Samuel L. Mather, the grandson of one of the founding fathers of the Connecticut Land Company whose investment had led to the establishment of Cleveland, co-founded the iron-ore mining and shipping firm of Pickands, Mather & Co. in 1883, which helped him amass a new fortune on top of his already formidable wealth. Pickands Mather had kept offices for only a short time in the Perry-Payne Building on Superior Avenue when Mather commissioned the Chicago architectural firm of Burnham & Root (already known locally for its Society for Savings Building) to design a headquarters office building on land that he and John Hay had purchased on the northwest corner of Superior and Water Street (now W. 9th).

The aptly named Western Reserve Building occupied a triangular parcel on the crest of a steep hill descending into the flats along the river. The land had once been home to the Carter Tavern, a hewn-log inn that early Western Reserve of Connecticut settler Lorenzo Carter had built in 1803. Following Carter's death in 1814, Phineas Shepard operated the inn for an unknown span of time, and it was the site of the meeting in 1816 that organized Trinity Parish, later Trinity Episcopal Cathedral. After it closed, deeds show that Carter's children Alonzo and Laura sold the land to the Oviatt family in two transactions in 1825 and 1830. By 1828, the Oviatts had replaced the old two-story inn with a three-story brick building that stood until Orson M. Oviatt razed it for a new four-story commercial block called the Franklin Buildings in 1835. The Franklin Buildings housed various dry-goods houses and professional offices, including the men's clothing store of George A. Davis, who owned the block from 1851 until his death ten years later.

The Franklin Buildings later housed Western Union Telegraph Company, which added "innumerable adornments of fencing and wires which surmount[ed] the electric ridden structure," according to an account in the Plain Dealer in 1886. Three years later, Hay and Mather, the executors of Amasa Stone's estate, purchased the property in the estate's name and set out to redevelop it. (Hay's and Mather's wives Clara and Flora were Stone's daughters.) Following on the heels of the Perry-Payne Building, the announcement of a new building to replace the Western Union block was a welcome news to those who feared Euclid Avenue's inroads. As the Plain Dealer pointed out in 1889, "Enough is now promised in the way of new buildings to save the street from becoming what it had at one time threatened to do—a street for banks and the wholesale trade plentifully mixed up with saloons."

Mather’s new eight-story pressed-brick and sandstone Western Reserve Building, which opened in 1892, is considered a transitional skyscraper. Like Burnham & Root’s Monadnock Building in Chicago and Cudell & Richardson's Perry-Payne Building, it had traditional load-bearing masonry exterior walls but also incorporated some interior steel framing, a recent innovation. On the ground floor, the Western Reserve Building featured pink sandstone piers capped by Romanesque capitals and a large Romanesque arch framing its Water Street entrance. Its upper floors had either rectangular, segment arch, or full arch windows, some of them in oriel bays. Samuel Mather had an elaborate cherry-paneled office inside. 

In addition to Pickands Mather, the Western Reserve Building housed American Steel & Wire, Cleveland-Cliffs Iron, Island Creek Coal, and other shipping, mining, and manufacturing concerns. The building’s uses reflected business leaders’ desire to locate offices in the Wholesale District (later renamed the Warehouse District) close to Cleveland’s harbor. The riverside location was also attractive to the U.S. Weather Bureau. On May 1, 1892, Cleveland’s weather observatory and signal station opened there, 135 feet above the street, giving it a commanding view of the lake and river. From this lofty perch, signalman and weather observer W. B. Stockman hoisted flags to alert ship captains and downtown pedestrians to impending changes in the weather. The station had previously operated on top of the six-story Wilshire Block on Superior Avenue a block and a half west of Public Square. Now it was another beneficiary of Mather’s eagerness to be closer to the harbor.

In 1903, the Western Reserve Building was expanded northward along Water Street with an interior lightwell that may have drawn inspiration from Burnham & Root’s Rookery Building in Chicago or perhaps from a similar feature inside the Perry-Payne Building. The expansion increased the original building's size by about 40 percent. The building flourished into the 1920s, but like other buildings west of Public Square, it faced increasing competition from newer ones that rose to the east along Euclid Avenue. In 1924, Mather sold his interest in the Western Reserve Building to the Union Lennox Company, a firm named for the mammoth Union Trust Building that had recently replaced the Lennox Building on the northeast corner of Euclid and East 9th. Soon after, Pickands Mather moved its headquarters into the Union Trust Building. With the loss of its identity as a hub of the city's iron-ore business and the rise of newer, larger skyscrapers, the Western Reserve Building's future was in question.

The Western Reserve Building changed hands twice during World War II and, under Louis E. Goldman, it underwent a modernization in 1947 that covered its Romanesque arch entrance with a blocky granite façade. Despite this effort to renew its appeal, over the next three decades, the building stood sentinel over a part of downtown that was gradually decaying and receding in civic importance. Toward the end of that time, Goldman was no longer able to attract tenants, so the building sat mostly vacant. The exception to the rule was the opening in 1970 of the Cleveland Urban Learning Community, an experiment by St. Ignatius High School that took advantage of cheap rent to place its headquarters in the Western Reserve Building.

The Cuyahoga River’s east bank had been a natural place for Samuel Mather to envision an office building housing his iron mining and shipping business in the early 1890s. Although seemingly less natural, Herbert W. Strawbridge, chairman of the Higbee Company department store, felt a similar pull toward the western edge of the derelict Warehouse District nine decades later. Several years earlier, Strawbridge had visited San Francisco’s Ghirardelli Square, a shopping, dining, and entertainment complex filling the shell of its namesake chocolate manufacturer’s former factory. As Higbee’s downtown store sales slipped, Strawbridge recalled Ghirardelli Square. Then he hatched a daring plan to buy a swath of property overlooking the river and create a similar venue. Settlers’ Landing, as it would be named, would evoke Cleveland’s start along its river and, like Ghirardelli Square, reuse existing buildings as much as possible. More importantly, Strawbridge reasoned, Settlers’ Landing could draw large numbers of tourists and suburbanites back to a sagging downtown—and hopefully to Higbee’s.

Among the properties that the newly formed Higbee Development Corporation bought through agent John H. Bustamante was the Western Reserve Building, which Goldman was doubtless thrilled to unload in 1973. Strawbridge then hired Lawrence Halprin, the man behind Ghirardelli Square, to plan Settlers’ Landing. Higbee Development sank $4.5 million into a full renovation of the Western Reserve Building in 1974-76. The results drew a mixed response locally. Some decried the sandblasting that pitted the delicate sandstone facade. Others looked askance at the similarly insensitive treatment of the building’s interior. To avoid removing any leasable space, Higbee Development enclosed the historic lightwell to add an interior fire escape, heating and cooling ducts, and new restrooms on each floor. Halprin’s designer Angela Tzvetin created a modern lobby with “domed brick vaults” and spiderweb-like iron designs between their pillars, leading one architectural critic to dub the “corny” concept “early wine cellar.” The same critic went so far as to suggest that the Western Reserve Building was “second-rate Burnham and Root” that would have been better off bulldozed.

When the Western Reserve Building reopened in 1976, it seemed that the building had a new relevance as the Flats transitioned from maritime to leisure uses, but renewal was slow and difficult. Higbee’s operated a sandwich shop off the lobby while it searched (ultimately in vain) for a full-service restaurant to assume the space. At the time of the opening, only 1,220 of 53,840 square feet of office space was leased. Then Higbee’s plans for Settlers’ Landing collapsed after a major fire consumed some of the buildings the company had hoped to renovate. Despite efforts to promote the building, including hosting an exhibit and slideshow as part of the 1977 sesquicentennial of the opening of the Ohio Canal, the Western Reserve Building underperformed expectations. Coupled with Higbee’s expenses from opening new stores at Euclid Square and Randall Park malls, its renovation of Pickands Mather’s onetime headquarters building contributed to record quarterly losses that year. By 1981, the building was reportedly at 97 percent occupancy, but Higbee’s needed an infusion of cash, so it sold the building to another syndicate headed by developer John Ferchill.

Though Settlers’ Landing had flopped, the Flats and Warehouse District boomed in the 1980s. Nightspots, restaurants, and loft apartment conversions reinvigorated an area that earlier downtown planners had largely forsaken in their fixation on Erieview. It was too late for Higbee’s, which sold out to Youngstown developer Edward J. DeBartolo and the Little Rock-based Dillard’s chain in 1987 (though the Higbee’s name survived another five years). As for the Western Reserve Building, it flourished anew. Among the firms based there was Those Characters from Cleveland (now CloudCo Entertainment), a subsidiary of Cleveland-based American Greetings that formed in 1981 to develop and license characters developed by the card company such as Holly Hobbie and Strawberry Shortcake. That year saw Cleveland artist Elena Kucharik’s creation of the Care Bears, making the Western Reserve Building the birthplace of one of the 1980s’ popular culture icons.

Ferchill and his partners undertook yet another renovation in 1990 and built an eight-story addition to the north that doubled the size of the 1892/1903 building. The sandstone- and microcotta-faced addition featured a new arched entry, while the syndicate uncovered and restored the long-hidden one on the original building. After initial success, the enlarged building gradually languished again. By 2016, it was two-thirds vacant and in foreclosure, leading Ferchill to sell it the following year to WRB Partners (comprised of developer Fred Geis, real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield, and others). During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Western Reserve Building clung to its original function as an office building in a new era marked by the loss of downtown office-based work and a spate of office to residential conversions. In addition to attracting a global co-working company, WRB Partners added to its amenity-driven approach to combatting the loss of traditional dedicated office work by doing what Higbee’s had tried and failed to do fifty years earlier: entice a restaurant operator. In 2023, the popular Cleveland Heights-based Luna Bakery opened its third cafe on the building’s ground floor.

For more (including 19 images) view the original article

On the one hand, it was a bucolic, glass-walled, red-meat Mecca with unobstructed water and city views. On the other hand, both the Cuyahoga River and the city of Cleveland were increasingly dark, smelly and bereft of life. Moreover, travel to and from the restaurant was the kind of creepy, nail-biting experience that only a golem could love: a dim and bumpy ride to an isolated peninsula in the Flats.

Such were the contradictions that, by the middle of the 20th century, defined Jim’s Steak House. But through most of the restaurant’s life, negatives and setbacks hardly seemed to matter. In fact, in the eight years after its founding in 1930—when Cleveland and the Flats were still bustling—Jim’s Steak House served 280,000 steaks. Untold thousands of quality meals would follow until the eatery finally shut down in 1997.

“Jim” was James Kerkles, a Greek immigrant who arrived in the US in 1905. In 1930 he and his wife Hilda opened their restaurant on West 9th Street. They relocated to the Flats’ famous Collision Bend within a year, occupying a building that previously housed the Lumberman’s Club restaurant. (Ironically, the Lumberman’s Club had just moved downtown.) Jim and Hilda’s timing was ideal: The Eagle Street Bridge had just opened across the street and visitors would be able to view the newly completed Terminal Tower across the river. But like the two arteries leading to Jim’s (Scranton and Carter Roads) there were plenty of potholes ahead. On June 15, 1939, Kerkles died at the age of 53. From that point on, Jim’s Steak House would, in effect, be Hilda’s Steak House. The following year, the decision was made to make Collision Bend more navigable, which necessitated the restaurant’s demolition.

The new Jim’s opened within two years, only a few dozen feet southwest of the previous location. Accordingly, its address jumped from 1782 Scranton to 1800 Scranton. Such progress! Hilda later remarried and by the end of World War II she and her nephew Ray Rockey were the meat and potatoes of Jim’s Steak House. Hilda managed the money—keeping the restaurant in the black while hiring only white women as waitresses and clothing them in all-white uniforms. Ray handled most of the day-to-day operations, working constantly and living in an apartment above the restaurant. "It's like taking care of a baby that never grows up," Rockey once said.

The formula worked: Blue collars from the Flats, white collars from downtown and wet collars from the river and nearby fire station filled Jim’s during the day. At night couples, partiers and glitterati swilled Johnny Walker Black ($0.75 in 1950) and devoured strip steaks ($4.50 in 1950). The Goodtime ferried diners to and from Cleveland Indians games. Heavy food was de rigueur: red meat, no soup, no salad (except head lettuce) and no vegetables except onions (which were fried). 300 to 400 people was a decent day’s attendance.

In the 1960s the building was remodeled, with giant glass windows offering diners a more panoramic view of the city. Weeping willows and birch trees (planted over the years by Hilda) added to the ambience.

Hilda died in 1974 at age 75 and Ray Rockey assumed full control of what was still a thriving operation. But like graffiti emblazoned across the Flats, the writing was on the wall, and a lot of it spelled “competition.” By the late 1970s myriad entertainment options had popped up on both the East and West Banks. The Flats had always had niche bars and eateries (Pirates Alley, Otto’s Grotto, Harbor Inn, Flat Iron Café), but this was different: The area actually was becoming a destination of choice—not just for pubby drinking and dining joints like Fagan’s and the Cleveland Crate and Trucking Company but for high-end eateries such as the Watermark and Sammy’s.

The worst body blow landed in 1991 when the city closed the Eagle Avenue lift bridge for a two-year renovation. In a lawsuit, Ray Rockey claimed that, as a result, Jim’s lost 65 percent of its business. Rockey died in 1995 at the age of 71, three years before the Ohio State Supreme Court awarded the restaurant $483,000 in compensation. By that time the bridge had reopened (1993) but Jim’s had shut down (1997). The bridge closed for good in 2005. New occupants of the restaurant space—the River House, the Aqua club, the Mega Nightclub—soldiered on until 2011 when the building was demolished.

Readers responded en masse to a May 2020 Cleveland.com article on Jim’s Steak House. Virtually everyone heaped praise on the restaurant. However, the most vivid account may have come from Bruce Tyler in Cleveland Heights who recalled, “As restless 9-year-olds, [we] ran out back on the lawn toward the river before the food arrived. We watched in awe as an enormous ore boat negotiated the tight river bend. The water was an unhealthy shade of brown, with some iridescence on the surface, and rising bubbles would stretch a bit before they popped, as if trapped in goo. I thought about this sight last year when we kayaked on the river around the same location and saw blue water, not brown, and saw herons in the shallows. Thank you environmentalists everywhere.”

For more (including 8 images) view the original article

The S. S. Canadiana was originally built in 1910 to ferry passengers from Buffalo, New York to the Crystal Beach Amusement Park in Crystal Beach, Ontario. It made the circuit up to six times a day for over 40 years. However, by the 1950s revenue declined. Hastening its retirement, a fight broke out onboard the Canadiana on May 30, 1956. Dubbed “The Crystal Beach Boat Race Riot”, the initial fight between teenagers started two days earlier at Crystal Beach Amusement Park before eventually continuing onto the Canadiana’s voyage back to Buffalo. The Canadiana retired from the Crystal Beach circuit later that year.

After retirement, the ship was eventually bought by Jim Vinci of Cleveland in June 1968 for $3,600. Jim Vinci had opened his restaurant, Diamond Jim’s, in the Flats two years prior in 1966. Despite a bomb going off next to Vinci’s car at the restaurant in 1967, Vinci shrugged it off, intent on building a nightlife empire in the Flats. He claimed the bomb was a case of mistaken identity and kept expanding. His next step was the conversion of the Canadiana into a floating restaurant.

After putting a reported $500,000 into the boat’s restoration, Vinci cited a heart attack and difficulty meeting city building codes for the eventual stagnation of the Canadiana’s conversion. Finally, around 11am on February 17, 1982, the Canadiana sank to the bottom of the Cuyahoga River at its mooring at West 3rd Street and Stones Levee. Water reached all the way up to the first deck of the three-deck ship. It was apparently quite the spectacle. The Cleveland Plain Dealer quoted a customer of Jim’s Steakhouse who, having watched the scene unfold over lunch, exclaimed, “This is like Disneyland. Let’s refloat the ship tonight and do it all over tomorrow.”

When asked what he thought had caused the boat to sink, Vinci said that the Cleveland Electric Illuminating Co. was dumping potash into the river which harmed the structural integrity of the ship. In response, CEI said that they did not use potash nor was potash used in producing electricity. Whatever the cause, the Canadiana was never to become a Flats destination.

For the next two months the ship sat at the bottom of the Cuyahoga River while Vinci insisted he would soon begin salvaging the boat. However, by April, no attempts had been made and the situation was becoming dangerous. Collision Bend, near where the boat sat, necessitated shippers to make an almost 90-degree turn when navigating the river. The power needed to make that turn was said to be able to generate enough suction on the Canadiana that it might drag it out into the river creating a dangerous navigational hazard. Vinci was unable to come up with the $250,000 to move the ship and relinquished it to the Army Corps of Engineers to begin the long process of refloating and moving the boat. Finally, on June 21, 1983, over a year after it had originally sunk, the Canadiana left Cleveland for good when it was towed to Ashtabula to be refurbished by the “Friends of the Canadiana.”

Two years after the Canadiana left Cleveland, its former owner, Jim Vinci, and his assistant Edward Doubler, were found shot in the back of the head in Diamond Jim’s on March 29, 1985. There were no signs of a break-in and no cash or valuables had been stolen. David L. Hicks, a detective at the scene, was quoted in the Cleveland Plain Dealer saying, “It was definitely a hit on Vinci.” The case was never solved.

As for the Canadiana, it was eventually stripped for restoration in 1988 and towed to Port Colborne, Ontario, about ten miles west of Crystal Beach, for drydocking. By 2004 the restoration project had run out of funds and the ship was scrapped. Parts of the Canadiana were saved including the engine, which was displayed at the 50th anniversary rally of the Western New York Gas & Steam Engine Association, as well as some of the interior such as a wooden buffet now at the Port Colborne Historical and Marine Museum.

For more (including 5 images) view the original article

As the Ohio-Erie Canal, built between 1828 and 1832, was nearing completion, many in Cleveland caught "canal fever" and began to believe that their town was so strategically situated on the Great Lakes and along the new canal that it was destined to become an important world trade center. One man who invested in that belief was James S. Clarke, the former Sheriff of Cuyahoga County and, in the decade of the 1830s, one of the biggest real estate speculators in Cleveland. In 1831, Clarke, Richard Hilliard (a wealthy dry goods merchant), and Edmund Clark (an insurance agent and banker) formed a partnership and purchased fifty acres of land just south of the Village of Cleveland in Cleveland Township. The acreage constituted the southern part of a peninsula surrounded on three sides by the Cuyahoga River and located just south of the river's first bend. On this land, then known as Case's Point (but which today is a part of the Flats we know as Ox Bow Bend or Columbus Road Peninsula), the partnership platted a development in 1833 called "Cleveland Centre," which featured streets named after foreign countries—British, French, German, China and Russia—radiating from a hub called Gravity Place, an appropriate name, they thought, for a future center of world trade and business. The land was ideally situated just south of the new Canal Basin, where Great Lakes ships traveling up the Cuyahoga River were expected to anchor and receive or transfer cargo to or from awaiting canal boats.

Lots in the new development sold well in the early years and soon a small village sprouted at Cleveland Centre. Commission merchant offices, warehouses and docks were built on the western side of the development, primarily on Merwin Street, where a young John D. Rockefeller got his first job as an accounting clerk years later. On the east side of the development, a residential neighborhood formed around Columbus Street (today, Columbus Road), the main avenue running north-south through the Centre. It wasn't long before there were so many Irish and German working-class immigrants living there that, in 1838, they built the first Roman Catholic church in Cleveland, St. Mary's on the Flats. Cleveland Centre also received a boost from Clarke's construction of the Columbus Street Bridge in 1835—the first permanent bridge across the Cuyahoga River at Cleveland—and in 1836 by the platting of Willeyville. Another development by Clarke and others, Willeyville was located on land directly across the river from Cleveland Centre and connected to it by the Columbus Street Bridge.

Despite James S. Clarke's optimism and promotion, and the promising beginning in the decade of the 1830s, Cleveland Centre, which was annexed to Cleveland in 1835, did not become a center of international trade and business. Instead, a national economic crisis—the Panic of 1837—intervened, ending "canal fever" in Cleveland and ruining James S. Clarke. After the economy recovered, it was the Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati Railroad (CC&C), rather than international trade merchants, that arrived in Cleveland Centre. In 1851, the CC&C purchased twelve acres of land on the south end of the Centre—almost one-quarter of the entire development—and there built an engine roundhouse and other maintenance and repair facilities for its trains. The arrival of railroads here and elsewhere in Cleveland in this era coincided with the city's early industrial development, and in the years that followed a number of industrial buildings went up at Cleveland Centre, on or near the tracks of the railroad. Sometimes, the construction of these buildings required that portions of the streets that radiated from Gravity Place be vacated, and this, over the years, damaged the beauty and symmetry of the original street plan. The residential neighborhood on the east side of the development likewise suffered from the arrival of the railroad and the intense industrial development. By 1880, St. Mary's had closed its doors and many of its former parishioners had moved out of the Flats.

The name "Cleveland Centre" itself lost its cachet sometime in the late nineteenth century as the place became better known as just part of the industrial Flats. When Cleveland experienced de-industrialization in the mid-twentieth century, Cleveland Centre, like the rest of the Flats, languished for several decades as a place of mostly closed factories and empty warehouses. That began to turn around in the decade of the 1970s when the Flats experienced rebirth as a city entertainment district. Cleveland Centre was not, in the early years of this rebirth, home to many of the entertainment venues, which tended to locate to the north, closer to the lake. However, in the early twenty-first century, a number of acres in the southern part of the Centre, formerly owned by the CC&C Railroad and its successors, were re-purposed for recreational use and became home to the Commodore's Club Marina, the Cleveland Rowing Foundation and Cleveland Metroparks' Rivergate Park, which featured a skatepark and a riverside restaurant called Merwin's Wharf. With Cleveland Centre becoming a trendy place once again, Dan Rothenfeld, a local artist, taking it all in and perhaps channeling the ghost of James S. Clarke, proposed in 2016 that historic markers be placed there and that the original radial streets and hub at Gravity Place be lighted so that both on the ground and from the air people could remember and commemorate this early era attempt to build an international trade center in the Flats. And why not? It is not the first time that grand plans have been laid out at this place.

For more (including 12 images) view the original article

The Smead Rolling Road was a mechanical device built into the roadbed of Eagle Avenue to help haul wagons to the top of the cliffs framing the Cuyahoga Valley in the days before sufficiently powerful trucks were developed. Vaguely reminiscent of the mechanics behind San Francisco's cable cars, this contraption lasted a brief time before being abandoned and later demolished when the tracks for the Cleveland Union Terminal were installed across Eagle Avenue's route.

Cleveland was founded in 1796 at the mouth of the Cuyahoga with Lake Erie to take advantage of the portage between the Great Lakes system and the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to New Orleans. This portage, where Akron is today, was a short land route for carrying boats that linked these water systems via the Cuyahoga River and promised a strong economic future for the young village.

In the early nineteenth century, the potential of the portage route was realized by the construction of the Ohio & Erie Canal, which accelerated Cleveland's rise as an important western commercial city. The canal entered the city alongside the river and ended near its mouth at Lake Erie, ensuring that all the heavy cargo coming to Cleveland via the canal, river and lake would arrive down at the water level, eighty feet below the city. Railroads, which tended to employ the long grades of the Cuyahoga's tributary streams to enter the valley and its docks, further concentrated the arrival of heavy freight below where the population lived, worked, and shopped.

Before trucks came to have sufficient power to traverse the steep grades of the river banks, it was difficult for horse-powered wagons to supply produce to the city. To address this problem, in 1906 inventor Isaac D. Smead patented his "rolling road," a electric-powered device to pull unharnessed wagons up Eagle Avenue from the Flats to Ontario Street, right at the popular Central Market.

In the nineteenth century, "Colonel" Smead had been a major figure in the heating and ventilating business, at one point reputed to be the leading manufacturer of such equipment for public buildings in America. The Panic of 1893 led to his bankruptcy and he turned to other engineering pursuits. He designed the rolling road as an electric-powered moving belt, to which wagons could be attached. The wagon's team of horses would be unharnessed and walked uphill while the wagon made the trip up the rolling road at three to six miles per hour. The former process of moving wagons up by horsepower alone was said to take twenty minutes to an hour, while Smead's invention cut it to two minutes.

While it appears to have operated satisfactorily, it wasn't long before improvements in internal combustion engines powered trucks sufficiently to render it obsolete, when it was abandoned and its remnants dominating the center of Eagle Avenue for years. Writing in his memoirs, The Ginney Block, Edward D'Alessandro told a tragic story about his youth and the remains of the rolling road. A gang of his friends and he were racing on sleds down Eagle Avenue. The youth in the lead slid out into the intersection with Canal Road and was killed by a passing truck. D'Alessandro, who would later go on to lead the Cleveland Public Library system, was able to swerve his sled into the rolling road's foundations and escape a similar fate.

In the 1920s the Terminal Tower complex on Public Square was being built and its Cleveland Union Terminal passenger station in the lower sections was designed to bring trains through the valley. This wiped out Eagle Avenue, which henceforth traversed a bridge over the tracks. That bridge lasted into the 21st century, when much of it in turn was demolished and thus Eagle Avenue no longer connects Ontario Street with the Flats. But for decades, between the Smead Rolling Road and the subsequent bridge, Eagle Avenue was one of the city's more engineered roads.

For more (including 6 images) view the original article

In 19th-century Cleveland, bridge-building was big. The Columbus Street Bridge—a 200-foot covered structure completed around 1836—was the city’s first major span. It supplanted a series of less-permanent crossings such as a chained platform of floating logs and a wood-surface structure supported by pontoon boats. The opening of the Columbus Street Bridge (combined with Cleveland’s destruction of an older bridge to the north) fomented the infamous Ohio City Bridge War. Other projects followed, including the Center Street Bridge, the Main Street Bridge and the Seneca (West 3rd) Street Bridge. Foreshadowing later disasters, the Seneca Street structure collapsed in 1857. The official cause was “overloaded with cattle.” In 1878 a milestone was reached when the Superior Viaduct was completed. This was the first Cleveland span tall enough to let river traffic pass under it without enacting a swing or levitation mechanism.

But the century’s largest bridge by far—as well as the one most beset by misconception and misfortune —was the Central Viaduct, built by the King Iron Bridge and Manufacturing Company and completed in 1888. What most people refer to as the Central Viaduct stood roughly where the Innerbelt Bridge (I-90) is now located. It was 2,839 feet long and extended from Jennings Avenue (now West 14th Street) to Central Avenue (now Carnegie Avenue). Known as a "stilt" type bridge, it had a turntable section that pivoted horizontally to let tall ships pass. However, the Jennings-Central span was only part of the Central Viaduct initiative. A second bridge—the Walworth Run section—connected Abbey Avenue to Lorain Avenue at W. 25th Street. Rebuilt in 1986, the 1,088-foot bridge continues to link Ohio City with what is now Tremont.

Even before the Jennings-Central portion of the Viaduct was completed, tragedy struck. On the afternoon of January 5, 1888, part of the structure collapsed, killing several workers. Investigators concluded that a large water-carrying machine ran off the end of a temporary wooden trestle. On the way down, it took out two sections of the nascent bridge which collapsed on workers beneath. In 1892, disaster struck again when a speeding streetcar jumped the tracks and crashed into an oncoming car.

Would that that were all. On the foggy evening of November 16, 1895, Railcar 642 of the Cleveland Electric Railway Company, heading west from downtown, crashed through a gate and plummeted 100 feet off the Viaduct into the Cuyahoga River. Unbeknownst to the passengers and crew, the center section (the “draw”) had been opened to permit the tugboat “Ben Campbell” towing a lumber barge to pass underneath. And unbeknownst to motorman Augustus Rogers, the power cutoff switch (designed to stop the streetcar when the draw was open) was broken. Of Car 642’s 21 passengers and crew, 17 died, including conductor Edward Hoffman who left behind a wife and 10-month-old son.

"Nothing like it recorded in the history of the Forest City," mourned the Cleveland Press. Interviewed by the paper, bystander Phil Beck recalled that "the car was running rapidly up until the time it reached the safety rail. It came to a standstill and the conductor jumped out and threw the switch. Then the motorman put the power on and the car moved forward at a high rate of speed. We all yelled to the motorman to stop, but he did not seem to heed nor hear us. [After crashing through a gate] he saw his peril and, without reversing the power, sprang to the bridge. He saved himself by catching the edge of the footwalk. Then the car dropped over the edge. It was going at such a high rate of speed that it did not seem that the front end dropped first, but seemed to sail out into the air and then drop down." On its descent, the car struck the bridge pilings and plunged head-first into the river. It took two days of searching with grappling hooks to recover the bodies from the river. Only one passenger, Patrick Looney, survived the plunge. Disabled and traumatized, Looney returned to County Clare, Ireland, where he lived out his life.

Upon seeing the open draw, motorman Augustus Rogers and three passengers had jumped from the car before it plunged. Rogers was accused of manslaughter and jailed. A month later he was freed and charges were dropped. Responsibility for the tragedy was placed on conductor Edward Hoffman, who had told the motorman to proceed through the gates.

The Viaduct’s draw span was replaced with a high-level truss bridge in 1912, but even that failed to put an end to the structure’s sad track record. On May 25, 1914, a fire at Fisher-Wilson Lumber Company underneath the bridge destroyed 300 feet of the Viaduct. The span was rebuilt but safety concerns remained, exacerbated by continuous sinking of land at the bridge’s western end.

Declared unalterably unsafe, the Central Viaduct was closed in 1941 and demolished shortly after World War II. By that time, plans for a grand “Innerbelt” project were underway, but funding and property-acquisition issues delayed the initiative. A new structure following the general path of the Central Viaduct was completed in 1962. Other than congestion, the new bridge was largely devoid of problems, although commercial truck traffic was banned from the bridge between 2008 and 2010 due to structural concerns. The entire span was replaced by the new George V. Voinovich Bridges, completed in September 2016. All that remains of the hard-luck Central Viaduct are several stone piers—fully visible from a ramped section of the Towpath Trail in northeast Tremont.

For more (including 9 images) view the original article

Kingsbury Run refers to an area along the east side of Cleveland near Shaker Heights that stretched westward through Kinsman Avenue and down to the Cuyahoga River. It also included a natural watershed that runs through East 79th Street in Cleveland where natural creeks drain storm water into the Cuyahoga River from areas that are now known as Warrensville Heights and Maple Heights. The name Kingsbury Run comes from James Kingsbury, the first inhabitant of Newburgh (1797) and one of the earliest settlers of the Western Reserve area. In the late 1800s, the city commissioned a new sewer tunnel system project. This was constructed to pass through the Kingsbury Run area under Kinsman Avenue.

The Kingsbury Run stretch of land separated Cleveland from Newburgh and became an area for railroad traffic. Industry boomed in this area, including the crude oil refinery belonging to John D, Rockefeller and the oil and naphtha works of William Halsey Doan. The boom years, however, were followed by a wave of poverty. During the Great Depression, the industry began to collapse and Cleveland's workforce suffered. Minorities and immigrants were among the hardest hit. The groups that were affected the worst included African Americans, particularly those from the Cedar-Central area; a Hungarian community in Kinsman to the east of Cedar-Central; Czech and Slovak neighborhoods east of downtown along the lakefront; and Polish, Czech and Irish neighborhoods along the banks of the Cuyahoga River. Many of these displaced and out of work people took up residence in abandoned plots of land and formed communities of their own that became known as shantytowns. One of these types of settlement formed in Kingsbury Run.

The impoverished population of the area continued to grow into the late 1930s. A large wave of new residents moved in from other lakefront shantytowns as these were being removed by the city. It was during this time that Kingsbury Run grew to notoriety by being thrust into the spotlight as a crime scene. Many of the victims of the still unidentified Kingsbury Run Butcher were discovered in the shantytown. Hinting at the gruesome nature of the killings, the case soon became known as the Cleveland Torso Murders.

Beginning with the discovery of the first victim in September of 1934 thirteen people were brutally murdered over the course of four years. All of them were decapitated, some while they were still alive. The first victim was a woman determined to be in her mid-30s was never identified and was referred to as “The Lady of the Lake.” Though this killing was not first attributed to the serial killer at the time, it would be considered as the killer's first victim later in the investigation. In 1936 the recently appointed Cleveland Safety Director Eliot Ness was placed on the case.

In 1938, Cleveland safety director Eliot Ness ordered and conducted a raid of the area that resulted in the eviction of 300 squatters as well as the burning of at least 100 shanty homes. The murders continued until the last victim was discovered in August 1938, after which the murders simply ceased. The Torso Murders case remains unsolved. Two decades later, the city set out to redevelop Kingsbury Run into a low-income housing area as part of the Garden Valley federal urban renewal project. Constructed on a slag dump donated by Republic Steel, Garden Valley was emblematic of a national tendency in the 1950s to relegate renewal housing to marginal inner-city lands.

Kingsbury Run is still remembered today, mostly for a violent period of time in Cleveland history. When city government makes reference to this area, it is mostly to note the vast sewer system that runs through it.

For more (including 5 images) view the original article

Moses Cleaveland (1754-1806) was born and raised in Connecticut. After studying law at Yale College, he served as a Captain in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War. Moses was a shareholder in the Connecticut Land Company which purchased land in the Western Reserve, or New Connecticut. This involvement led Moses Cleaveland on an expedition into the Ohio wilderness. He was responsible for surveying the land as well as negotiating land rights with the Native Americans living there, who initially challenged the surveying party's right to be on the land but ultimately accepted livestock, whiskey, and various trinkets from Cleaveland in exchange for an assurance of safety.

On July 22, 1796, Moses Cleaveland arrived at the mouth of the Cuyahoga River and decided that the land just to the east of it would be the capital of the new territory. His surveyors laid out a town, including a 9-1/2-acre Public Square, on the high bluffs overlooking Lake Erie and the winding Cuyahoga. Cleaveland and most of his men returned to Connecticut in October, having laid out towns and plots all across the territory east of the Cuyahoga River.

Ninety-two years later, in 1888, the Early Settlers Association of the Western Reserve erected a statue of Cleaveland on the very Public Square that his men had once plotted. Cast in bronze and standing just under eight feet tall, the statue, which cost over $4,000 to build, shows Cleaveland as a surveyor, holding a staff and compass. Despite the honored position that Cleaveland holds in the city's history, however, it is spelled Cleveland – without the extra "a." One legend has it that in 1830 the city's newspaper could not fit the "a" in its headline, so the city became Cleveland.

Cleveland further paid homage to its founder not only through the city’s name and bronze monument but through living monuments scattered throughout Greater Cleveland. In 1946, as part of the 150-year anniversary of Moses Cleaveland’s party arriving at the Cuyahoga River’s mouth, it was proposed that Arthur B. Williams and the Cleveland Museum of Natural History should locate and label trees that were alive in Cleveland when Moses Cleaveland first came to the city. There were 242 trees nominated from 23 different tree species. Each tree was checked to verify its age. The final list of official Moses Cleaveland Trees included 150 trees that the public could easily access. Each of the official Moses Cleaveland Trees was outfitted with commemorative metal plaques so that the public could easily identify the trees. Since 1946, more trees have been added to the official list of Moses Cleaveland Trees, while some of the first designated trees have died out. As of 2021, there are 273 Moses Cleaveland Trees, which stand as living history that connects present-day Cleveland to its founding.

Despite Moses Cleaveland’s vast impact on Cleveland, he never returned to the city that bears his name (minus an "a," anyway) after his surveying job was completed. On his return to New England he wrote:

"While I was in New Connecticut I laid out a town on the bank of Lake Erie, which was called by my name, and I believe the child is now born that may live to see that place as large as Old Windham."

Although it took time for Cleveland to grow and develop into a viable city after his departure in 1796, Cleaveland's prophecy proved quite an understatement.

For more (including 6 images & 3 audio files) view the original article

What's in a name? The city of Kent has identified with various names and nicknames throughout its establishment in 1805. Originally known as Franklin Mills, the city was once a thriving industrial town. The mills located on the banks of the Cuyahoga River brought money, people and pride to this northern Portage County settlement. Overlooking the Cuyahoga River is the Star of the West Flour Mill (originally known as the Williams Brothers Mill). It is the only fully functional mill left in the city of Kent.

Established in 1879 by the Williams Brothers, the Star of the West specializes in producing flour and tops fifteen million dollars in sales each year. Other prominent mills of the past include the Kent Mill, also a flour mill, and the Alpaca Mill which originally specialized in milling silk.

The mills of Kent have left a lasting impression on the city. Water power for the mills was harnessed from the Cuyahoga River with the construction of the Kent Dam in 1836. Reliance on the Cuyahoga, however, did not come without a price. In 1913, the river flooded and wiped out many of the mills on the riverbanks, including the Kent mill. Once the pride of the area, the Kent mill stopped running after the flood and was torn down in 1931.

Early on, goods from Kent's mills were shipped via the Pennsylvania & Ohio Canal which ran parallel to the Cuyahoga. The canal was short lived and shipping methods were replaced when prominent banker Marvin Kent brought the Atlantic & Great Western Railroad to town in 1863. Mr. Kent's rail lines had a tremendous impact on the city and in 1864 Franklin Mills was renamed Kent in honor of him. Today, Kent is still a flourishing community with a history as rich as they come. Meanwhile, the Star of the West Flour Mill continues to carry on the traditions of the city's earliest industrial history into the 21st century.

For more (including 7 images) view the original article

Water, something we all take for granted today, was often the key resource needed to make a new settlement thrive. This was certainly the case for Kent, located in northern Portage County, about 40 miles southeast of Cleveland.

The area around Kent was originally owned by the Connecticut Land Company, which sold parcels of land to pioneers such as Moses Cleaveland, John Haymaker, and Zenas Kent in the late 1700s. One of the most important geographic requirements for the new settlers was a water source, which could be used to power various mills and, later on, factories. The Cuyahoga River runs through Kent, which made the city an ideal location for settlers. The river was both friend and foe to the early developers of the area. Several times floods caused terrible damage. To end this constant struggle with nature, the residents of Kent decided to construct a dam.

The Kent Dam was completed in 1836 and was considered to be one of the greatest engineering successes of its time. The arched dam is the oldest masonry dam in Ohio and is the only dam to be connected to a canal lock. In its early days the Kent Dam played an essential part in providing water power to the many businesses and mills located on the banks of the Cuyahoga. The lock connecting the dam to the Pennsylvania & Ohio Canal made shipping goods to and from the area very convenient.

In 2004, the dam was bypassed due to environmental problems associated with the river's low flow. Though the dam today has no real function, it remains intact because the citizens of Kent have grown to love it. The rich history of the dam and its impact on the development of the city have made it an essential part of Kent's identity.

For more (including 9 images) view the original article

One of Cleveland's oldest and most enduring legends is that famed Sauk war chief Black Hawk was born in Cleveland and that the grave of his mother Summer Rain is located on the grounds of Riverside Cemetery.

The story dates back to 1833 when, according to two Cleveland newspapers, Black Hawk stopped here on his way home from a triumphal tour of New York, Philadelphia and other east coast cities. While in town, he visited Chang and Eng Bunker, the Siamese Twins, who were being exhibited locally as part of nineteenth-century America's fascination with physical deformities. Neither newspaper article, however, included mention that Black Hawk was born in what is now Cleveland or that, while here, he had visited the grave of his mother.

Black Hawk returned to Cleveland's papers decades later, after the Civil War, in romanticized stories about his previous visit to Cleveland. Native Americans once again had become objects of fascination as American troops confronted Native cultures on the Great Plains and drove them off the land. To many Americans Native Americans represented the savage forces of nature that needed to be civilized by technology, democracy, and American ideals.

In 1875, W. W. Armstrong, owner and editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, editorialized that Black Hawk had canoed several miles up the Cuyahoga River to visit the place where he was born and where he spent his childhood. A few years later, in 1879, Frederick T. Wallace, a city of Cleveland lawyer and local literary figure, claimed that he had been informed by an "intelligent gentleman since deceased" that Black Hawk had been born in Cleveland and that the grave of his mother was located on a bluff overlooking the west bank of the Cuyahoga River on the grounds of the recently opened Riverside Cemetery. Finally, in 1883 Harvey Rice, a well respected nineteenth century Cleveland civic leader who had been living in Cleveland in the 1830s, published Pioneers of the Western Reserve, a history of Cleveland in which he repeated Wallace's account of the birthplace of Black Hawk and the location of the grave of Black Hawk mother's at Riverside Cemetery.

In the 1870s and 1880s, with little direct evidence to support their claims, Cleveland's civic boosters appear to have constructed the legend of Black Hawk's birth and familial connections to Cleveland. Perhaps the legend was based on early dealings with the area's original population. Or perhaps it was done to promote Cleveland by connecting the city's emerging industry and civilization to Black Hawk; a symbol of Native Americans and the previously powerful and untamed forces of nature out of which Cleveland had been born.

According to this apocryphal narrative, the southeast corner of the bluff on the grounds of Riverside Cemetery is not only the final resting place of many of Cleveland's early civic and industrial leaders, but also that of Summer Rain, mother of Black Hawk.

For more (including 7 images) view the original article

In 1866, brothers Thomas and Isaac Lamson joined with Samuel Sessions to form the Mt. Carmel Bolt Company in Southington, Connecticut. Three years later the three partners moved their operations to Cleveland, building a plant at 2188 Scranton Road in what is now northwest Tremont. This location—close to railroad tracks and the Cuyahoga River—proved ideal for moving raw materials and finished products into and out of the plant. Many of Lamson & Sessions’ employees lived in the area (then known as Lincoln Heights), largely because of the neighborhood’s close proximity to industries populating the Cuyahoga River Valley (The Flats).

The partnership was incorporated in the State of Ohio in 1883 and renamed Lamson & Sessions Company. In 1928, the company went public, selling shares of common stock on the Cleveland Stock Exchange, which later became part of the Midwest Stock Exchange and now is known as the Chicago Stock Exchange (CHX). Since November, 2007, Lamson & Sessions has operated as a subsidiary of Thomas & Betts Corp.

Lamson & Sessions grew rapidly after moving to Cleveland, developing into a national leader in the production of nuts, bolts, and other fasteners. As the company grew, its operations expanded to other locations in and around the city. During World War II, the company was among the largest manufacturers of nuts and bolts in the United States. In 1950, the company opened a new plant in suburban Brooklyn, Ohio, which replaced most of Lamson & Sessions’ other Cleveland-area facilities. Now headquartered in Beachwood, Ohio, and Memphis, Tennessee, Lamson & Sessions supplies the telecommunications, electrical, construction, consumer, power, and wastewater markets. One of its major business segments is Carlon, which, in addition to making a variety of industrial goods, was among the first manufacturers of the hula hoop. During the mid-1950s Carlon often produced more than 50,000 hula hoops per day!

For more (including 6 images & 1 audio file) view the original article

Clevelanders met the opening of the Superior Viaduct in December 1878 with great fanfare, celebrating the city's first high-level bridge. The bridge in many ways symbolized Cleveland's continuing economic growth and  development into a major American city. Prior to the Viaduct's opening, low-level bridges were the only way for vehicles to cross the Cuyahoga River. To approach these  bridges, commuters had to navigate steep valley walls. Moreover, bridge traffic would come to a halt with the passing of each and every boat. While the Superior Viaduct's central span still had to swing open several times a day to let taller ships through, it was a vast improvement over the older bridges.

The building of the Superior Viaduct began in March 1875, three years after city residents voted to fund its construction. Costs eventually came to a little over two million dollars. Despite all its grandeur, the viaduct became outdated with the opening of the Detroit-Superior Bridge in 1917. That bridge was built high enough to let even the larger boats pass underneath without disturbing traffic.  

The viaduct was closed to cross-river traffic once and for all when its center span was removed in 1923. Over time, the once-celebrated structure was dismantled. Today, a number of the stone arches and other components of the viaduct's western approach are all that remain.  

For more (including 7 images & 1 video) view the original article

The story of the Cuyahoga River fire of 1969 - the event that sparked pop songs, lit the imagination of an entire nation, and badly tarnished a city's reputation - is built more on myths than reality. Yes, an oil slick on the Cuyahoga River - polluted from decades of industrial waste - caught fire on a Sunday morning in June 1969 near the Republic Steel mill, causing about $100,000 worth of damage to two railroad bridges. Initially the fire drew little attention, either locally or nationally. The '69 fire was not even the first time that the river burned. Dating back to the beginning of the twentieth century, the river had caught fire on several other occasions.

The picture of the Cuyahoga River on fire that ended up in Time Magazine a month later - a truly arresting image showing flames leaping up from the water, completely engulfing a ship - was actually from a much more serious fire in November 1952. No picture of the '69 river fire is known to exist.

Throughout much of Cleveland's history, water pollution did not trouble the city's residents very much. Instead, water pollution was viewed as a necessary consequence of the industry that had brought prosperity to the city. This attitude began to change in the 1960s as ideas associated with what would become known as environmentalism took shape. In 1968, Cleveland residents overwhelmingly passed a $100 million bond initiative to fund the Cuyahoga's cleanup. Also, by this time deindustrialization was somewhat alleviating the pollution problem, as factories closed or cut back operations. Ironically, the city and its residents were beginning to take responsibility for the cleanliness of the river in the years before the infamous fire of 1969.

The '69 fire, then, was not really the terrifying climax of decades of pollution, but rather the last gasp of an industrial river whose role was beginning to change. Nevertheless, Cleveland became a symbol of environmental degradation. The Time article contributed to this, as did the notoriety of Cleveland Mayor Carl Stokes. Stokes, who was the first black mayor of a major city when elected in 1967, became deeply involved with the issue, holding a press conference at the site of the fire the following day and testifying before Congress - including his brother US Representative Louis Stokes - to urge greater federal involvement in pollution control. The Stokes brothers' advocacy played a part in the passage of the federal Clean Water Act of 1972. In Cleveland, a number of Cleveland State University students celebrated the inaugural Earth Day in 1970 by marching from campus to the river to protest pollution.

Even though it has been misunderstood, the 1969 Cuyahoga River fire did help bring about positive change. The river's water quality improved during the following decades, and business investors capitalized on this by converting parts of the Flats' abandoned industrial landscape into an entertainment district featuring restaurants, nightclubs, and music venues.

Much of the industry that both made Cleveland rich and caused its river to burn may never be coming back, but Clevelanders are meeting this challenge by reshaping their city to reflect its current realities.

For more (including 8 images & 2 videos) view the original article

By the 1960s, Lake Erie had become extremely polluted, in part due to the heavy industry that lined its shores in Cleveland and other cities. Factories dumped pollutants into the lake and the waterways that flowed into it (like the Cuyahoga River) without much government oversight. Waste from city sewers made its way into the lake too, as did fertilizer and pesticides from agricultural runoff.

As a result of these pollutants, Lake Erie contained increased levels of phosphorus and nitrogen, which contributed to eutrophication - a process that encourages the development of algal blooms. Dead fish littered the shoreline as a lack of oxygen in the water led to massive fish kills. Episodes like this led to the coining of the phrase - more sensational than factual - "Lake Erie is dead," which started to appear in national publications in the late 1960s.

In 1969, the Cuyahoga River caught fire, bringing more negative national publicity to Cleveland and its polluted waterways. Even though pollution in Lake Erie was a regional problem, Cleveland bore the brunt of the negative publicity.

The burning river and the "dead" lake were major impetuses for the Federal government to step in and deal with water pollution in Cleveland and across the nation. In 1972, Congress passed the Clean Water Act, a measure that tightened regulations on industrial dumping. That same year, the United States and Canada signed the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement in an attempt to lower the amount of pollutants entering the Great Lakes.

Locally, the city took steps to improve its sewer system and better monitor water quality. Mayor Carl Stokes led the way, pledging to clean up Cleveland's waterways. He appeared before Congress (and his brother, United States Representative Louis Stokes) in 1970 to discuss the issue and seek federal aid. Carl's involvement brought significant media attention to the problem and contributed to the national movement against water pollution.

For more (including 7 images & 1 video) view the original article

Bathed in blue light at night, the Detroit-Superior Bridge (also known as the Veterans Memorial Bridge since 1989) is a striking feature on the Cleveland skyline just west of Public Square. Cleveland's King Bridge Company built the span between 1912 and 1917 at a cost of over five million dollars. This 3,112-foot-long compression arch, suspended-deck bridge was the first fixed high-level bridge in the city and, for a time, one of the largest steel and concrete reinforced bridges in the world. Its single steel span over the Cuyahoga River provides 96 feet of clearance above the water, allowing for uninterrupted vehicle traffic. At the time of its completion this was a vast improvement over the older Superior Viaduct, whose center span was forced to swing open several times a day in order to allow boats to pass underneath, stopping bridge traffic for five or more minutes. 

Until the end of Cleveland's streetcar era in the mid-1950s, the lower deck of the Detroit-Superior Bridge carried streetcars on its four sets of tracks. To this end, a subway and underground passenger stations were built below its east and west approaches. Meanwhile, vehicular traffic on the upper deck of the bridge was heavy in the years following the bridge's opening on Thanksgiving Day 1917, and traffic tie-ups often occurred. These lessened with the opening of the city's second fixed high level span – the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge – in the 1930s. More recently, the development of the interstate highway system, with its various high-level spans over the Cuyahoga River, has further diminished the bridge's importance to commuters. However, the Detroit-Superior Bridge remains a key feature in Cleveland's built environment and an impressive example of architectural and engineering expertise. 

For more (including 6 images & 1 video) view the original article

It is hard to imagine Cleveland developing into the city that it did had it not been chosen to be the northern end of the Ohio & Erie Canal. George Washington discussed the possibility of building a canal to connect Lake Erie with the Ohio River as far back as the 1780s, but it was not until 1825 that the Ohio Legislature voted to fund the project and construction commenced. An initial span opened between Akron and Cleveland on July 4, 1827. When fully completed in 1832, the Ohio & Erie Canal traveled 308 miles through 146 lift locks on its path between Cleveland and Portsmouth, Ohio.

The canal almost instantly turned Cleveland into a major commercial center. The city became the hub of a continental transportation network that connected with New York City via Lake Erie and New York's Erie Canal as well as with the nation's developing frontier areas and New Orleans via the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. Goods like wheat, corn, coal, and lumber came north to Cleveland from the frontier while manufactured products from factories in the northeast arrived in Cleveland in return. Travel by road at this time — in places where actual roads existed — was unreliable and expensive. The canal dramatically cut the cost of transporting goods. It opened up new markets for manufactured goods, and tied Americans living at the margins of the nation into an expanding national economy.

The banks of the Cuyahoga River soon became populated with warehouses, docks, and shipyards. It was not long before the area became a center of industrial production as enterprising Clevelanders started turning the raw materials arriving from the hinterlands via the canal into new and highly demanded products like steel and petroleum. Many of the Irish immigrants who built the canal remained in town to work in these new industries.

Traffic and revenue on the Ohio & Erie Canal peaked around the 1850s. Already by then, railroads were taking over as the dominant mode of transportation. Cleveland, which had already established itself as a major city thanks to the canal, continued to prosper. Raw materials and finished goods poured into and out of town, but they did so on boxcars instead of canal boats.

The canal gradually fell into disuse. Steel factories tapped into it for use in their mills and flooding occasionally wiped out portions of it. Towards the end of the twentieth century, portions of the Ohio & Erie Canal came under the protection of the National Park Service with the creation of the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. Other federal and local projects have preserved many sections of the canal. Thanks to these efforts, future generations will be able to view Ohio's original interstate highway system: the man-made ditch that brought prosperity to Cleveland on the deck of a canal boat.

For more (including 7 images & 2 videos) view the original article