It was, in the first place, road and bridge improvements that created the park — almost as an afterthought. For much of the first two decades of the twentieth century, the city of Cleveland had planned and then constructed Bulkley Boulevard (today, the west Shoreway) and then the Detroit-Superior Bridge, thereby providing more direct access for Clevelanders living on the east side to travel to Edgewater Park on the west side. To address anticipated congestion from traffic coming off the new bridge near West 25th Street, the city purchased, and in 1917 razed, several buildings on Detroit and Vermont Avenues, immediately west of West 25th, using part of the cleared land to create a fan-shaped entrance way onto Bulkley Boulevard. The land that was left over after the fan-shaped entrance way had been created? Well, little thought was apparently given to it until west side Councilman Michael H. Gallagher came along and decided that the remnant land should be a park serving as a memorial to Bernard "Brick" Masterson.

In 1917, Gallagher, a Republican, had been elected Ward Eight Councilman — the ward that then encompassed much of the near west side — defeating three-term incumbent Democrat, William J. Horrigan. Gallagher owed much of his electoral success to Brick Masterson, the Republican ward leader. Masterson, who also was owner of a popular saloon at 1313 West 25th Street, was known on the west side as "Mayor of the Angle." This was perhaps due to his success in turning out the Republican vote in 1909, which contributed significantly to the stunning defeat of Cleveland's most famous mayor, Tom L. Johnson. Nine years after Johnson's defeat, and just four months after he engineered Michael Gallagher's victory over incumbent Councilman Horrigan, the 44-year old Masterson died tragically from a fall he suffered on St. Patrick's Day.

While other politicians likely forgot the colorful ward leader soon after his very public funeral, Councilman Gallagher did not. In 1921, several years after the entrance way to Boulkley Boulevard at West 25th and Detroit had been created, he successfully sponsored legislation to make that small leftover piece of land a park named "Masterson Square." And while some may have poked fun at the little park, as the Plain Dealer did in an article published in 1926, for decades Masterson Square served as a gathering place for community events in the historically Irish Old Angle neighborhood. As late as 1944, it was the site of a gala fundraising event for the new memorial chapel at nearby St. Malachi Catholic Church. And then, apparently, as time passed, and the ethnic composition of the neighborhood changed, the park lost its public identity as a memorial to Brick Masterson.

In the year 2000, eight decades after the park had been first named as the result of one Cleveland councilman's efforts, another Cleveland councilman came along — Ward 14's Nelson Cintron, who decided that it would be a great idea to honor boxing great Jimmy Bivins by naming the park, which was by this time apparently only known to city officials as the "Detroit-West 25th Street park," after him.

James Louis "Jimmy" Bivins, an African American whose family moved from Georgia to Cleveland in 1921 during the Great Migration, was one of the city's best boxers ever, fighting both as a light heavyweight and as a heavyweight. His professional career lasted from 1940 to 1955, during which time he amassed a record of 86-25-1. During the years of World War II, he won the "duration" championship — awarded when Joe Lewis and others were away in the service — in both the light heavyweight and heavyweight classes. Bivins retired from boxing in 1955, but afterwards he became a trainer at the Old Angle Gym, which for many years was located in the Campbell Block, a building catty-corner across the street from Masterson Square. There, Bivins not only trained young men--many of whom came from impoverished areas of the near west side, but he also became a partner in the operation of the gym, contributing his money as well as his time to keeping the gym going, at a time when many Cleveland boxing gym owners were hanging up their gloves for good. After the Campbell Block was torn down in 1975, Bivins moved the gym first to the West Side Community House at West 30th Street and Bridge Avenue, and then in 1978 to St. Malachi School, where he taught boxing to kids there until 1996 when old age and personal tragedy ended his career as a trainer.

On October 4, 2000, Cleveland City Council passed Councilman Cintron's sponsored legislation to name the little park at the corner of West 25th and Detroit Avenue "Jimmy Bivins Park." But no plaque or other signage was ever put up to identify the park. And so it remained for fifteen years until 2015, when a redevelopment proposal came before the City that included the land upon which the park was located. During the redevelopment review process, the City not only learned that the proposal included land that was a city park, but also that the park had been named on two different occasions in honor of two different legendary Clevelanders. City officials are now considering the possibility of upgrading the park, and, hopefully, once and for all, resolving its name.

2021 Update: Apparently, the City has resolved the issue of the twice-named little park by reaffirming that it is Jimmy Bivins Park in honor of the late, great Cleveland boxer. Signage honoring Bivins has gone up in the park area on the northwest corner of Detroit Avenue and West 25th Street.

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Boxing in the Old Angle, an historic Irish neighborhood located on Cleveland's near west side, has deep roots, reaching back at least as far as the year 1894 when Brother Salpicious of the Christian Brothers of the La Salle Order founded the La Salle Literary and Athletic Club at St. Malachi school for boys on the corner of Pearl Street (West 25th) and Division Avenue. The Club encouraged boys attending St. Malachi to engage in a number of sports, including boxing. It achieved national attention in 1912 when it sponsored the St. Patrick's Day parade in Cleveland, featuring new featherweight boxing champion Johnny Kilbane, who had learned to box at the La Salle Club in the first decade of the twentieth century.

As young school boys who trained at the La Salle Club grew older, other, more professional places were needed to provide continued training in the sport of boxing. Johnny Kilbane, and others like Tommy Kilbane (no relation), Tommy (later "Black Jack") McGinty, and "Young Brick" Masterson, at first often had to travel out of the Old Angle neighborhood to places like Volk's Gymnasium downtown on Prospect Avenue to train. But in 1910, that changed when Jimmy Dunn, legendary trainer of Johnny Kilbane and other early twentieth century fighters, opened his first professional gym in the Angle neighborhood at 2618 Detroit Avenue--just a block west of the intersection of West 25th Street and Detroit. According to an article which appeared that year in the Plain Dealer, Dunn's new establishment was "fitted up as completely as any gym in the city." Johnny Kilbane was training out of Dunn's Gym at 2618 Detroit when he won his featherweight boxing crown in 1912.

Other gyms sprouted up in the neighborhood, and elsewhere, as the sport of boxing--thanks in large part to Johnny Kilbane's fame, became more popular in Cleveland in the 1920s and was viewed as a way to climb out of poverty, despite official discouragement of the sport from City Hall. Jimmy Dunn's Gym at 2618 Detroit saw a succession of new owners, including Tommy "Black Jack" McGinty, the Frisco Club and others, including former boxer Bryan Downey who, around 1930 closed the gym at this location and opened a new one downtown on Superior. Danny Dunn (a cousin of Jimmy Dunn), who for a short time managed the gym his cousin had founded, opened his own gym just up the street at 2816 Detroit in 1926. It became a neighborhood fixture for over a decade, training many boxers, until it closed around 1941. Its most well-known boxer was Johnny Risko, a Slovak immigrant and heavyweight boxer, who trained at the gym in the decades of the 1920s and 1930s when he was one of the top contenders in the United States for the heavyweight crown.

Shortly after Danny Dunn's gym closed, as well as Bryan Downey's downtown in the same year, a movement appears to have begun in 1943 to bring a boxing gymnasium back to the Old Angle. Prominent among the people involved in the movement was John A. Keough, a third generation Irish-American born in the Angle neighborhood, whose son John M. "Jackie" Keough, a welterweight, was one of the top boxers in Cleveland in the 1940s. In or about 1943, Keough and a partner opened a gym in two rooms and an allotted basement area of the Campbell Block, an historic building erected in 1891 by Alexander Campbell, the grandfather of another famed fighter--Admiral Isaac Campbell Kidd, who went down fighting on the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

Located near St. Malachi Church and just a block north of the intersection of West 25th and Detroit Avenue, the gym was named the "Old Angle" gym, according to one source, by former boxing champion Johnny Kilbane. For much of the next three decades, the Old Angle Gym was THE place to train on the west side of Cleveland. It operated out of the Campbell Block from 1943 until 1949. In 1950, Keough opened a new Old Angle Gym in the Rhodes Building at 1699 West 25th Street. This Old Angle Gym—sometimes also called the Old Angle Athletic Center— remained at that location until 1959, when Keough moved it back to the Campbell Block.

One of the boxers attracted to the Old Angle Gym was James Louis "Jimmy" Bivins, an African American, whose family moved to Cleveland from Georgia in 1921 when he was just two years old. Bivins fought as both a light heavyweight and heavyweight, winning the "duration" title in both weight classes during World War II. After retiring from boxing in 1955, Bivins returned to the Old Angle gym to become a trainer, introducing a whole new generation of kids living in the neighborhood to the "sweet science," including bantamweight Gary Horvath, who won multiple Golden Gloves championships in the decade of the 1960s. Later, after Keough and his partners retired from management of the gym, Bivins and Horvath took over, operating the Old Angle Gym out of the Campbell Block until that building was torn down in 1975. Afterwards, the two operated a boxing gym for several years in the West Side Community Center at West 30th Street and Bridge Avenue, and then Bivins opened up a boxing gym at St. Malachi Church--where it all started, for neighborhood youths in 1979, running it until the mid 1990s.

In the year 2000, in recognition of the contributions which Jimmy Bivins made to the community both as a legendary boxer and as a trainer of young boxers on the near west side, the City of Cleveland, figuratively speaking, returned to the historic intersection of West 25th Street and Detroit Avenue, passing legislation to name the little park on the northwest corner of that intersection "Jimmy Bivins Park." Unknown to city officials at the time, the same park had eighty years earlier been dedicated as a memorial to Bernard "Brick" Masterson, a popular near west side ward leader, who was also associated with the sport of boxing--as a member of the historic La Salle club and as the father of a promising young boxer who, in the early days, trained with Johnny Kilbane in Jimmy Dunn's gym on Detroit Avenue. No matter the inadvertent slight to "Brick." Had he been alive to witness the renaming of his park, he probably would have been honored to share it with a man like Bivins. It would be entirely in keeping with history and tradition at this epicenter of boxing in Cleveland.

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The Campbell Block was for many years one of the most recognizable buildings in the Old Angle neighborhood on Cleveland's near west side. It was actually at one time two separate buildings located just east of Pearl (West 25th) Street, between Vermont and Viaduct Avenues. Both were built by Alexander Campbell and both came about as a result of the construction of the Superior Viaduct, Cleveland's first high level bridge, which opened to traffic in 1878. In the course of planning construction of the west side approach to the Viaduct, the City had purchased an eighty foot wide swath of land (part of the Alonzo Carter Allotment) located just east of the intersection of Pearl Street and Vermont Avenue. This purchase split a number of parcels of land and, among other things, created a triangular piece of land with frontage on Pearl Street, Vermont Avenue and the new Viaduct Avenue. During the period 1877-1882, Campbell, a Scottish immigrant who had settled in Cleveland in 1867 and had become a prominent paving contractor in the city, purchased all of the land interests which comprised the triangular area with the intent of constructing a commercial building and hotel on the land.

Campbell's first building, identified on early maps as "Campbell's Block" and located on the eastern part of the triangular piece of land, was a three-story wood and brick building which fronted on Viaduct Avenue. It was completed in 1880. The upper two floors were devoted to apartment suites, while the first floor was divided into seven store fronts for retail merchants, among whom over the years were butchers, confectioners, cigar-makers, barbers, saloon keepers and others. One of those store fronts was home to the offices of the Cleveland Graphic, a weekly Democrat newspaper. And, in 1886, according to the Plain Dealer, this was where Charles Salen, co-owner of the Graphic and County Democrat party leader, organized Cleveland's first amateur baseball league, which played its games on the southeast side at Beyerle's Park (later called Forest City Park) for several years, before moving to Brookside Park on the west side.

The second Campbell Block building—which many Clevelanders still remember—was built in 1892, just to the west of the first building. It was a red brick five-story building that was originally planned as a hotel, but became instead an apartment building with retail store fronts on the first floor. This building had frontage on both Viaduct Avenue and Pearl Street. In 1897, the building received acclaim for its innovative fire escape system—called the "Burden" fire escape, which enabled fire fighters to extract people from a burning building using a wire basket hauled along rails attached to projections from the roof and exterior sides. This new fire escape had been promoted and installed on the building by Isaac Kidd, Alexander Campbell's son-in-law and the father of the future-famed World War II war hero, Admiral Isaac Campbell Kidd. Like the first building, this building also had a variety of retail tenants on the first floor. In the post World War II era, the most famous of these in the neighborhood were J & L Seafoods, Green's Cafe, and the Old Angle Gym.

By the time World War II arrived, Alexander Campbell's heirs now owned and managed the two Campbell Block buildings. In 1948, the first building--said by one County official to be in "very poor shape," was torn down and in the same year the second was conveyed out of the family. Gradually, as the surviving building aged and deteriorated, it emptied of its apartment residents and became--from a revenue perspective, primarily a site for billboard signs. It's three locally famous first floor tenants—J & L Seafoods, Green's Cafe, and the Old Angle Gym, however, continued to operate their businesses there until the very the end. That end came in late December 1975 when a wrecking ball knocked down the building, demolishing the Block that the Superior Viaduct and Alexander Campbell had created almost 100 years earlier.

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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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