For a long time, it was part of the most prominent geographical feature of the west side of Cleveland. A pleasant little winding brook, the Walworth Run had its headwaters near what is today the intersection of Clark Avenue and West 65th Street. It flowed from there northeasterly to the Cuyahoga River, a distance of about three miles. The valley through which it passed was wide, with hillsides that became so steep as they neared the Cuyahoga River, that they formed a natural boundary between what came to be known as the west and south sides of town.
Walworth Run was reputedly named after pioneer settler Judge John Walworth, who lived in Cleveland for just six years before his untimely death in 1812. When Walworth died, the Run was still that pleasant little brook. But two decades later that began to change. The Ohio & Erie Canal was built. Industry began to come to Cleveland. And with industry came thousands of migrants and immigrants. And then, sometimes in concert, other times at odds, local government, industry, and new residents threatened, endangered and finally ended the existence of Walworth Run.
Culverts and bridges built over it by the city on occasion collapsed, or were washed away in storms, spilling stones, iron, and other materials into it. Slaughterhouses, breweries and oil refineries, which located along the Run near the Big Four railroad tracks, used it as an open sewer for their industrial waste. Residents did much the same, dumping down the hillsides and into the Run everything from table scraps to ashes to tin cans to broken glass. To alleviate flooding in the Isle of Cuba, the west side Czech community located just south of the Run, the City built storm sewers that channeled rain water into it. Eventually, the Walworth Run became so swollen and polluted that, by the early 1870s, nearby residents, whose lands had by this time been annexed to the City of Cleveland, were clamoring for City Hall to do something about it.
George Howlett, a professional painter and immigrant from England, was one of those residents. He knew the Walworth Run well. In 1850, when he was just 25 year old, he and his wife Sarah moved from Cleveland, crossing the Cuyahoga River to become residents of what was then still Brooklyn Township. In 1861, he purchased the old William Burton House at 221 Burton Street (today, 2678 West 41st Street). The Greek Revival styled house sat (and still does today) less than a half mile south of Walworth Run. George regularly took walks along the Run, enjoying its beauty and country-like feel. As much as anyone else, he was an eyewitness to the transformation of the picturesque brook into a foul-smelling, litter-clogged dank body of water.
In August 1873, after the area had been annexed to Cleveland, a group of residents met with the City Board of Health. In this era, the science of bacteriology was still in its infancy and many still believed that the odors from such a polluted waterway could cause fatal diseases if inhaled. When the Board appeared to be unresponsive to their fears and complaints, they marched over to Becker Hall at the corner of Columbus (West 25th) Street and Queen Avenue to organize. The radicals wanted to press the city to evict all slaughterhouses from the Run. George Howlett, who had been elected secretary, convinced them to instead petition the City to abate the nuisance by enclosing the entire Walworth Run—all nearly three miles of it, in an underground sewer.
For the two decades that followed, Cleveland City officials deliberated, delayed and sometimes battled in court with residents and other interested parties, over just how to construct such a sewer and, just as importantly, how to pay for it. While George Howlett, who died in 1892, never lived to see it, the matter was finally resolved in 1897 when the City commenced construction of the Walworth Run Sewer. It was an engineering marvel and then the largest sewer project ever undertaken by the City of Cleveland. The diameter of the pipe in much of the sewer was more than 16 feet—large enough for a locomotive to pass through it. It was designed to separate sewage from storm water, sending the former into an interceptor pipe that emptied into Lake Erie, while the latter was transported along a separate chamber into the Cuyahoga River. Completed in 1903, the project eliminated the Walworth Run as a geographical feature of the west side of Cleveland, replacing it with a sewer and atop that a street that bore the Run's name.
Today, more than 100 years later, the Walworth Run Sewer is still here. It is an integral part of the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District sewer system for the west side of Cleveland. Some of Walworth Avenue too still remains, although parts have been vacated and other parts have been renamed Train Avenue. But that pleasant little winding brook called Walworth Run that once flowed northeasterly into the Cuyahoga River separating Cleveland's west and south sides? It has been gone for so long that most Clevelanders have forgotten that it ever even existed.
]]>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.
]]>In 19th-century Cleveland, bridge-building was big. The Columbus Street Bridge—a 200-foot covered structure completed around 1836—was the city’s first major span. It supplanted a series of less-permanent crossings such as a chained platform of floating logs and a wood-surface structure supported by pontoon boats. The opening of the Columbus Street Bridge (combined with Cleveland’s destruction of an older bridge to the north) fomented the infamous Ohio City Bridge War. Other projects followed, including the Center Street Bridge, the Main Street Bridge and the Seneca (West 3rd) Street Bridge. Foreshadowing later disasters, the Seneca Street structure collapsed in 1857. The official cause was “overloaded with cattle.” In 1878 a milestone was reached when the Superior Viaduct was completed. This was the first Cleveland span tall enough to let river traffic pass under it without enacting a swing or levitation mechanism.
But the century’s largest bridge by far—as well as the one most beset by misconception and misfortune —was the Central Viaduct, built by the King Iron Bridge and Manufacturing Company and completed in 1888. What most people refer to as the Central Viaduct stood roughly where the Innerbelt Bridge (I-90) is now located. It was 2,839 feet long and extended from Jennings Avenue (now West 14th Street) to Central Avenue (now Carnegie Avenue). Known as a "stilt" type bridge, it had a turntable section that pivoted horizontally to let tall ships pass. However, the Jennings-Central span was only part of the Central Viaduct initiative. A second bridge—the Walworth Run section—connected Abbey Avenue to Lorain Avenue at W. 25th Street. Rebuilt in 1986, the 1,088-foot bridge continues to link Ohio City with what is now Tremont.
Even before the Jennings-Central portion of the Viaduct was completed, tragedy struck. On the afternoon of January 5, 1888, part of the structure collapsed, killing several workers. Investigators concluded that a large water-carrying machine ran off the end of a temporary wooden trestle. On the way down, it took out two sections of the nascent bridge which collapsed on workers beneath. In 1892, disaster struck again when a speeding streetcar jumped the tracks and crashed into an oncoming car.
Would that that were all. On the foggy evening of November 16, 1895, Railcar 642 of the Cleveland Electric Railway Company, heading west from downtown, crashed through a gate and plummeted 100 feet off the Viaduct into the Cuyahoga River. Unbeknownst to the passengers and crew, the center section (the “draw”) had been opened to permit the tugboat “Ben Campbell” towing a lumber barge to pass underneath. And unbeknownst to motorman Augustus Rogers, the power cutoff switch (designed to stop the streetcar when the draw was open) was broken. Of Car 642’s 21 passengers and crew, 17 died, including conductor Edward Hoffman who left behind a wife and 10-month-old son.
"Nothing like it recorded in the history of the Forest City," mourned the Cleveland Press. Interviewed by the paper, bystander Phil Beck recalled that "the car was running rapidly up until the time it reached the safety rail. It came to a standstill and the conductor jumped out and threw the switch. Then the motorman put the power on and the car moved forward at a high rate of speed. We all yelled to the motorman to stop, but he did not seem to heed nor hear us. [After crashing through a gate] he saw his peril and, without reversing the power, sprang to the bridge. He saved himself by catching the edge of the footwalk. Then the car dropped over the edge. It was going at such a high rate of speed that it did not seem that the front end dropped first, but seemed to sail out into the air and then drop down." On its descent, the car struck the bridge pilings and plunged head-first into the river. It took two days of searching with grappling hooks to recover the bodies from the river. Only one passenger, Patrick Looney, survived the plunge. Disabled and traumatized, Looney returned to County Clare, Ireland, where he lived out his life.
Upon seeing the open draw, motorman Augustus Rogers and three passengers had jumped from the car before it plunged. Rogers was accused of manslaughter and jailed. A month later he was freed and charges were dropped. Responsibility for the tragedy was placed on conductor Edward Hoffman, who had told the motorman to proceed through the gates.
The Viaduct’s draw span was replaced with a high-level truss bridge in 1912, but even that failed to put an end to the structure’s sad track record. On May 25, 1914, a fire at Fisher-Wilson Lumber Company underneath the bridge destroyed 300 feet of the Viaduct. The span was rebuilt but safety concerns remained, exacerbated by continuous sinking of land at the bridge’s western end.
Declared unalterably unsafe, the Central Viaduct was closed in 1941 and demolished shortly after World War II. By that time, plans for a grand “Innerbelt” project were underway, but funding and property-acquisition issues delayed the initiative. A new structure following the general path of the Central Viaduct was completed in 1962. Other than congestion, the new bridge was largely devoid of problems, although commercial truck traffic was banned from the bridge between 2008 and 2010 due to structural concerns. The entire span was replaced by the new George V. Voinovich Bridges, completed in September 2016. All that remains of the hard-luck Central Viaduct are several stone piers—fully visible from a ramped section of the Towpath Trail in northeast Tremont.
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