Brothers Martin and Michael Stumpf opened Cleveland’s first known brewery on Hamilton Street between Muirson (East 12th) and Canfield, just south of Lakeside Avenue. The proximity to rail service and ice from the winter lake made the area an ideal site for a brewery to supply local saloons (before bottled beer, local commercial distribution was the standard method of the times). During the next 15 years, the brothers split as partners but each continued brewing independently in the same near-east Hamilton Street neighborhood.

In 1859, Michael Stumpf sold his operation to the newly-organized Lyon Brewery, formed by Paul Kindsvater, a popular local saloonkeeper, and brewmaster Jacob Mall. By this time, Cleveland’s brewing industry was thriving. Like most breweries in the city, Lyon was operated by a German brewmaster. They produced the lagers preferred by Cleveland’s large Eastern European ethnic communities, replacing earlier common ales. The business and facility expanded rapidly and thrived into the 1890s as Mall’s leadership role was passed to his son-in-law. In 1896, in pursuit of greater production capacity, a new larger plant was built on Davenport Street.  In the mid-1800s, Davenport Street connected Canfield Street (East 14th) with Briggs Street (East 22nd) along the edge of the downtown bluff— about 70 feet above the rail tracks along the Lake Erie shore. While local competition was fierce, growing demand generally meant there was enough business to go around. However, a new challenge was emerging as consolidated national brewers threatened local brewers’ market shares.

Meanwhile, George F. Gund (b. 1855) grew up in La Crosse, Wisconsin, where he later worked as a banker and with his father in the John Gund Brewing Company. George Gund relocated to Seattle in 1890, bought a local brewery, and expanded it. In 1897, he moved to Cleveland and purchased and renamed Jacob Mall’s Lyon Brewery to The Gund Brewing Company. Amidst all the competition, Gund refocused his business model on the individual consumer and away from the traditional saloon distribution. He built a bottling plant, upgraded working conditions and methods, and packaged three-bottle cardboard cartons in lots of eight to distribute to homes near and far. Gund’s Crystal Lager satisfied thirsty Clevelanders. The brewery continued to thrive into the 20th century under George F. Gund’s leadership while he cultivated other business interests in beverages, banking, mining, insurance, and real estate. Gund died in 1916, leaving his chair to his son, George F. Gund II.

George F. Gund II arrived in Cleveland from Seattle having finished Harvard Business School and a banking position. He personalized his arrival with Gund’s "Clevelander" beer, which sold for the next few years. In early 1919, Ohio enacted statewide prohibition rules and Gund ceased brewing beer and transferred his reserve inventory to the Pilsner Brewing Company of Cleveland to exhaust the inventory of Gund beer. During Prohibition, the Gund family refocused business away from brewing towards real estate management, banking, and various other business endeavors including decaffeinated coffee, later sold to the Kellogg Corporation and re-branded as Sanka. In the process, George F. Gund II became one of Cleveland’s foremost bankers as Chairman of the Cleveland Trust Company. His sons maintained the family’s Cleveland presence with philanthropic efforts (The Gund Foundation) and professional sports interests for the next century.

Gund Realty continued to own the Davenport property throughout the Prohibition years. The pre- and post-Prohibition eras also saw constant tensions within the industry between large national brewing conglomerates and smaller local operations in cities throughout the country. With the repeal of Prohibition came a rebirth of the local brewing industry. Gund Realty leased the Davenport facility to the Sunset (later Sunrise) Brewing Company. The new managers renovated and resumed the reliance upon bottled and canned beer with emphasis as a shipping brewer. More federal legal challenges forced another ownership change and product evolution. Sunrise emerged with its premier brand Tip Top Beer by the end of the decade. In 1939, Sunrise Brewing, still operating at the Davenport facility, was renamed Tip Top Brewing Company. More controversy ensued into the first half of the 1940s with rumors of the company’s connection to organized crime. By utilizing wartime rationing regulation loopholes, Tip Top Brewery added hard liquor sales to their beer business to gain market advantages in Cleveland saloons.

In 1944, Tip Top Brewing was sold to the Brewing Corporation of America (Carling Beer) and brewing operations ceased on Davenport Avenue. The building continued to be utilized as a beer and beverage warehousing and distributing facility for the next few decades. From the mid-1970s to the 2010s, the City of Cleveland and the Pennsylvania Railroad, along with several local banking and mortgage agencies and developers carried out property transfers, demolitions, and rezoning initiatives of the Davenport and neighboring properties as urban planning and development transformed the district.

The Davenport Avenue roadway was removed between East 14th and 16th Streets. The area once defined by Stumpf, Lyon, Gund, Sunrise, and finally Tip Top brewing operations is now occupied by Cleveland’s WKYC television studios and the Cleveland FBI headquarters building. The location that played a part in more than a century of the brewing industry’s evolution from a local to a global scale also marked the long arc of Gund family's business and family fortunes, which still resonate in Cleveland today.

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Even people who live nearby may not know about Duck Island. Among suburbanites, the name is even less likely to resonate. What’s more, if you do a Google Images search you’ll get pretty pictures of an island off the cost of Maine. Some of these photos include ducks, but none of them are Cleveland’s Duck Island.

So where is Duck Island and what does it have to do with ducks? The answer to the first question is that Duck Island is a small community (perhaps one square mile) between Tremont and Ohio City. Bisected by Abbey Avenue, Duck Island is bordered by Carnegie Avenue to the north, Train Avenue and Scranton Road to the south and east, and the RTA Red Line rapid tracks to the west. For municipal planning and management purposes, Duck Island is considered part of Tremont. The answer to the second question is that Duck Island has nothing whatsoever to do with ducks (although you may see an occasional duck sign or banner). Most folks believe that Duck Island got its name during Prohibition—a place where bootleggers would “duck” the law.

But Duck Island’s profile is rising rapidly. In fact, it might be hard to find a Cleveland locale whose popularity has increased more swiftly. Plans are underway for large “ultra green” housing developments at West 20th and Lorain; West 20th and Abbey; and West 19th and Freeman. Toney new homes dot Columbus Road and West 17th, 18th and 19th Streets. Abbey Park, located at the corner of West 19th Street and Smith Court is earmarked for a major facelift. Gateway Clinic on Abbey Avenue has become a haven for quality pet care. Several new breweries are on the books. And to the cheers of myriad residents, St. Wendelin Catholic Church on Columbus Road reopened its doors in 2012—two years after being closed by the Catholic Dioceses of Cleveland.

To be sure, a number of residents are squeamish about Duck Island’s burgeoning popularity. Concerns about inflation, noise, parking and population density are common and largely valid. Fortunately, organizations like Tremont West Development Corporation, the Duck Island Block Club, the Duck Island Development Collaborative, Cleveland Neighborhood Progress and Kent State University’s Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative are working hard to build figurative bridges. That’s a good thing because Duck Island has become too hot to not trot: It’s equidistant between Tremont and Ohio City; a short drive, train ride or walk to downtown; and a hop/skip/jump to riverfront destinations like the Towpath Trail, Scranton Peninsula and Merwin’s Wharf. Plus it has killer views of the city.

Like Tremont and Ohio City, Duck Island is an old neighborhood. Most of its original housing stock dates to the late 1800s. These homes were inhabited primarily by blue-collar workers who staffed steel mills, factories, warehouses and river-shipping interests in the Flats. In fact, the geography of Duck Island is such that, until the early 20th Century, Tremont residents could not walk north or east without first descending into the Flats. In 1887, however, the Central Viaduct, was constructed. Initially, the Viaduct consisted of two bridges: The first structure (more than one-half-mile long) extended from Jennings Ave. (now West 14th Street) to Central Avenue (now Carnegie Avenue). It followed the same basic path taken by what is now Interstate 90. Deemed unsafe, the bridge was torn down in the early 1940s. The second structure—the Abbey Avenue Bridge—continues to bind Tremont and Ohio City, with Duck Island smack in the middle.

Even with the bridges, Duck Island retained most of its isolated, blue collar status throughout the 20th Century. That sense of sequestration was exacerbated by the fact that, over the years, Duck Island was alternately claimed and disowned by Ohio City and Tremont. In the mid 1920s, moreover, Duck Island became even more isolated on the west when a deep trench was dug to accommodate railroad tracks for passenger trains serving the new Union Terminal complex. A half-dozen city blocks were removed—thus separating Duck Island from Ohio City. The only bridge subsequently erected to cross the divide was on Abbey Avenue.

Beginning in the 1970s, populations declined precipitously throughout the area. Businesses closed and even fewer people than usual wanted to move to a disadvantaged neighborhood with elderly housing stock and close proximity to a downtown with little to offer. However, Duck Island might have been rediscovered sooner, were it not for residents’ extreme suspicions about redevelopment. This mindset peaked in the 1990s, when residents staunchly opposed any initiatives that smelled even vaguely of gentrification. Rosemary Vinci, a community leader with a frequently ambiguous agenda, urged residents to reduce density by acquiring neighboring properties and demolishing dwellings. Vinci was a former strip club manager who, at the time of her death in 2008, was being investigated alongside her superiors, Jimmy Dimora and Frank Russo. Vinci also led opposition to a development next to the West 25th Street Station along Columbus Road south of Lorain. Rosemary’s father, by the way, was James Vinci, reputed organized crime figure and owner of the famed Diamond Jim's in the Flats.

Vinci or no Vinci, change is coming to Duck Island, including the kind of mixed-income, high-density residential development Rosemary so vociferously opposed. The plusses and minuses of urban renaissance will continue to be debated, but Duck Island’s unified wall of resistance is beginning to quack.

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One could easily mistake the recent proliferation of microbreweries and brew pubs springing up on what often seem to be every other block in Cleveland as a modern and unique phenomenon. All of this has occurred here before, however, and with even more vigor and success than today’s upstarts are enjoying. With the influx of beer-loving immigrants from Germany, Bohemia and Ireland after the Napoleonic Wars ended in 1815, Cleveland was a big, and expanding, beer-drinking town. Just as IPAs fuel the burgeoning beer market today, at the end of the 19th century it was the new German lager that was all the rage, and most of the two dozen breweries then producing upwards of half a billion barrels of beer, switched from ale to lager brewing. Ironically, the shift today is back in the other direction, from the now disdained lager, back to ale. In an attempt to take advantage of the huge profits being raked in by beer barons of the day such as Isaac Leisy and George Gund, in the spring of 1904 a grocer and tailor pooled their resources and built a state of the art brewery on Union Avenue and East 69th Street, and the Forest City Brewing Company was born.

Michael Albl was brought to America by his father in 1850, leaving behind his handicapped mother in Stenovic, a province of Pilsen in what was then Bohemia. Arriving in Cleveland, like many Czech immigrants of the time, Albl quickly found work as a cooper in Rockefeller’s refinery. In the winter of 1873 he opened a grocery at 4950 Broadway that would grow to become one of the largest in the area. By this time Albl was trusted and admired by his community and was often called on to serve as executor of estates and to offer business advice to his neighbors. He dabbled in real estate and the insurance business, and was elected to a string of political offices after garnering the support of the community. He was appointed judge on April 1, 1887, and waterworks trustee in 1890. In 1904 Albl teamed with fellow Czech Joseph Troyen to build a state of the art brewery just a short walk from Albl’s successful grocery and Troyen’s clothing shop. They recruited Vaclev Humel from the Pilsner Brewing Company on Cleveland’s west side to supply the beer brewing expertise they lacked.

The enormous building at 6920 Union Avenue was designed by Mueller & Mildner, a team of architects from Detroit who specialized in breweries throughout the Midwest and Canada at the turn of the 20th century. This was a hulking industrial building built more for function rather than form, but was described as, “the most distinctive and unusual industrial architecture to be found on this continent” by the journal Historic Preservation in 1975. The brewery was among the first to switch to steel fermenting tanks, vats and kegs, and coupled with the steel supports of the brewery itself, made it far less prone to fire than previous breweries. It opened with a brewing capacity of 50,000 barrels/year to serve a mostly local market, and is estimated to have cost $220,000 to construct.

Although the brewery was successful from the start and was featured in many of Cleveland’s saloons in the early 20th century, several difficulties had to be confronted by Albl and his team. A worker named Emil Kohlt was severely burned on July 16, 1909, when scalding wort was accidentally spilled on him. Just two years later Jerry Mrazek was the subject of the most grisly event that occurred at the brewery when his body was found boiled at the bottom of a huge brewing vat. Newspaper accounts vary, with one claiming he fell into the boiling liquid after fainting due to illness, while another maintains that it was suicide. Despite these accidents, the brewery was constantly expanding during these early years, and in 1913 a $25,000, three-story bottling line was planned. With construction nearing completion the night of December 17th of that year, and despite the brewmaster, Marian Hansky, living in a house directly across the street, two men armed with sledgehammers did extensive damage to the new addition and parts of the existing brewery. The men, who were never apprehended, were suspected of belonging to the Prohibition movement, which would be the biggest and most constant threat to Forest City Brewing.

Prohibition began in Ohio in 1919, a year before it became law across the United States. Forest City was one of the very few breweries in Cleveland that attempted to remain open during this period. Michael Albl’s son Frank attempted to keep Forest City afloat by producing Zem-Zem grape juice and XLNT De-Alcoholized beer, but was rumored to have continued supplying local speakeasies with the fully-alcoholized, illegal variety. After numerous lay-offs, Prohibition won and the brewery finally closed its doors in 1930, leaving only Pilsener Brewing Company operating in Cleveland by the end of Prohibition.

With the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, Forest City immediately went back into production. Hansky was still the brewmaster, brewing the famous Samson Ale—named after the brewery near Albl’s hometown in Bohemia that produced the original Budweiser. Forest City, better suited than most Cleveland brewers to resume production, accounted for 25% of the beer sold in the first year after Repeal, but soon struggled financially once the new beer conglomerates got up to speed. The brewery was purchased by the Carling Brewing Co. in 1944 for $477,000, but they would consolidate their production facilities four years later and the brewery on Union was closed and the equipment sold. The building was not well-suited for other businesses, and after a short period as Distributors Furniture Warehouse in the 1970s, the building was demolished in February 2012. Of all the many breweries that once proudly called Cleveland home, the Forest City Brewing Company's building on Union Avenue is the only one that has ever been named to the National Register of Historic Places.

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The Friendly Inn Social Settlement was founded in 1874 to provide a liquor-free gathering place for the residents of poor neighborhoods. Originally called the "Temperance Coffee House and Lunchroom," it eventually evolved into one of the city's first settlement houses. The charitable work of members of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) resulted in the establishment of multiple locations of the Friendly Inn within Cleveland at 634 St. Clair Street, 34 River (W. 11th) Street, and 71 Central Place. These affluent women reportedly left their coachmen and drivers, setting out on their own to mingle with the poor, pass out food, and read passages from the Bible. Groups like the WCTU would eventually become the spokespersons for the Prohibition era.

An article from the Cleveland Press states that the Friendly Inn was originally a place of boredom, but was transformed into a facility that was comfortable, well lit, and sanitary. The settlement houses encouraged those who spent time there to read and learn other skills.

Through donations from John D. Rockefeller and Stephen V. Harkness, one of the founders of Standard Oil Company, the Friendly Inn was able to consolidate its locations in 1888 into a three-story building called the Central Friendly Inn, located at 522 Central Avenue at the corner of Broadway. However, in 1894 the organization was facing a financial crisis. Administrators of the social settlement engineered a plan to raise the necessary funds to provide its services to the poor — the creation of the Woman's Edition of the Plain Dealer. Through negotiations with the managing editor, 200 women contributed to the process of writing and distributing the first edition of the fundraising newspaper on January 24, 1895.

In contrast to many other settlement houses in Cleveland and the United States, the Friendly Inn refrained from practices of segregation and kept its doors open to African Americans. The Friendly Inn was the first settlement house in Cleveland to operate with an interracial staff and by 1942 the organization was celebrating "Negro Health Week." Between 1950 to 1970 the demographics of the neighborhood in which the Friendly Inn operated switched from a primarily European immigrant to a predominantly African American population. In response to this change, the Friendly Inn created programs that specifically addressed issues faced by African Americans. The Inn provided employment training, housing assistance and hosted G.E.D classes to combat the increased rates of high school dropouts.

Currently, the Friendly Inn has included programs that focus on the role of the family by providing family camping trips and promoting the benefits of living a healthy lifestyle. In recent decades the Friendly Inn began to consolidate its branches, and in 2003 the organization moved into a 41,000-square-foot building located on 2386 Unwin Road.

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Luna Park opened in 1905 as the second in an international chain of amusement parks (all known as Luna Park) opened by Frederick Ingersoll, owner of the Ingersoll Construction Company. Ingersoll's company got its start building vending machines, roller coasters, and other amusement park rides. By 1901, however, the company had started building entire amusement parks as well. The two first Luna Parks opened in Cleveland and Pittsburgh in 1905. At its peak, Ingersoll's company ran over 40 amusement parks across the country and in such exotic locales as Mexico City and Berlin, Germany.

Luna Park was Euclid Beach Park's most significant competition throughout the early part of the 1900s. Unlike Euclid Beach Park, however, Luna Park charged admission at its gates and sold alcohol to its guests. Portions of the park were copied from the Luna Park (unaffiliated with Ingersoll's parks of the same name) in New York City's Coney Island. The park covered 35 acres of hilly ground in Cleveland's Woodland Hills neighborhood. In order to reach the entrance gates of Luna Park, patrons had to climb a steep flight of stairs. Later, an escalator was installed. Once inside, the park had a number of popular attractions, including a carousel, a ferris wheel, roller coasters, a funhouse, a dance hall, and a roller skating rink. The Luna Bowl, a 20,000 seat stadium on the park's grounds, played host to a number of sporting events and was home to two of Cleveland's earliest professional football teams in the 1920s: the Cleveland Bulldogs and the Cleveland Panthers.

Luna Park lost much of its popularity in the 1920s. Alcohol Prohibition during this time seriously hurt the beer-serving park (Euclid Beach was alcohol free throughout its history). The Great Depression led to a further decline in attendance, and most of the park was demolished in 1931.

By 1940, Luna Park had been replaced by the Woodhill Homes housing project.

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In 1873, Isaac Leisy and his two brothers (all originally from Bavaria in Germany) left their small brewery in rural Iowa and came to Cleveland after purchasing Frederick Haltnorth's brewery on Vega Avenue for $120,000. Haltnorth (who was also the proprietor of Haltnorth's Gardens -- a beer garden at East 55th Street and Woodland Avenue) had purchased the brewery in 1864 from Jacob Mueller, who originally opened it in 1858. Only weeks before purchasing Haltnorth's brewery, Isaac Leisy had been in Cleveland to attend the annual Brewer's Congress. Leisy must have been impressed with the opportunities for growth and prosperity in Cleveland, which was quickly becoming an industrial metropolis, as compared to those that existed in rural Iowa.

In the mid-1880s, Isaac Leisy (having bought out his brothers) renovated the old brewery and expanded its operations, constructing a multi-building, eight-acre campus along Vega Avenue and increasing beer production eightfold. The Leisy Brewery aimed to be as self-sufficient as possible, and to this end the brewery's grounds contained, for example, a bottling plant, stables for its fleet of horse-drawn delivery carriages, a cooperage, a blacksmith shop, and two 80-foot silos that held barley prior to its on-site malting. Self-sufficiency was important since competition among breweries in Cleveland at the time was fierce, with nearly twenty breweries operating in the city in 1890. To make matters more difficult for Leisy, in 1898 ten small Cleveland brewers joined the new Cleveland & Sandusky Brewing Co., a massive combination that signaled the brewing industry's turn towards consolidation. Isaac's son Otto took control of the company after his father's death in 1892 and promptly vowed to remain independent of the new combination. He wrote to the Plain Dealer in 1898, emphatically stating that "My firm has existed in Cleveland for over a quarter of a century; has prospered by honorable methods of trade, thereby obtaining, possessing and enjoying the confidence of the same. By its former methods my company proposes to preserve and maintain its trade, and in a fair way compete with its opponent, the huge beer trust."

Indeed, Leisy Brewing remained an independent, family-owned brewery throughout its entire history. It thrived in the decades before Prohibition, steadily increasing its sales and production. When Prohibition took effect in 1920 and brewing beer became illegal, the company made a short-lived attempt to produce non-alcoholic beverages. This proved to be unprofitable, and Leisy Brewing closed in 1923. Unlike some of Cleveland's other breweries which had also been forced to shut down during Prohibition, Leisy returned after the repeal of Prohibition in 1933. That year, Otto's son Herbert Leisy reopened the brewery, reequipping it with new machinery to replace the equipment that had been sold off during Prohibition. Industry consolidation, however, continued to chip away at Cleveland's small, independent breweries in the decades after Prohibition. Leisy Brewing finally closed in 1958, and its plant on Vega Avenue was demolished in the mid-1970s.

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