John Quinn lived in Irishtown Bend, an Irish settlement on the west bank of the flats, from 1870 to 1912 and became one of the enclave’s best-known denizens. In the late 1980s, archaeologists from the Cleveland Museum of Natural History excavated his homesite, unearthing many artifacts that helped shed light on his life in Irishtown Bend. Quinn held several jobs before finally working as a police officer until he retired. As a police officer, he was well known both at Irishtown Bend, where he started out, and on Whiskey Island, where he worked the longest. Not only was he a hard worker but he also had a large family to take care of.

His story, like that of all immigrants, starts before he even set foot in the United States. John Arthur Quinn was born on June 4, 1846, in the village of Ardfinnan, Ireland, and in 1860 Quinn, his parents, and his younger siblings immigrated to the United States. Many people left Ireland during this time because of the Great Famine of 1845 to 1849. Once immigrants arrived in the United States, they had to find jobs, which became increasingly difficult due to discrimination against Irish immigrants. The Quinn family’s history resurfaces in 1860, around this time they immigrated to the United States. At this time, John started working as a mechanic for the Cuyahoga Steam Furnace Company.

In 1871, Quinn worked as a bricklayer and had a house in Irishtown Bend. This was an Irish community first established in the 1820s. One of the reasons why so many Irish immigrants settled in this area was because of the construction of the Ohio Canal, which opened in 1832. Many Irish immigrants had the opportunity to work as both as ditch diggers for the canal and on the ore docks. Between these jobs, there was a lot of draw for Irish immigrants to settle in Irishtown Bend.

Irishtown Bend was a place marred by several stigmas attached to it. One of these stigmas was due to the area’s poor and hazardous living conditions. Prior to the 1860s, Irishtown Bend was a shantytown filled with one-room shacks, most of which were poorly built. The whole family would oftentimes live in these one-room shacks. They were a huge fire hazard and in 1877 the Cleveland Plain Dealer had a story about a fire that started with a stove being knocked over, spread quickly, and burned down five shanties. The Bend was unsanitary because there were many factories located by the river. At this time, there were no regulations in place for proper waste management, making it all too easy for factories to dump waste and sewage into the river. These conditions caused the whole area to be known as the “open sewer of the city.”

Another stigma attached to Irishtown Bend was that it was notable for being very crude and unsavory. There were often fights and usually these fights ended up in the newspaper because of arrests or involvement with the police. For example, in 1889 a Plain Dealer article titled “The Irishtown Battlers” relayed how the two suspects were charged for resisting the constable and were arrested. The notoriety of Irishtown Bend did not help Irish immigrants in the area to get decent jobs because these incidences continually reinforced its reputation.

In 1870, John Quinn married a woman named Ellen, also an Irish immigrant, and in 1870 they had their first child, a boy named John. After a few years, the Quinn family moved to the north side of West River Road in Irishtown Bend. By that time, Irishtown Bend was no longer filled with one-room shacks. While there was still a stigma attached to the area as a “shantytown,” the buildings that occupied the area were of decent quality.

On May 16, 1871, John Quinn became a police officer and served for 32 years as a patrolman. Over the years many, newspaper articles featured him. His first couple of months as a police officer were spent in the Ninth Precinct. From early on it was clear that John Quinn had a “special talent for finding thieves and arresting them.” After his first year as a police officer, his record was so good when it came to dealing with difficult people that he was transferred to Whiskey Island, where he remained for the rest of his career.

Both Irishtown Bend and Whiskey Island were very difficult to patrol, but Quinn was up to the task. In dealing with difficult people the interviewer from the Plain Dealer asked him in 1903 how difficult his work was and if he had ever gotten hurt. He remarked that it was not too difficult after people realized that he meant business. As far as being hurt, he said that he had been bitten on his hands several times. He went on to say that he had no other marks and that in all the years that he had been patrolling he had never had to draw his weapon on a man. He became very well known in this area and in Irishtown Bend for being a fair but stern policeman.

On May 30, 1903, Quinn resigned from the police force. However, he remained active in the community, including serving on a committee that oversaw the creation of a park in Irishtown Bend in 1905. In 1912 the Quinn residence was demolished, and John Quinn and his family moved from Irishtown Bend. Some years after this, a May 20, 1918, obituary for Quinn revealed that he died after being ill. The obituary’s title, “Whiskey Island’s Iron ‘Mayor’ Dies,” suggests how well respected he was to be given the respectable nickname of ‘mayor’.

After John Quinn's death, Irishtown Bend continued to be demolished and all of the residents moved away. During CMNH’s 1980s archaeological dig in the area, The Quinn house at 435 West River Road was one of the properties that had been uncovered. While many artifacts were uncovered, some of the most interesting were high price ceramics and glass objects, all of which show that the Quinn residence became financially quite well off. As a policeman, Quinn most likely stayed in the area because of this connection to his community. Not only was he connected to the community, the discrimination that Irish immigrants faced meant that they often had to live in ethnic communities to avoid some of the harsher aspects of the biases that they faced. Among the other most interesting items found were ceramic insulators, demonstrating that Quinn at some point had electricity, which was very rare. This suggests that he was a diligent worker and that he most likely saved whatever money he could so that when he was older, he had a fair amount of wealth established. It also shows that he rose above the discrimination against Irish immigrants by proving that most of the stigmas applied towards Irish people were not applicable to him. Quinn’s story, illuminated through archaeological work, adds dimension to the Irish-American experience in Cleveland’s Irishtown Bend.

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Irish immigrants flocked to Cleveland after the potato famine in 1848. Along the Cuyahoga River in Ohio City grew a concentrated Irish neighborhood known as Irishtown Bend. It was so named because of the Irish shantytown located along one of the curves of the Cuyahoga River. This neighborhood centered on Riverbed Street, but ranged from West 25th Street eastward to the Cuyahoga River, and between Detroit Avenue southward to Columbus Street.

Irishtown Bend was located in the heart of Cleveland's industrial infrastructure. A significant number of Irish worked in the shipping industry that thrived along the Cuyahoga River as part of the extensive Great Lakes trading network. For Irishtown Bend, the shipping industry came in the form of ore docks used to load and unload the massive freighters that traversed the Great Lakes.

Although essential to Cleveland's industrial well-being, trade, and Irish population, the Cuyahoga River proved to be its own worst enemy. Cuyahoga literally means crooked river, and it earned a sinister reputation because of how treacherous it was to navigate, particularly in a 500-foot freighter. In 1901, Cleveland discussed straightening the Cuyahoga River to alleviate the problems of navigating it. The first detailed study did not begin until 1912, and work did not occur until the mid-1930s, continuing intermittently into the 1950s.

When discussion of altering the Cuyahoga River began at the turn of the 20th century, the fate of the river and those who depended on it became untenable. Proposed plans involved cutting land to make river bends wider, or completely re-rerouting the river. The possibility of eminent domain threatened the homes and livelihoods of those living and working along the river.

The approval of an improvement plan in 1929 called for the widening of the river at Irishtown Bend, which required the demolition of the shanty homes erected on its hillside. Dredging of the river did not occur at Irishtown Bend until 1938, but even after this initial alteration, the Plain Dealer reported that Irishtown Bend was still a nuisance. By the mid-1950s, what was left of Irishtown Bend's residential area was either dilapidated or abandoned, and the area was razed in 1958 to prepare for a second attempt to alter the river.

River improvement was not the only reason for razing the Irishtown Bend slums, however, as a $10 million public housing project had also been approved in an attempt to revitalize the neighborhood. The highlight of the housing project was a pair of 16-story buildings called Riverview Towers, which still prominently stand. Unfortunately, the housing project did not fulfill the proposal's intent to revitalize the neighborhood. While the entire housing project was intended to attract residents of diverse stages in life, young and middle-aged suitors mistook the project as one exclusively for elderly residents.

Local magnate Jeffrey P. Jacobs planned further development of Irishtown Bend in 1989 but a geographical survey revealed the remainder of undeveloped land at Irishtown Bend was too unstable for any further development. In 2019, federal funds enabled the stabilization of the river bank and the transformation of the Bend into a riverside park to proceed.

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Google “St. Malachi” and you’ll get a hodgepodge of Malachis (with an i) and Malachys (with a y). The distinction is two people and roughly 1,500 years. St. Malachi (with an i) was a minor prophet identified in the last section of the Old Testament. St. Malachy (with a y) was a 12th-century Irish monk and Bishop of Armagh in Northern Ireland. Yet St. Malachi (with an i) Church, the venerable house of worship on Cleveland’s near west side, was named after the monk (the one with a y) and not the prophet (the one with an i). Why the disconnect? No-one knows. But the net effect is that a Roman Catholic Church bears the name of a Hebrew prophet.

What we do know is that St. Malachi Church is part of a thriving parish on Washington Avenue in Cleveland’s Irishtown Bend neighborhood (what hipsters now call “Hingetown”), and that the parish recently celebrated its 150th birthday. But St. Malachi Church is nowhere close to the parish’s oldest building. That honor goes to the rectory, which was built in 1834. There’s also a St. Malachi School building, which dates to 1885. Replacing an earlier structure built in 1867, it was initially a girl’s school administered by the Ursuline Sisters. It remained a girl’s (and later co-ed) parochial school until 1968 when it merged with St. Patrick School to found Urban Community School. Lastly, there’s Malachi House, a hospice on Clinton Avenue that dates to 1910. The Washington Avenue church we see today—which includes an 18-room convent for the sisters of St. Ursula—is actually a rebuild. Erected in 1947, it replaced the original Gothic-style structure (completed in 1871) which was destroyed by fire in 1943.

Around 1865, Amadeus Rappe, Cleveland’s first bishop (installed 1847), organized St. Malachi Church to better serve Irish citizens who lived around the “Old Angle” and worked in the manufactories and warehouses that filled the Flats. Father James Molony became the church’s first pastor, serving from 1865 to 1903. Prior to construction of St. Malachi Church, much of the Irish population worshiped at St. Patrick Roman Catholic church on Whitman Avenue in Ohio City. During construction of St. Malachi, parishioners also attended St. Mary’s on the Flats (the colloquial name of the parish of Our Lady of the Lakes) at Columbus and Girard Streets near the present-day site of Rivergate Park. To this day St. Malachi remains part of the St. Patrick parish.

St. Malachi Church was formally dedicated in March 1871. It soon became known as a “port church,” because the cross on its steeple was illuminated to help guide ships on the lake. The spire that held the lighted cross was destroyed by a storm in the 1870s and never rebuilt.

The parish grew rapidly, and by the turn of the 20th century St. Malachi Church ministered to roughly 2,000 families. Then came a rapid slide, as myriad homes were constructed on Cleveland’s west side and most residents left the Flats. By 1928 church membership had fallen to 60 families. The 1935 construction of Lakeview Terrace on West 25th Street bolstered membership considerably, and by 1938 St. Malachi's membership had rebounded to 400 families.

Then came the fire. On December 23, 1943—75 years to the day from its first mass—the church went up in flames, likely the result of a boiler explosion. Church elders immediately decided to rebuild, although construction was delayed until after World War II. The new Romanesque structure, designed by George W. Stickle, was dedicated on June 29, 1947. Built of multi-color Tennessee crab-orchard stone, the church features decorative buttresses, lancet windows and a square tower complete with battlements. Rescued from the old church, the baptismal font and most of the statues were reinstalled in the new structure.

The parish’s numbers dwindled again in the 1950s and 1960s but then rebounded. By 1995 Father Anthony Schuerger was ministering to more than 1,200 families. The parish school also moved ahead—surviving a severe enrollment drop by merging with St. Patrick to form the Urban Community School in 1968, with campuses at St. Malachi and St. Patrick (by then relocated to Bridge Avenue). In 1976 the school building at St. Wendelin Church on Columbus Avenue in Tremont was incorporated into the Urban Community School, replacing St. Patrick. The St. Malachi school building served as the campus of Urban Community School until a new facility was completed in 2005 at West 48th Street and Lorain Avenue.

St. Malachi Church has always been about serving neighborhood residents. But as the near west side grew steadily poorer in the latter decades of the 20th century, St. Malachi upped its game. It instituted the Backdoor Sandwich Ministry and a Monday Night Meal program. In 1985 it converted a nearby warehouse into Malachi Center, which continues to assist the homeless, organize after-school and adult-education programs, and provide men’s and women’s support groups. And following the donation of four row houses on Clinton Avenue, Malachi House of Hope (now Malachi House) opened its doors in 1988. Since then, it has served as a final home and care facility for thousands. St. Malachi Church may no longer visible to Lake Erie sailors. But in partnership with sister parishes St. Wendelin and St. Patrick, it and its many satellite facilities remain a beacon of light.

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