Train Avenue on the west side of Cleveland is undoubtedly so named because it follows the tracks of the Big Four Railroad in a northeasterly direction from the old Stockyards near Clark Avenue and West 61st Street almost all the way to the Cuyahoga River. If you travel to Train Avenue's western end today, you'll see on the south side of the street—just before you get to the West 61st Street intersection—several old red brick buildings. Near the top of one are two granite stones, one carved with the word "Bottle" and the other with "Works." On the building next to that, you'll see another granite stone, this one carved with the year "1913." Whether you're a beer lover or not, give yourself a pat on the back, for you have just arrived at the place where the Standard Brewing Company once manufactured Erin Brew beer—one of the most popular beers in the history of Cleveland.

The Standard Brewing Company had its origins in the founding of the Kress-Weiss Brewing Company in 1902. In that year, Stephen S. Creadon, a west side saloonkeeper and second generation Irish-American, entered into an agreement with German immigrant brewer Andrew Kress and several investors to produce a weiss (light wheat) beer out of an old butcher shop located on the corner of Sackett and Louis (West 32nd) Streets, in today's Clark-Fulton neighborhood. Unfortunately, the venture faltered, and Creadon and Kress soon parted ways. In 1904, Creadon, who retained the lease to the brewery building, brought in new investors and Jaroslav Pavlik, a Czech immigrant brewer, and incorporated anew under the name of the Standard Brewing Company. Pavlik brewed lager beer—darker and heavier than weiss beer—and sales quickly took off. The following year, the growing firm recapitalized and moved to a larger facility, an old flour mill located on the north side of Train Avenue near the West 61st street intersection.

Just one year after moving to its new location, the young company faced a serious challenge to its continued existence. In November 1906, J. P. Kraus, a banker with First National Bank which had financed the new venture and controlled most of the company's stock, proposed that its directors approve a sale of their business to Cleveland and Sandusky Brewing Company. The latter was a large regional brewery which had been gobbling up local independent breweries in the Cleveland and Sandusky areas since 1897. Standard Brewing's directors—led by Creadon, whose experiences as a saloon keeper had perhaps persuaded him to stay away from conglomerates—voted to stay independent and rejected the proposed sale. However, Creadon now had to find new financing for his company and find it quickly. His search ended with John T. Feighan, a Forest City Savings and Trust Company banker, who, like Creadon, was a member of the west side Irish community. Feighan's bank, which since 1903 had been located in a new building on the southwest corner of Pearl (West 25th) Street and Detroit Avenue, was right across the street from Creadon's other business—his neighborhood saloon. Soon Feighan became not only a lender and director of Standard Brewing, but also an officer of the company, serving first as its treasurer and then later as its president after Creadon's death in 1921.

Creadon's savvy in the saloon business, Feighan's business acumen, and Pavlik's brewing skills: They were a winning combination. By 1913, new brewery buildings had gone up on both the north and south sides of Train Avenue and the company was now marketing Pavlik's lager under the name of Erin Brew, making it a favorite among Cleveland's west side Irish-American community. According to the company's 1914 corporate report, between the years 1906 and 1913 it almost doubled production, increasing annual output from 40,000 barrels to 75,000 in that period. As it approached the end of that decade, Standard Brewing Company had become one of Cleveland's largest and most successful independent breweries. Then, in 1919, the State of Ohio banned the sale and manufacture of liquor within the state, and one year after that the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was passed, ushering in the era of national Prohibition. Standard Brewing Company, like several other Cleveland breweries that survived Prohibition, converted its manufacturing facilities to the production of ginger ale and other soft drinks. When Prohibition ended in 1933, those breweries were able to quickly shift production back to beer. By May of that year, Standard Brewing Company was once again producing Erin Brew beer for a very thirsty consumer public.

In the 1940s, just after the end of World War II, Standard Brewing Company, under the leadership of John T. Feighan and George Creadon, son of founder Stephen Creadon, entered into a series of annual agreements to sponsor radio and TV broadcasts of Cleveland Indians baseball games. When the Indians won the World Series in 1948, Erin Brew beer went from being the favorite beer of Cleveland's Irish community to being one of the most loved beers in all of Cleveland. Responding to this increased demand, in 1950 the company built an extensive new bottling and canning facility just west of its earlier twentieth-century buildings on Train Avenue. Sadly, this would be the peak of Standard Brewing Company's successful operations in Cleveland.

The decade of the 1950s marked the beginning of the end for Cleveland's brewing industry, as a changing consumer public and improved transportation facilities promoted the success of large national breweries at the expense of smaller local breweries. Standard Brewing Company was one of the last of Cleveland's independent breweries to succumb, selling its brewery facilities to the F & M Schaefer Brewing Company of New York in 1961. Three years after that, Schaefer sold the facilities to C. Schmidt & Sons Inc., a large Philadelphia brewery. By the mid-1960s, Erin Brew was replaced by Standard Premium and soon the once most popular beer in Cleveland was just a memory.

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Located on the south end of the Stockyards neighborhood of mostly working-class homes, the two story brick Italianate-style house at 7403 Denison Avenue stands out, especially because of its cupola and intricate balustrade craftsmanship. Built in 1866 for Alexander Kimberley, the house is not only one of the oldest in the neighborhood, but it is also one of the neighborhood's few remaining houses of this type of architectural design.

Who was Alexander Kimberley, you might ask? He was not an early Cleveland industrialist like James Farnan who with his family's brass factory wealth built a similarly beautiful Italianate home in the Detroit-Shoreway neighborhood (see Cleveland Historical story: "The House that Brass Built"). Nor was he a large-scale real estate developer like Benjamin Tyler who could easily afford his elegant Italianate summer home on the north end of the Stockyards neighborhood (see Cleveland Historical story: "B. F. Tyler House"). While neither a James Farnan nor a Benjamin Tyler, Alexander Kimberley still found a path to moderate wealth in mid-nineteenth-century Cleveland, one that enabled him to build the beautiful house that is the subject of this story. It's a house which has now stood on the top of the ridge at Denison Avenue and West 73rd Street for more than 150 years.

So how did he do it? Alexander Kimberley was an immigrant from Birmingham, England. When he arrived in Cleveland in 1846 as a nineteen year old boy, the city was just beginning its transition from commercial hub to industrial powerhouse. In the 15-year period from 1845-1860, the urban population exploded from 14,000 to 44,000, a more than 300% increase. Alexander Kimberley decided to make his money by serving that growing population. He began by operating saloons. By 1852, he had opened his first, near the docks at the foot of Superior Street. Three years later, partnering with his younger brother Frederick, he opened a second, this one on Public Square, across from where the County Court House sat at the time. Perhaps he intended this saloon to serve a more genteel clientele than the first. The brothers advertised that their "Arcade Dining Saloon" would feature an "Eating House on the European Plan." In 1857, Kimberley, now thirty years old, capped off his saloon entrepreneurship by opening a third saloon--this one he called a restaurant--on Merwin Street, near West Street, not far from where the Flat Iron cafe sits today on the east bank of the Flats.

There are no records extant to tell us exactly how much money Kimberley made from these three saloons, but it must have been substantial. And, like many of the lower socio-economic classes who began to make money in Cleveland's growing mid-nineteenth-century economy, Kimberley decided to invest in real estate in Ohio City, which soon merged with Cleveland to become the latter city's west side. He purchased a house on Detroit Street just east of Kentucky (W. 38th) Street in 1853, living there and operating a millinery store out of the first floor. In 1859, he made his second investment, a commercial lot on Detroit near Hanover (W. 28th) Street. By the time the 1860 census arrived, Alexander Kimberley was no longer a saloon keeper. It is likely that when the census-taker asked what his profession or trade was, Kimberley responded with some pride, "I am a merchant."

In 1864, Alexander Kimberley purchased eighteen acres of land on the south side of Ridge Road (now Denison Avenue) in what was then Brooklyn Township from Rufus K. Winslow, one of the founders of the Academy of Natural Sciences, later known as the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. The land lay about two and one-half miles southwest of Kimberley's home on Detroit Street. By this time, he was married and the father of two children. Within two years' time, construction of the ornate house in the country which is the subject of this story was completed and the family moved in. When the 1870 census was taken four years later, Kimberley stated that he was now a farmer--most likely a gentleman farmer, because he continued to operate his millinery store in town and invest in real estate in the Detroit Street area of the near west side. Among his most significant projects was the development in 1873 of a commercial building complex on the south side of Detroit Avenue between Hanover (W. 28th) and State (W. 29th) Streets, which he built in partnership with his brother David. The complex featured a number of retail store fronts, two meeting halls, and one building known as the Kimberley Block.

Alexander Kimberley died in 1885 after suffering a stroke. The Italianate house at 7403 Denison was sold a few years later to immigrants from Germany, the Ernst Stern family. The Sterns lived in the house until 1916, when it was sold to a building supply company that used the home as an office. Ever since, the property has been used for commercial purposes, although as late as 1940, the second floor of the house was leased to renters. Most recently, the grand old house served as the home of a waffle house and ice cream store.

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According to legend, Prince Vlad III, the fifteenth century Wallachian prince who inspired Bram Stoker to create Dracula, once cruelly impaled a thousand Saxons on stakes in his bloody quest to conquer neighboring Transylvania. While Vlad the Impaler was an actual historical figure and while there is some historical evidence that the Saxons of Transylvania may have crossed paths with him in his incursions in the late 1400s into their lands, the legend itself is likely an exaggerated account of a battle gory by today's standards, but not so much so by those of the fifteenth century. Yet the legend does suggest something about the west side Transylvanian Saxon immigrants to the United States who, in 1907, purchased a large house at 7001 Denison Avenue in the Cleveland Stockyards neighborhood and converted it into a place they called the Sachsenheim. The word translates literally to "Saxons' Home." As you read a little bit more about the Saxons from Transylvania, you will understand why having a home was so important to them.

The Saxons were ethnic Germans who, at the invitation of King Geza II of Hungary, began immigrating in the twelfth century into Transylvania--at the time a vast, but thinly populated area east of Hungary, near lands further to the east that later became the Romanian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia. The Saxons called Transylvania "Siebenburgen"--seven towns, after the original seven fortified settlements they built there. Over time they built more towns and villages. As centuries passed, Transylvania--not Germany, became their home. They survived Vlad the Impaler's assault upon their home in the fifteenth century, but the mid-nineteenth century brought a new threat to their home when nationalism took root in eastern Europe. The ruling Hungarians implemented a policy called Magyarization, which aimed at destroying the language and culture of all non-Hungarians. And, the Romanians, by now forming a majority of the population, contended that Transylvania should become part of a Romanian state.

Saxons began leaving Transylvania in large numbers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many came here to Cleveland, where, by 1895, colonies existed on both the east and west sides of the city. Like other immigrant groups did in America's pre-welfare society, they formed local fraternal benefits organizations called Erster Siebenburgen Sachsen Kranken Untersteutszung Verein ("First Transylvanian Saxons Sick Benefit Society") to protect members of their community from catastrophic illness and industrial workplace injury and death. These local organizations later led to the creation of a national organization, known today as the Alliance of Transylvania Saxons (ATS) with local branches here in Cleveland and elsewhere in the United States. It was west side Cleveland's Branch 1 that in 1907 bought and converted the dwelling at 7001 Denison Avenue into the Sachsenheim so that its members would have a place to gather and engage in cultural activities.

The Eintracht Singing Society, organized in 1897, practiced and performed at the Sachsenheim. In 1904, Branch 1 and the Eintracht united, according to an ATS publication, "beginning a period of intensive civic and cultural work in Cleveland." In 1902, Branch 4 was organized for women. Both branches over the years have actively maintained the Sachsenheim as well as planned the scheduling of cultural activities there. In 1905, a second singing society was organized, "Hermania," which in 1922 united with the earlier formed singing society to form Eintracht-Hermania, the predecessor of today's surviving mixed chorus, Eintracht-Saxonia Sachsenchor. Over the years, other cultural groups were organized at the Sachsenheim, including a cultural dance group called the Cleveland Saxon Dance Group. These cultural groups perform today not only here in the United States, but also internationally in Europe.

The Sachsenheim itself changed over the years. Renovations and expansions were made to the building--one in 1910 and and a second in 1925, which added a ballroom, two bowling alleys, a music room, dining room, a restaurant, and other amenities to the facility. The Sachsenheim also opened itself during this era to the Stockyards Neighborhood, allowing local residents and organizations to use the hall for weddings, showers and other events. The restaurant today hosts a weekly Taco Tuesday and is a popular gathering place for young people in the neighborhood.

Over the years since its founding, the Sachensheim has been maintained primarily through revenues raised by the events of the cultural activities groups. The women of the Auxiliary Committee of Branch 4 have for years provided catering services for events at the hall. Money is also raised by the Sachsenheim's bi-annual homemade sausage sale that, according to the ATS, is "well known around town." As a result of the efforts of these two local branches of the Alliance of Transylvania Saxons and others, as well as that of the singing society Eintracht-Saxonia Sachsenchor, and with help from time to time from other organizations and the residents of the Stockyards neighborhood, the Sachsenheim at 7001 Denison Avenue, while very far away from Transylvania, continues to this day to be the Transylvanian Saxons' home in Cleveland.

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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.

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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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He was caught by chance. In early December 1945, Cleveland police officers had picked up and questioned two 14-year old girls on an unrelated matter. The girls mentioned a 12-year old boy in the neighborhood who had boasted about setting fires. The boy was brought in and he eventually confessed to setting the March 11, 1944 fire that the Cleveland Plain Dealer called "one of the most spectacular and disastrous" in the city's history. He said that he had done it for a thrill.

The fire that the boy set was at the Cleveland Union Stockyards on West 65th Street between the Big Four railroad tracks and Storer Avenue. It destroyed ten acres of pens and adjoining buildings on the stockyards' 40-acre property. Billowing black clouds of smoke from the fire could be seen for miles and prompted hundreds of people to call the Plain Dealer to find out what was burning. Newspaper accounts claimed that 25,000 people turned out to watch 15 Cleveland Fire Department engine companies battle the blaze for hours.

When it was all over, Cleveland firefighters Norman Kitzerow and Patrick Mangan lay dead and three other firemen had suffered life-threatening injuries in the fire fight. Over 100 animals--hogs and cattle, had died too, some in the blaze itself and others afterwards when, running crazed on W. 65th Street, they were shot dead by police armed with submachine guns.

Cleveland's stockyards hadn't always been as large as they were at the time of the Great Fire. Nor had they always been located on W. 65th Street. For most of the nineteenth century, a number of small stockyards existed in the city, with the largest of these in the Walworth Run valley near Columbus Street. In 1881, a group of Cleveland businessmen joined together to form the Cleveland Union Stockyards Company and aggregate the city's stockyards on a nine acre parcel of land on what was then considered the far west side of Cleveland. Adjacent lots were purchased in the decades that followed.

By 1926, the peak year of Cleveland Union Stockyards activity, one million hogs, 400,000 sheep, and 135,000 cattle were annually slaughtered there. In that era, the Stockyards were the third largest industry in Cleveland, each year doing fifty million dollars worth of business. It was also the seventh largest stockyard in the United States, and the largest between New York and Chicago.

In the short term, the Stockyards recovered from the 1944 fire. Employees were seen the next day building temporary pens on the site. But just as most Clevelanders in the 1940s didn't know that their city was already sliding toward decline, Stockyards officials didn't yet realize that the glory days of their enterprise were behind them. All around the country, large stockyards, including Cleveland's, were opening up smaller branch stockyards closer to other communities they served. And when companies like Swift & Co. decided in the 1950s and early 1960s to abandon Cleveland as a meatpacking center, the end for the Cleveland Union Stockyards was near.

Union Stockyards closed in 1968. Another entity, Cleveland Livestock Market Several, tried to keep the stockyards open and did so until 1974, when it ended its operations. The property was then sold, the pens and associated buildings were torn down, and a K-Mart was built on the site.

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