According to one website, it was for years one of Cleveland's most popular places for urban exploring. In a building where world wars were once won, young people crept through dark hallways, clambered up rusted metal stairways, and walked carefully through debris-filled rooms.

Well, perhaps it is a bit of a stretch to say that wars were won in this building. But it is a fact that, in the long-vacant Warner & Swasey building at 5701 Carnegie Avenue, critical armament parts were once manufactured that helped the United States and its allies win two world wars during the twentieth century.

The five-story building made of reddish-brown stone was constructed over a six-year period from 1904 to 1910. It replaced the original Warner & Swasey building that had been erected on the site in the early 1880s. That was just shortly after Worcester Warner and Ambrose Swasey, two young New England machinists, had come to Cleveland to build a machine shop — to Cleveland, because they thought Chicago was just too far west.

Warner & Swasey built telescopes and machine lathes in the new, as well as the old, building on Carnegie Avenue. And in wartime, when the company built those armament parts that helped America win two world wars, thousands of Clevelanders worked there. They built parts for tommy guns in World War I. And in World War II, when 7,000 Clevelanders worked for Warner & Swasey, they built parts for planes, ships, and tanks.

From World War I, through World War II, and into the 1950s and the 1960s, the building on Carnegie Avenue was one of Cleveland's most important workplaces. People talked about Warner & Swasey in the same breath and in the same way that they talked about the city's other big employers, like Republic Steel, TRW, and Ford Motor. But then the building on Carnegie Avenue began its downward slide, much like the city of Cleveland did in the same period. In the end it was a victim of high technology, and when it closed its doors for good in 1985, only a few hundred employees were still left to be sent elsewhere.

Decades passed after Warner & Swasey left Cleveland. Its iconic early twentieth-century industrial building was owned for much of that period of time by the City of Cleveland, which looked to put the building to a new use. In 1988, Cuyahoga County had considered the building as a possible site for its Department of Human Services and Child Support Enforcement Agency. That fell through. In 1992, Cleveland officials talked about making it the Charles V. Carr Municipal Center. That never happened either.

In 2010, yet another proposal was put on the table. Fred and Greg Geis, sons of German immigrants who came to Cleveland in the 1960s, proposed to convert the Warner & Swasey building into a high-tech office, lab and manufacturing facility. However, after several years of planning, the Geis Brothers ultimately decided that the Warner & Swasey Building would not suit their purpose, and they developed their Tech Park instead on a large piece of land located between Euclid and Carnegie Avenues, several blocks east of the Warner & Swasey Building.

And so the historic building stood vacant and deteriorating on Carnegie Avenue for several more years. And then, in 2018, a new redevelopment proposal was put forward by Pennrose, a housing developer from Philadelphia. Its proposal was to convert the Warner & Swasey Building into an apartment building with some affordable housing units, some units for seniors, and some market-rate units. The proposal included a possible roof deck which, according to the developer, would offer tenants amazing views of downtown Cleveland.

In 2025, Pennrose completed its acquisition of the Warner & Swasey Building and, in early 2026, it began its redevelopment and restoration of the historic building. It is likely hoped by all who know the historic nature of the Warner & Swasey Building that soon it will be filled with residents who will not only enjoy the benefits of living in an historic building, but will, as well, enjoy the benefits of living in Cleveland's fast-developing Midtown neighborhood.

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On a high, grassy knoll overlooking East Cleveland stands the Warner & Swasey Observatory. Once a scientific landmark, today it is a bleak sentinel. Although it operated for more than sixty years, offering what the Plain Dealer called "a plumb line to the heavens," light pollution from a growing Cleveland reduced its usefulness with each passing year so that by midcentury it was no longer a reliable resource for astronomical research.

The Warner and Swasey Company, maker of machine tools and precision instruments, got its start in 1880 when Connecticut machinists Worcester Reed Warner and Ambrose Swasey decided to go into business for themselves. Moving to Cleveland, eventually they built a large factory on Carnegie Avenue at East 55th Street to manufacture turret lathes and telescopes. Their products found military uses during both world wars, and they built a number of telescopes for leading observatories, including the University of California's Lick Observatory, which reigned as the world's largest refracting telescope for about a decade in the late 19th century, and the U.S. Naval Observatory. Warner and Swasey operated in Cleveland until being bought out in 1980 by the Bendix Corporation.

Warner and Swasey became trustees of Case Institute of Technology. Among their many gifts to the institution was the Warner and Swasey Observatory. Designed by the renowned Cleveland firm of Walker and Weeks and situated some 270 feet above the level of Lake Erie, the observatory, which opened in 1920, was equipped with a Warner and Swasey-built 9.5-inch refractor. Unlike today's telescopes, which use mirrors to reflect light from objects in space to form an image, older refracting telescopes utilized a lens to refract, or bend, light and render an image.

The initial telescope was used until 1941, when the company delivered a much more powerful, 24-inch telescope, the Burrell Schmidt, housed in a second dome. The observatory mounted groundbreaking studies in the early 1950s, including one to prove the theory that the Milky Way was a spiral galaxy and another that found that cooler stars (red giants) were mainly near the center of the Milky Way. But these discoveries marked the twilight of the observatory's short-lived heyday. When light pollution--a common problem for observatories located near cities--became insurmountable in the 1950s, Case acquired a new site for the Burrell Schmidt telescope near the "chimney" of Geauga County, some thirty miles east of its original location. There it operated from 1957 until 1979, when it was again moved to Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona.

Meanwhile, the Warner and Swasey Observatory was outfitted with a 36-inch telescope. Hailed as the nation's finest for public viewing, it operated for more than twenty years until the observatory closed permanently in 1980, the same year that Warner and Swasey sold out to Bendix. Just as its maker's success led to a corporate takeover that ultimately brought its liquidation, the observatory itself succumbed to a byproduct of the relentless expansion of the city that had attracted two young machinists westward a century before.

Today one can still find the original refracting telescope built for the observatory. Since 1982 it has operated in a small dome atop Case Western Reserve University's Albert W. Smith Building.

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Supported by a steel superstructure and faced with Euclid bluestone quarried nearby, Forest Hill Park Footbridge traverses Forest Hill Boulevard in East Cleveland on land that was once part of Standard Oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller's summer estate. Spanning 347 feet across a deep valley in the Dugway Brook watershed, the 48-foot-high pedestrian bridge was intended to nestle in the hilly landscape of the Heights (the westernmost foothills of the Appalachians) on Cleveland's east side.

Designed by Wilbur Watson and Associates in 1939 with consulting architects F. B. Walker and A. D. Taylor, Forest Hill Park Footbridge was built in 1939-40--the work of more than 1,000 men toiling for two years. The men were paid with Works Progress Administration funds as part of its plan to put unemployed Americans back to work on useful projects. Wilbur Watson was a nationally known civil engineer and bridge designer who also engineered the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge over the Cuyahoga River. Taylor, who planned Forest Hill Park for the Rockefellers, was president of the American Society of Landscape Architects and a protege of the Olmsted firm founded by Frederick Law Olmsted, the "father of landscape architecture" who co-designed New York's Central Park. Taylor's sensibilities are reflected in the picturesque bridge.

Over the years the bridge suffered from neglect. A wire fence "cage" to prevent pedestrian falls, marred its graceful span, while vandals broke and removed stones from its parapet. Park volunteers repaired this damage in 2021, helping to ensure that the footbridge remains a beautiful presence for park users.

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Shaw High School in East Cleveland opened in 1838 thanks to a donation made by Sarah Shaw after the death of her husband John. Since they had no children, she decided to give back to her rural community by donating some of the family's farmland for use as a school yard. Since then, Shaw High School has taken a number of physical forms, but it continues to be located on the Shaw's old farmland along upper Euclid Avenue.

Shaw Stadium — a half-mile northwest of Shaw High — was built in 1923 and served as the home of the National Football League's Cleveland Rams (the city's first professional football team) in 1938. Spectators at football games there today are sure not to miss a performance from Shaw High School's world-renowned Mighty Cardinal Marching Band. In 2008, the band made headlines after traveling to China to perform at ceremonies for the Beijing Summer Olympics.

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Forest Hill was once the sweeping estate of oil baron John D. Rockefeller. Originally from a small town near the Finger Lakes in upstate New York, Rockefeller purchased the land along Euclid Avenue as a commercial venture in 1873, opening (along with other investors) a "water cure resort" centered around a Victorian mansion built on a hilltop overlooking Cleveland and Lake Erie. After the resort quickly went out of business, the mansion became the Rockefeller family's summer home, often referred to as "the homestead." The Rockefellers split time between here and their home on Euclid Avenue's Millionaires' Row until the family moved to New York City in 1884, after which point they returned to Forest Hill each summer. After his wife died in 1915, however, John D. Rockefeller seldom returned to Cleveland and Forest Hill. The summer home burned down under mysterious circumstances in 1917.

Rockefeller sold Forest Hill to his son John Rockefeller Jr. in 1923 for $2.8 million. In 1939, Rockefeller Jr. donated 235 acres of the Forest Hill acreage to the cities of Cleveland Heights and East Cleveland with the express stipulation that they be used for public recreation. This land included the site of the old Rockefeller house (now used as a sledding hill), and was developed into a public park by the landscape architect and Cleveland Heights native A. D. Taylor. The park opened in 1942, allowing members of the public to at last savor the cool lake breezes previously enjoyed by the richest man in the world. Picnic areas, walking trails, ballfields, and a swimming pool were some of the amenities added to the park over the years.

On the land east of Lee Boulevard, Rockefeller Jr. commissioned Andrew J. Thomas of New York to design a Garden City-influenced residential and commercial development. The resulting Forest Hill subdivision included 81 French Norman–style houses situated with common back yards that formed greenswards, as well as the gateway business block now known as the Heights Rockefeller Building, before the Great Depression prevented a fuller expression of the Rockefeller-Thomas vision. After prolonged difficulty in developing the remainder of the Forest Hill residential allotment, Rockefeller Jr. sold the land in 1948 to a Toledo-based syndicate that in turn sold lots to individuals who built mostly California ranch houses.

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The National Electric Lamp Association (NELA) formed in 1901 under Franklin Terry and Burton Tremaine. Much of NELA's light-bulb innovation stemmed from, and competed with, both Charles F. Brush's arc light technology, and Thomas Edison's incandescent lamp technology. GE became a major stockholder in NELA as soon as 1902, and provided the former facilities of the Brush Electric Co. as a new home for NELA. GE's stake in the company become so substantial, 75%, federal courts ordered GE to dissolve the company in 1911. GE quickly absorbed NELA and successively gained ownership of NELA's new industrial complex in the suburbs, Nela Park.

The location for Nela Park was known as Panorama Heights, a place where German immigrants held vineyards prior to the parks development. Nela Park was designed by New York landscape architect Frank E. Wallis in a Georgian style. The finished product was the first ever industrial park, costing roughly $400,000 in 1913. The actual move from the old Brush Electric Co. factory on East 45th Street to Nela Park on Noble Road took nineteen hours to complete on April 18, 1913.

The "park" was developed with the acquisition of 44 land parcels between 1911 and 1925, as well as a few more in the 1930s and ’50s. Ultimately, its 71-acre campus stretched between Noble and Belvoir Roads in East Cleveland and reached into Cleveland Heights to the east for a few blocks. Construction of eleven buildings by 1915 provided facilities for engineering, manufacturing, administration, maintenance, utilities, operations, and lamp laboratories. Eight more facilities were added by 1930, and four more in the 1950s brought Nela’s campus to its present status as a comprehensive lighting development center. Throughout this period, the Nela “camp” was developed on the campus grounds to house recreational, assembly, event, and dining facilities. Its annual holiday light display started in 1924.

The business park also contained several features to appease employees including a decent cafeteria, general library, a dispensary that provided dental, nursing, and medical care, a barber shop, transportation office, ample garage parking, and a local bank branch. Nela Park also provided a range of recreational facilities such as tennis courts, baseball fields, an in-ground swimming pool, bowling alleys, and even an auditorium. Due to its reputation as a leading innovator in electrical lighting research and development, and university campus environment, it doesn't come as much of a surprise that Nela Park developed a reputation as a "University of Light."

A century after Nela Park was built, a centenarian time capsule was unearthed. Originally sealed and buried on March 25, 1912 in front of a crowd of high-ranking employees, the capsule was concealed within a cornerstone of Marketing Building #307 for 100 years to the day before its exhumation in 2012. The capsule contained a newspaper, photos, and most notably several incandescent light bulbs, which in 1912 were a state of the art development. To the delight of the hundreds of current and former employees who witnessed the opening of the time capsule, one of the bulbs was placed on display and successfully produced light despite being stowed away for an entire century. The President and CEO of GE Lighting took the opportunity to point out how appropriate it was that such a lamp still functioned, citing that GE's Nela Park was responsible for the development of quality, energy-efficient lighting products that benefited countless individuals and organizations. Another time capsule was ceremonially buried in 2013 at Nela Park. Among its contents was a GE Energy Smart 60-watt replacement LED bulb with a 22-year service life when operated three hours a day.

By the latter half of the 2010s, General Electric Corporation was undergoing reorganization of its business model and priorities to include the divestiture of the lighting business. In 2020, Savant Systems Inc., of Massachusetts, acquired GE Lighting from General Electric, preserving its name and keeping maintaining its century-long lighting operations intact. Two years later, GE Lighting sold Nela Park to Milwaukee-based Phoenix Investors, with plans to consolidate its operations in one building and attract other tenants to the remainder of the Georgian-style campus.

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One afternoon in the summer of 1869 Liberty Holden was riding down Euclid Avenue when he noticed a beautiful forested green space with rolling hills. Holden suggested the spot to the Lake View Cemetery Association as the perfect place for the cemetery they were planning. The Association bought the 211-acre spot and transformed it into the first rural cemetery in Cleveland.

The rural cemetery (or garden cemetery) movement in the United States began on the East Coast during the early nineteenth century. Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts (established in 1831), Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (1836), and Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York (1838) are considered the nation’s first three rural cemeteries, and they laid the pattern that many other American cities would follow in establishing their own rural cemeteries.

Before the rural cemetery movement, most urban burial places were located in churchyards. The move from burial places in the city to a rural setting happened for a multitude of reasons. The first reason was many burial grounds in the city occupied prime locations eyed for commercial development. The second issue that led to the foundation of rural cemeteries was that the capacities of these burial grounds were reaching their limits. Yellow fever in New York led to high mortality rates. Mass graves, bodies being kept in church cellars, and the generally poor condition brought up concerns about respect for the dead. The condition of the burial grounds was also threatening to compromise public health. In particular the gas fumes from dead bodies were noxious. The final reason for the establishment of rural cemeteries was a change in view of nature. Nature came to be seen as beneficial for human health. Those who planned the first rural cemeteries responded by taking the natural landscape into consideration in their designs.

The rural cemetery movement was also called the garden cemetery movement because rural cemeteries, with their emphasis on cultivated nature, doubled as parklands. Rural cemetery planners drew inspiration from English gardens. Mount Auburn was the brainchild of Dr. Jacob Bigelow, a medical doctor and botanist. With the support of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, the cemetery included a botanical garden. The cemetery, along with providing a place for burials, was a green space for the city of Boston and a popular destination for locals and tourists alike. Rules were implemented and updated in order to manage the number of visitors in respect of those buried and their families. The rural cemetery movement therefore helped with the creation of separate city parks.

Lake View Cemetery mirrored these predecessors in its creation. Jeptha H. Wade, Joseph Perkins, and Henry Bolton Payne were the first group to discuss the creation of a rural cemetery in Cleveland. Through their efforts, the Lake View Cemetery Association was organized on July 28, 1869. The Association looked for picturesque locations for the cemetery and acquired 211 acres (now 285 acres) east of Cleveland between Euclid Avenue and Mayfield Road. The Association brought in Adolph Strauch, a well-known gardener, landscaper, and the superintendent of Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincinnati. Spring Grove was another well-known early rural cemetery designed by John Notman, who had previously designed Philadelphia’s Laurel Hill Cemetery. Lake View had hills and valleys with peaks high enough to look out over Lake Erie and still see the city. Parts of the land were densely forested. A few streams were located on the property that were planned for use in creating manmade lakes. Strauch laid out the walking paths and the lot boundaries before filling in where the trees and plants should be placed. His method involved accentuating the natural features of the landscape.

Not only did Lake View mirror Mount Auburn, Laurel Hill, and Green-Wood in its conception but also in its later regulation of visitors. These regulations reflected one of the intended aspirations for rural cemeteries besides merely housing the dead. The cemetery served as a place of moral education as well as a beautiful landscape with grand monuments, including memorials to President James A. Garfield, John D. Rockefeller, and Jeptha Wade. If the solemnity of its statuary failed to inspire, cemetery rules instructed visitors on how to act while on the grounds and guide toward solemn remembrance. An 1882 column titled “Lake View Cemetery: Not a Picnic Resort” brought complaints made by lot owners and family of the buried to the public's attention. Its author described the fanfare associated with visiting President Garfield’s memorial but emphasized the issue of strangers setting up picnics on grave monuments and the crowds trampling the grounds. There was a call for regulation on Sundays that led to implementation of ticketing for admittance to follow the same action taken at Green-Wood and Spring Grove cemeteries.

Once among the only substantial cultivated green spaces in reach of Clevelanders, Lake View Cemetery became less novel by the turn of the twentieth century, when newly opened city parks began to lure recreation-seekers away. Nevertheless, Lake View continued to attract visitors with its variety of plants, trees, and flowers. In the 1940s Dr. William Weir cultivated more than 170 varieties of daffodils and donated a large collection of bulbs to Lake View. The bulbs were planted in a three-acre portion of the cemetery with more being added each year. With more than one hundred thousand bulbs, Daffodil Hill has become a perennial attraction enticing visitors back to Lake View Cemetery yearly to see them in bloom.

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