York City grocery magnate, who immediately considered and then withdrew—in the face of civic opposition and the disapproval of the other NFL owners—a proposal to move the Rams to Boston. At one point Cleveland businessman Arthur “Mickey” McBride offered to buy the team from Reeves, who rejected the offer, causing McBride to found a Cleveland franchise in the emerging All-America Football Conference (AAFC) that later was to be named the Browns. Had McBride succeeded in buying the Rams, it is very possible the team might never have left Cleveland and that the Browns might never have entered the NFL.

In 1943, Reeves and general manager Charles “Chile” Walsh, with a war-shortened roster, and after watching attendance for Cleveland Indians baseball games plummet the previous summer, became the only NFL team to elect to suspend operations because of World War II, and sent multiple players to other teams in a dispersal draft. In 1944 Reeves and Walsh, quickly recognizing their mistake, returned the Rams to NFL play and selected quarterback Bob Waterfield of UCLA in the player draft.

In 1945 the Rams—featuring stars including Waterfield, end Jim Benton, lineman Riley “Rattlesnake” Matheson, and four other players who would jump to the Cleveland Browns the following year—surged to the Western Division title and their first-ever winning season at 9–1. The resulting championship game at Municipal Stadium on December 16, 1945 was among the more unusual in NFL history. With wintry weather in the forecast, Stadium groundskeepers covered the field with straw and laid down a tarp, which subsequently was covered with heavy snow as the week before the game wore on. On game day, as temperatures hovered near zero and snow piles and stacks of straw ringed the field and the Stadium floor’s perimeter, the Rams capitalized on two Waterfield touchdown passes and a freak safety by Washington Redskins quarterback Sammy Baugh to win the game and the NFL championship, 15–14.

After the game, Reeves jubilantly suggested he might expand the capacity of 23,000-seat League Park by 10,000 to create a more suitable home for his new champions. But with the Browns of the new AAFC planning to begin play in autumn 1946 at 78,000-seat Municipal Stadium, which McBride had offered to share with the Rams, Reeves instead announced on January 12, 1946—amid a citywide newspaper strike in Cleveland that lasted a month—that he would transfer the franchise 2,400 miles west to Los Angeles and its 103,000-seat Memorial Coliseum. Reeves’s fellow NFL owners initially opposed the move, arguing that the Rams would be situated an impractical 2,000-mile, 45-hour train ride from the next-closest teams in Chicago and Green Bay, Wisconsin; but Reeves countered that the move was necessary for the NFL to gain a foothold in California, where the rival AAFC’s San Francisco 49ers and Los Angeles Dons just were taking up residence.

Browns officials, advancing quickly to gain public favor now that they were assured of sole access to the Cleveland pro football market, positioned their new AAFC team as a way to forget the Rams. And indeed the Browns, after joining the NFL in 1950 following the disintegration of the AAFC, faced the Rams for the league championship three times in the six seasons from 1950 through 1955, with the Browns taking two. The Rams and the Browns paced pro football in attendance for years, yet their respective host cities were beginning to move in opposite directions. With Los Angeles the fifth-largest city in America at the time of the move and Cleveland just behind it as sixth largest, Los Angeles and the Sun Belt grew rapidly while Cleveland and the so-called Rust Belt continued to decline in population.

The Rams, in becoming the first major-league sports franchise west of the Mississippi, set off a westward migration of sports franchises that later included baseball’s Giants and Dodgers. The team also racially reintegrated the NFL in 1946 when it was forced to sign African American players Kenny Washington and Woody Strode as a condition for renting the publicly owned Los Angeles Coliseum. The Rams franchise was in some ways the “proto-Browns” for NFL football in Cleveland, and Reeves’s decision to relocate the team to L.A. was a falling domino whose implications continue to this day.

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Art Modell. The very mention of his name in Cleveland still stirs up vitriol. In 1963 he angered many by firing legendary Cleveland Browns coach Paul Brown, only two years after Art assumed principal ownership of the team. Most was forgiven in 1964 when the Browns won the NFL championship; but for decades after, Art was regularly criticized for meddling in on-field affairs. More bridges were burned in 1986 when the Ohio Supreme Court declared that Modell had enriched himself unfairly through the buying, operating and selling of Stadium Corporation, a company he founded to manage Municipal Stadium. Acrimony reached the stratosphere in 1995 when Art announced that he was moving the Browns to Baltimore.

The loss of the Browns — a blow from which many Cleveland sports fans have not fully recovered (even though the team name, colors, and traditions were salvaged when the NFL awarded Cleveland an expansion team in 1999) — is inseparable from the history of Jacobs Field, as the new stadium was known before Progressive Insurance acquired naming rights. That history is filled with perennial disappointments on the playing field for the Browns and Cleveland's professional baseball team, the Indians.

From the beginning of the 20th century, Cleveland Indians home games were played at League Park (also known as Dunn Field) at Lexington Avenue and East 66th Street. Beginning in 1932, some Indians games were staged in the newly built Cleveland Municipal Stadium on the city's lakefront. After 1947, the Indians used Municipal Stadium exclusively. Built as a multipurpose facility, Municipal Stadium began hosting football in 1946 — the year the Cleveland Browns came into being as part of the All-America Conference (the team joined the National Football League in 1950). By the early 1970s, the forty-year-old stadium was aging and needed major repairs, which the financially strapped City of Cleveland could not afford. In 1973, Art Modell agreed to lease the stadium and take responsibility for its upkeep. Over the years his Stadium Corporation made much more money from the stadium than it paid the city in rent, in part because Modell refused to share with the Indians any of the revenues from the 108 loges he added in the mid-1970s.

By the early 1980s, plans surfaced for a domed stadium that might house both the Indians and the NBA Cavaliers. At the same time, Cleveland State University was planning a convocation center for its basketball team, concerts, and university events. At Governor Richard Celeste's urging, the university agreed to study the feasibility of building a larger domed stadium that would serve CSU’s needs as well as those of Cleveland’s pro baseball and basketball teams. Researchers subsequently concluded that such a combination facility would lose money unless the Indians dramatically improved their dismal attendance. Advocates claimed a domed stadium would stimulate downtown revitalization and boost civic pride. Skeptics noted that the Silverdome in Pontiac, Michigan, and the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans had fallen short of expectations and required constant public subsidies to break even. Many believed that the Indians didn't deserve a new home and that any money spent on the franchise should be used to field a team worthy of attracting larger crowds. Unsurprisingly, voters refused to foot the bill—rejecting a property tax issue to fund the dome in May 1984.

The Indians had threatened to leave Cleveland before, in 1958 and 1964, prompting emergency campaigns to "save the Indians." And when owner F.J. “Steve” O'Neill died in 1983, the Cleveland Indians’ tenancy was once again under threat. Salvation came in the form of sibling developers Richard and David Jacobs, who acquired the team in 1986. The newly formed Greater Cleveland Domed Stadium Corporation began assembling land around the former site of the old Central Market, just south of Prospect Avenue at East 9th Street and Carnegie Avenue. But even though the Jacobs family pumped new life into the Indians franchise, Art Modell continued to demand a new 20-year lease on Municipal Stadium in return for his agreement to make much-needed improvements. Among the most serious problems were structural concerns, antiquated restrooms, a paucity of concession stands and poor field drainage. The situation was chaotic: Art was adamant. CSU was going forward with its convocation center. And now the Domed Stadium group was proposing two stadia: an open-air baseball field and an adjacent arena to lure the Cavaliers back from suburban Richfield.

In May 1990, voters approved a 15-year "sin tax" on sales of alcoholic beverages and cigarettes to help fund what was now being called the Gateway Sports and Entertainment Complex. Combined with Jacobs money, the new Jacobs Field was built in what has sometimes been called the "retro-modern ballpark" style first used a few years before for Baltimore's Oriole Park at Camden Yards. Like Oriole Park, Jacobs Field aimed not only to revive a city's fan base, it also sought to stimulate downtown development and build upon Cleveland's "comeback" under George Voinovich, Cleveland's counterpart to "messiah mayor" William Donald Schafer of Baltimore.

On April 4, 1994, President Bill Clinton threw the ceremonial first pitch at the new Jacobs Field. Roughly 18 months later, the Indians appeared in their first World Series since being swept by the New York Giants in 1954 (the Tribe lost the ’95 Series to Atlanta in six games). Jacobs Field enjoyed a record 455 consecutive sold-out home games between 1995 and 2001. That same period marked the demise and rebirth of the Cleveland Browns. Art Modell, who had steadfastly refused to participate in the effort to build the Gateway complex, incurred millions of dollars in revenue losses when the Indians departed for Jacobs Field. Already burdened with excessive debt, Art turned his back on the crumbling Municipal Stadium and reestablished the Browns as the Baltimore Ravens in 1996.

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Oghema Niagara of the band Pishqua, tribe Osauckee of the Algonquin nation, was born amid the thunderous sound of the Niagara on September 10, 1865, in the Hut of Two Kettle on the Tuscarora Indian Village in Lewistown, New York. Cleveland became his home during the first decade of the 20th century. He came to be known among white men as Chief Thunderwater and built an impressive career as a business leader and civic booster while maintaining his native identity.

As a member of the Pioneers Memorial Association, Chief Thunderwater led a long crusade to save the Erie Street Cemetery from relocation/desecration with a warning that "should the body of [Mesquakie chief and cemetery resident] Joc-o-Sot’s ever be touched, a terrible disaster would befall Cleveland." It would not be his last or even most famous prophecy. He also claimed, ex post facto, to have seen a vision in 1948, correctly predicting a World Series win by the Cleveland Indians baseball team. It is unknown whether the Chief was sincere or if, understanding the strange condition of native peoples in modern North America, he was merely playing the expected role of mystic. After all, Oghema Niagara had an agenda.

Born and raised during the final stages of the Indian Wars, he knew that adopting the ways of white men came with both opportunity and risk. Native Americans who entered white society were expected – and often forced – to abandon native cultural practices. Oghema Niagara learned that if he were to preserve his culture, he would need to understand what white Americans saw as important. It is likely his experience as a performer in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show gave him some idea of how to proceed. By showcasing (sometimes imagined or invented) native ways, he sought to promote the humanity of native people and demonstrate the value of traditional cultures. Along the way, he also made the social connections that would help establish him among the burgeoning Cleveland business class and lend him the influence he needed to serve as a voice for his people.

Chief Thunderwater began selling herbal cure-alls in Cleveland in the early 1900s. His products – including "Mohawk Penetrating Oil," "Thunderwater Tonic Bitters," "Seminole Sweet Gum Salve," and "Jee-wan-ga tea," – were supposedly derived from traditional medicines "from back in the days when bison trampled the prairie flowers in the dust." He ran his own Thunderwater & Rose company and served as president of the Preservative Cleaner Company, a manufacturer of polishes. He belonged to the Cleveland Business Men's Taft Club, made up of Republican Party supporters, and personally met Presidents Wilson and Taft. His 17 room dwelling at 6716 Baden Court served as his business headquarters. It also became a de facto inn for traveling Native Americans and an occasional home for those in need.

Oghema Niagara was Cleveland’s last known "sachem" and served as a founder and leader of the Supreme Council of Indian Tribes from 1917 to 1950. During that period, he addressed Indian affairs from his home and often travelled thousands of miles to personally diffuse situations throughout North America. He lectured vigorously in support of American Indian rights, leading the fight, for example, in United States, Ex Rel. Diabo vs. McCandless regarding the border between the U.S. and Canada and Indian acknowledgement thereof. Thundering against the "wrongs that the white man did unto his red people," Oghema Niagara led The Thunderwater Movement, which agitated for, among other things, unification of the tribes for the purpose of securing an independent Indian Nation roughly the size of Texas. In the latter half of his life, he was a consistent and controversial figure in the still-nascent movement for Native American rights, butting up against the repressive policies of the Indian Affairs office in the US and the Indian Department in Canada, as well as more assimilationist Native Americans.

By the time of his death on June 10th of 1950, Chief Thunderwater had become something of a ceremonial celebrity in Cleveland, at least in part thanks to the name of the local baseball team, for which he rooted near the end of his life ("May the best warriors win, as long as they are Cleveland's" he declared prior to the Indians' 1948 World Series win). Some claim he was the inspiration for the team's racially-insensitive Chief Wahoo mascot, an indignity imposed on the memory of a handful of other Native American Clevelanders, including baseball players Allie Reynolds and Louis Sockalexis. The Canadian government claimed he was not a Native American at all, but a "negro" conman named Henry Palmer – a charge his supporters (plausibly) considered a transparent fabrication meant to discredit the Pan-Indian Thunderwater Movement.

Chief Thunderwater, Henry Palmer, Oghema Niagara, is buried at Erie Street Cemetery, a place he helped preserve, alongside the unmoved grave of Chief Joc-o-Sot.

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They say "a hot dog is only as good as the mustard that goes on it," and who would have known this better than Cleveland's own mustard icon and food purveyor, Joseph Bertman? Bertman Original Park Mustard and the Bertman family name are synonymous with a Cleveland food tradition dating back to the 1920s. Its story is as much about Joseph Bertman the businessman, entrepreneur and humanitarian, as it is about the popular award-winning spicy brown concoction that he created.

Born in Lublin, Poland in 1902, Joseph Bertman was 6 when he immigrated to Cleveland. At only 13 years old, Bertman witnessed his father being shot to death by someone taking target practice at an old boxcar. (Bertman and his father were making deliveries for the family dry cleaning store at the time.) Following his father's death, the young Bertman became the sole support for his mother, four brothers and a sister. To keep the family together, he worked two jobs, seven days a week.

At 19, Bertman quit working for other people and set up his own business in pickle packing. He established Bertman Pickle Company in a little garage on E. 103rd Street. He would rise at 4 a.m. every day to begin peddling his products. In the mid 1930s, he established Joseph Bertman, Inc., a wholesale food business, first located at East 103rd Street and St. Clair Avenue, and then at 2180 East 76th Street. Bertman supplied food products to a variety of institutions, caterers, and ball parks, including League Park and later to Cleveland Municipal Stadium. In the period shortly after World War II, Bertman had exclusive distribution rights to many products. At one point, he was warehousing many items and running 22 trucks and a sales team in order to service his customers. He expanded his sales territory across an area that ran from Pittsburgh to Toledo, handling every type of food. Bertman became so expert in the business of buying foods and finding and importing food products that he began spending more time as a food broker than as a wholesaler. He traveled all over the world, finding crops and locating sources of critical foods and kept permanent apartments in New York and Miami as well as his Cleveland home. From hometown food giants Hector Boiardi (a.k.a. Chef Boyardee) to Vernon Stouffer, Joseph Bertman was a friend and mentor to many renowned people in Cleveland's food industry.

As for "The Good Stuff" that Cleveland Guardians fans have known and loved for generations, the recipe for Bertman Original Ball Park Mustard has remained almost unchanged over the years. The finest vinegar, brown mustard seed and spices are processed in a unique manner and never watered down. Since 1921, when Joseph Bertman invented it from his secret formula, his Original Ball Park Mustard has tantalized taste buds at Euclid Beach, League Park, the old Cleveland Municipal Stadium, and now at Progressive Field, too.

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The demolition of Cleveland Municipal Stadium officially began in November 1996 and was complete by the following spring. In the fall of 1995, Cleveland Browns owner Art Modell decided to move the city's football team to Baltimore. Angry fans began the demolition process themselves during the Browns' final home game in 1995, tearing out seats and taking other pieces of Municipal Stadium with them as souvenirs, knowing it might be their last time in the stadium. Part of Mayor Michael White's deal with the National Football League to bring an expansion team to the city included the building of a new stadium. The old stadium would be torn down to make way for a new lakefront facility. Coincidentally, Cleveland's Osborn Engineering Company, which, along with architectural firm Walker and Weeks, had been the main designer of Municipal Stadium, oversaw the demolition of the stadium that it had so proudly helped build more than 65 years earlier.

The construction of Cleveland Municipal Stadium was completed in 1931. It had a seating capacity of slightly more than 78,000, which gave the stadium the largest outdoor seating capacity of any stadium in the world. In 1928, Cleveland voters approved a $2.5 million bond to help pay for its construction, one of the first instances in which the public helped finance a sports stadium. The final cost of construction came in at around $3 million. On July 3, 1931, the first event at the stadium was held when heavyweight boxing champion Max Schmeling defeated Young Stribling. This also marked the first time that a heavyweight boxing bout had taken place in Cleveland.

The Cleveland Indians played their first game at the stadium on July 31, 1932, and played all of the 1933 season there, as well. Until 1947, however, the team played its weekday games at the smaller League Park, opting to play at Municipal Stadium only during weekends and holidays when a larger crowd could be assured. In 1948 and 1954 the stadium hosted Major League Baseball's World Series.

The Cleveland Browns began playing at Municipal Stadium in 1946 when they were a part of the All-American Football Conference (AAFC) -- a short-lived rival to the NFL. The Browns won all four of the AAFC's title games, three of which ('46, '48, '49) were held in Municipal Stadium. The Browns also had a perfect regular season (14-0) in 1948 and won the AAFC championship at the stadium that year by defeating the Buffalo Bills, 49-7.

After moving to the NFL in 1950, the team continued their success. The Browns played host to the NFL Championship Game (the precursor to the Super Bowl) in 1950, 1952, 1954, 1964, and 1968, winning each time except for the last. Today, the new Cleveland Browns Stadium (opened in 1999) sits on the site of Municipal Stadium.

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The construction of the massive, 70,000-seat Cleveland Municipal Stadium in the 1930s spelled the beginning of the end for a much older stadium— League Park. This ballpark was constructed in 1891 east of downtown in Cleveland's Hough neighborhood at Dunham Street (East 66th) between Linwood and Lexington Avenues. Lexington Avenue trolley-line operator Frank Robison shoehorned the ballpark into the residential neighborhood, conveniently generating revenues from fares and game tickets. Its tight quarters and restrictive right-field fence to fit the property gave rise to “pinball” baseball, leaving outfielders never knowing where the ball would ricochet. Close-by homes featured signs advertising local businesses for home-run promotions. Despite renovations in 1910 that replaced the original wood with concrete and steel, expanding capacity to over 20,000, League Park was deemed to be too small and antiquated for professional baseball after Municipal Stadium opened. 

League Park began its run as the home of the Cleveland Spiders who became the Indians in what was the site of the 1920 World Series, in which the Indians beat the Brooklyn Dodgers for their first championship. From 1916 to 1927, as a perquisite of owning the team, Jim Dunn changed the name to Dunn Field, but thereafter the name reverted to League Park. Negro League baseball teams also thrived at League Park from the mid-1930s, culminating with the Cleveland Buckeyes winning the the Negro American League World Series in 1945. The Indians played their last game at League Park in 1946, but for ten years prior to that they had been playing weekend and holiday games at the bigger stadium on the lakefront. During its heyday, the Park hosted MLB’s best—manager Tris Speaker, hitter Ty Cobb, slugger Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, infamous shoeless Joe Jackson, shortstop Ray Chapman, and champion Bob Feller, among others. Joe DiMaggio finalized his 56-game hitting streak at the Park in 1941; the streak ended the next day at Muny Stadium. The Indians initially achieved success after departing League Park, but the team's fortunes soon declined. The last thirty years or so of the Indians' tenure at Municipal Stadium were marked by losing seasons and tens of thousands of empty seats until their move to Jacobs Field in the mid-1990s and re-emergence of winning ways.

Though usually remembered for baseball, League Park also hosted a wider variety of sporting events. In the second and third decades of the 20th century, boxing drew crowds in the mild weather months to see Clevelander Johnny Kilbane defend his titles at the Park. Local high school football first appeared at the Park in 1896 when Central High met University School in a championship contest. More games were hosted over the years, including several Thanksgiving Day games between Cathedral Latin and St. Ignatius. College football also came calling to the facility between 1920 and 1949. The Big Four League of Western Reserve, Case Tech, John Carroll, and Baldwin Wallace used League Park regularly, hosting visiting teams from Ohio State, Ohio U., and others. The 1945 NFL champion Cleveland Rams, the last of a series of Cleveland professional football teams predating the Browns, also called League Park home between 1916 and 1950. Much of the stadium was demolished in 1952, when the site became a public park. However, a few remnants, including the baseball diamond itself, still stand today.

In 2002 the last of the grandstand structure was demolished. Cleveland city councilwoman Fannie Lewis mobilized local interest in capturing and preserving memories of the glory days of the stadium, and in revitalizing the surrounding neighborhood. Osborn Engineering, the firm that managed the 1910 refurbishment, provided design work for a renewed League Park recreation area. The Baseball Heritage Museum has been located at League Park since 2014. The Museum is dedicated to preserving the artifacts and stories of baseball’s past with a special focus on diversity in the sport; the stories of challenge and triumph intrinsic in the stories of the Negro Leagues and other underserved demographics in the sport. “General programming, youth educational offerings, community outreach and other initiatives are driven by the rich repository of life lessons in these stories. The Museum is also a driver of Cleveland’s sense of place, by continuously working to become a center of neighborhood life and a destination location for baseball and history lovers from across the city and across the country.”

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