In view of Progressive Field stands a historic landmark of Cleveland’s Lebanese community. Wedged between Aladdin’s Bakery and Market on its east flank and a double-decker parking garage topped by the statues of eight saints to its west, the twin-spired red-brick edifice of St. Maron Church offers a hint of a long-lost neighborhood that was once home to thousands of immigrants from the eastern Mediterranean before central-city redevelopment and suburbanization simultaneously pushed and pulled them away.
St. Maron Church, with close to 1,000 parishioners, is a Lebanese parish that follows the Maronite Rite, a liturgy recited in Syriac, a dialect of the Aramaic language believed to have been spoken by Jesus Christ at the Last Supper. The Maronite Rite is one branch of the Antiochene or Antiochian Rite that arose from St. Peter’s establishment of the Church of Antioch. Cleveland’s St. Maron is part of the Maronite Christian denomination, named for St. Maron, a 4th-century Syrian Christian priest who later became a hermit monk. His disciples went on to settle in the cedar-forested highlands of Mount Lebanon. The Maronites have been in communion with Rome since the 12th century but retained autonomous governance under the Patriarch of Antioch in Lebanon.
Lebanese and Syrian immigration to Cleveland dates as far back as the 1870s but was more pronounced in the 1890s and 1900s. Although they settled in various parts of the central city, most concentrated in the Haymarket District around what is now Progressive Field. Among the immigrants were more than 100 Maronite families, who formed the St. John Maron Society in 1914 to raise money to establish their own parish. In 1915, they succeeded in forming St. Maron Church in an 1870 two-story brick apartment building they purchased at 2214 East 21st Street just north of Cedar Avenue. The parish converted the building into its church with an upstairs rectory. Fr. Peter Chalala of Baalbek, Lebanon, served as St. Maron’s first pastor for its first six years. The congregation had four subsequent pastors over the thirty-two years after 1921. The longest-serving pastor, Fr. Joseph Komaid, a missionary originally from Sahel Alma, Lebanon, served the church for twenty-five years (1927-1952).
Under Fr. Komaid’s leadership, St. Maron acquired the former St. Anthony Church at 1245 Carnegie Avenue in 1939. St. Anthony, an Italian parish, had formed in 1886 and met in a small wood-frame building on Ohio Street (Central Avenue) until it was able to build a large Romanesque-style church on Carnegie in 1904. As the Haymarket neighborhood it served experienced an outmigration of parishioners, St. Anthony merged with St. Bridget’s, an Irish parish on East 22nd Street off Scovill Avenue, in 1938. St. Anthony sold its Carnegie Avenue church property to St. Maron the following year. St. Maron held its dedicatory mass, followed by a banquet at Hotel Carter, on April 7, 1940.
Over the years, a flourishing St. Maron expanded even as it faced some challenges. The congregation built a rectory in 1951 and renovated the church four years later, adding new stained-glass windows. In 1971, it had to repair substantial damage inflicted by a bomb that detonated inside a car parked in the East 13th Street alley between the church and Middle East Bakery (later Aladdin’s), which had been the target of three bombing attempts since it opened the previous year. In the early 1980s the church undertook the second major renovation and built a new administration building along its rear on Bronson Court. In the 1990s, St. Maron continued to attract an increasing number of parishioners, which necessitated additions to the church in 1997 and again two years later. The opening of Jacobs Field (now Progressive Field) west of St. Maron made parking more difficult for parishioners, leading the church to demolish its social hall in 1998 for a two-story garage that could ease access for churchgoers while raising money through event parking.
Continued congregational growth led the “landlocked” church to pursue building a larger church in Independence on land once occupied by Marcus A. Hanna II’s Rhea-Mar country estate and, later, the Sisters of the Good Shepherd’s Marycrest convent. When the suburb’s government tried to block St. Maron’s plan in 2007, citing drainage concerns, the parish sued and won the right to build. Thereafter, the church initiated a long-term building fund and has since used the Independence property, christened Maronite Village, for its administrative office, chapel, and community events such as its annual Middle Eastern Food Festival even as it continues its tradition of Sunday mass along downtown’s southern edge.
]]>Cleveland’s Greek population, only 6 in 1890 and 42 ten years later, soared to near its peak of 5,000 before immigration restrictions in 1924 imposed low quotas for further newcomers from Greece and other eastern Mediterranean nations. A smaller but still sizable community of immigrants had also come from what are now Lebanon and Syria. So many Greeks settled in the Haymarket district around the Central Market that the enclave that some Clevelanders referred to this area as "Greek Town." Some Greeks worked as fruit and vegetable peddlers, others as day laborers or steelworkers. Over time, a number became storekeepers, bakers, and proprietors of coffee houses and wholesale import grocery houses selling everything from olives to dried devil fish. Bolivar Road emerged as the social center for Greeks, its numerous coffee houses serving as places where Greek men sipped coffee or tea, shared hookahs, gossiped, played cards, dominoes, or barbouth, and caught up on news from their homeland. Yet even as Greek Town lost more and more Greek residents to Tremont and neighborhoods along East 79th Street in the years after World War I, its businesses remained a magnet drawing them back both to buy goods and socialize.
By the early 1940s, Plain Dealer columnist S. J. Kelly lamented that he “found Bolivar Road sadly depleted of its Greek. It is, in fact, a modern business thoroughfare and most of its classic residents are scattered over the city.” In the postwar years, as so many Clevelanders departed for the suburbs, remnants of ethnic communities beckoned as “old and colorful” anomalies in a downtown increasingly dominated by office towers and parking garages. As Bolivar Road transitioned from a complete neighborhood to the central business district for Greek, Lebanese, Syrian, and Palestinian populations that were now spread across the metropolitan area, it also gained greater popularity beyond these communities. A succession of "Grecian-American" restaurant-clubs at 714 Bolivar — The Athenian, Grecian Nites, and Never On Sunday — enticed patrons with belly dancers and bouzouki music. Middle East Restaurant, opening in 1962, introduced many Clevelanders to Middle Eastern cuisine. The restaurant’s proprietor, Edward Khouri, a native of Aramoun, a village near Beirut, built a loyal clientele with inexpensive, authentic dishes prepared and served by Josephine Abraham, also Lebanese. As Abraham later recalled, pita and hummus were so exotic to many customers when she started at the restaurant that she had to instruct them on how to use pita to eat hummus; “It was like feeding babies,” she quipped.
In 1973, the Greek and Middle Eastern businesses on Bolivar Road, along with the L&K Hotel, a single-room-occupancy hotel for “down-on-their-luck men,” fell to the wrecking ball to make way for a parking lot, which was later replaced with a garage for Progressive Field and Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse. Plain Dealer columnist George Condon echoed S. J. Kelly’s lament of three decades before, complaining that “downtown is diminished again.” While the Middle East Restaurant and Shiekh Grocery were able to find space in and next to the Carter Manor (formerly the Hotel Carter), other businesses dispersed. Today there is no sign of the Greek, Lebanese, and Syrian enclave on Bolivar. Greek culture revolves more around churches such as Tremont’s Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church. However, on nearby Carnegie Avenue, St. Maron Church and Aladdin’s Bakery and Market still offer visible reminders of where Cleveland’s Middle Eastern communities got their start.
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