In 1895, Hugo Chotek, a Czech-American journalist who lived in Cleveland, wrote a history of the city's early Bohemian (Czech) community. To learn about the origins of the community's west side settlement, south of the Walworth Run, he interviewed surviving pioneer settlers, including 73-year old Maria Novak, who had come to the west side--then Brooklyn Township, as a young woman in 1853. Maria painted a bleak picture of the social life there, far away from the much larger Bohemian settlement that had developed on the east side, near Broadway Avenue. "Our social life was dire with little if anything in the way of entertainment," she told Choteck.
Perhaps the years had clouded Maria's memory or perhaps she was referring only to those very first years of the west side settlement, which, according to the United States census, numbered only 13 families in 1860, but then grew to more than 100 families by 1870. What is certain, however, is that once the Cleveland newspapers around 1867 began reporting on the settlement, which they referred to as the "Isle of Cuba," no one in Cleveland imagined it as a place lacking in entertainment.
For the last three decades of the nineteenth century, Cleveland newspapers routinely reported on the wild Bohemians of the Isle of Cuba who danced to harmonica music in the saloons and dance halls scattered about their west side neighborhood, occasionally drank too much beer, and sometimes engaged in knife fights with predictably unhappy endings. (Author's note: Given the centrality of saloons in the early days of the community, I selected the original location of one of the saloons--Link's, on what today would be the northeast corner of Clark Avenue and West 47th Street, as the site of this story.)
In 1882, the Cleveland Leader wrote that this neighborhood was called "Isle of Cuba" because of the periodic overflows of the Walworth Run and its tributaries which flooded the area and left the high grounds in a shape that some thought looked like the Caribbean island. But most Clevelanders, given what they had been reading in the local papers, probably thought it was because the neighborhood was isolated from the rest of the city and was populated by Slavic immigrants with strange customs, who more than occasionally engaged in rowdy behavior.
Also contributing to this view of the neighborhood in this period were reports by the local newspapers, especially the Cleveland Leader, of the long running battle between church officials and the lay parishioners of St. Procop Roman Catholic Church on Burton (West 41st) Street, on the eastern edge of the Isle of Cuba. The Leader characterized this battle, which lasted from the mid-1870s until the late 1880s, as one between a dictatorial Slavish church and an open-minded lay population. It called upon Cleveland's Protestant ministers to conduct "missionary work" among the west side Bohemians. From time to time thereafter, the paper commented on the spiritual progress that these ministers were making in that community.
As the nineteenth century was winding down, the news stories about rowdy Bohemian adults on the Isle of Cuba gradually were replaced with stories about rowdy juvenile gangs. During the Spanish-American War, one neighborhood gang called the "Cubans" regularly conducted battles against a gang on the other side of the Walworth Run aptly named the "Spaniards." A few years later, when the British were fighting the Boers in South Africa, these same boys--or their younger brothers, renewed their battles under the gang names of the "Britons" and the "Boers."
Over the decades, the neighborhood name "Isle of Cuba" morphed into "Island of Cuba," then to "Little Cuba," and then to the "Cuba District" or just simply "Cuba." And finally, at least according to Cleveland newspaper accounts, the name became passé in the late 1920s. By then, the west side Bohemians, along with the Germans, Slovaks, Irish, Italians and other ethnic groups living in the area, had created a mature neighborhood with retail shops up and down Clark Avenue, industrial businesses throughout the neighborhood, and durable neighborhood institutions, including, in addition to St. Procop's Church and other Christian denominational churches, Ceska Sin Sokol Hall, and Mravenec Building and Loan Association, later known as People's Savings and Loan Association. No longer was it considered to be a place isolated from the rest of Cleveland.
]]>You're driving south on West 65th Street in your Ford Model T, sometimes called a Tin Lizzie. You pass St. Colman Roman Catholic Church on your left, then the Cleveland Trust bank building on the corner of Lorain Avenue, and just a little later Gordon Elementary School on your right. You're behind a trolley on this cold Monday morning, January 24, 1927. Traffic is moving even slower than usual. You wonder what the holdup is ahead.
Then you hear it . . . the sound of hard hooves on red brick street. You don't see them at first. But as you get closer to Clark Avenue and the Big Four Railroad tracks, you catch a glimpse of the herd-- brown, black and white splotches of color, a dozen or so head of cattle, coming your way, weaving through traffic. The steers pay no attention to the rules of the road. Some are trying to make it to the middle of the street, others want to turn back, but the drovers with their long sticks are there to guide them, keeping them close to the curb. As you proceed past the intersection, you reach the herd, taking in the smell now as well, and you carefully pass by.
The herd is on its way to the slaughterhouse of the Long Dressed Beef packinghouse on West 68th Street, where the individual cattle will become steaks, roasts and other beef products for Cleveland's meat-hungry population. But after you have passed them and the flow of traffic on West 65th has improved a little, you and your traveling companions don't give the cattle or the fate that awaits them any further thought.
For the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, it wasn't unusual for motorists like these to encounter herds of cattle, flocks of sheep, or a drove of hogs, all on their way from the Cleveland Union Stockyards to nearby slaughterhouses-- sometimes more elegantly referred to as "abbatoirs." On a daily basis, buyers from Swift & Company, Ohio Provision, Theurer-Norton, Webb Beef, Gibbs, Inc., and the other meat packers and renderers whose buildings stretched around the Stockyards like a giant inverted "C," would come to the yards. There they dickered with commission agents of the farmers who had raised the cattle, sheep and hogs in Ohio, Michigan and elsewhere and had then transported them by rail to Cleveland's Union Stockyards for sale. Buyer and seller squabbled over quantity and price per pound. And, when a buyer was finally sure that he hadn't been given a "bum steer," a deal would be struck. All that remained then was to transport the animals purchased to the meat packer's slaughterhouses. Given their geographical proximity to the Stockyards, the easiest way to accomplish that was to simply walk the animals there.
And so west side motorists, like those traveling south on West 65th Street on January 24, 1927, had to deal with these walking cattle, sheep, and pigs that slowed down traffic. But their inconvenience was minor compared to what people who lived in the Stockyards district had to endure. Residents of the Isle of Cuba, the Czech immigrant neighborhood located just east of the stockyards and packinghouses, dealt daily and constantly with raucous animal noise and horrific stench. Moreover, every so often animals would escape, and residents would come home to find cattle, hogs or sheep munching their lawns, trampling their gardens, breaking fence posts, and sometimes even endangering their children.
The meat packers and renderers of the Stockyards District, as well as the stockyards themselves, certainly did create neighborhood nuisance. But as Cleveland's third largest industry, they also employed thousands of Clevelanders. It all ended--jobs as well as nuisance, in the late 1950s through early 1970s, when first the packinghouses abandoned Cleveland as a regional meatpacking center and then the Stockyards closed.
Today, the ruins of the old packinghouses still stretch along the east side of West 65th Street between Clark and Storer Avenues, but now you have to look at an historic photo or talk to a long-time resident of the Stockyards neighborhood to understand a little bit of what it was once like to see cattle ambling their way down the streets of Cleveland's west side.
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