In 1933, Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin co-founded the Catholic Worker newspaper, which laid the groundwork for the Catholic Worker movement in the United States. The Catholic Worker was priced at “a penny a copy,” and continues to cost a penny today. The paper was crucial in spreading awareness about social issues that affected those who were struggling in the United States. From the Catholic Worker movement's inception, Day and Maurin highlighted the importance of personalism, prayer, hospitality, and community. In Maurin's “Easy Essay,” an early article in the Catholic Worker, he emphasized, “The Catholic Worker believes in creating a new society within the shell of the old with the philosophy of the new, which is not a new philosophy but a very old philosophy, a philosophy so old that it looks like new.”

Houses of Hospitality within the Catholic Worker community have been crucial in providing lodging and meals for many in need. Houses of Hospitality are similar to Progressive Era settlement houses, which aided the poor as well as recently arrived immigrants. Like settlement houses, Catholic Worker Houses of Hospitality allow those living there to be an active part of the community while living and interacting with those in need of support.

By the 1980s, several Catholic Worker Houses of Hospitality and communities had emerged nationwide. In 1984, several figures, which included longtime residents Bill and Judy Corrigan, Jim and Patty Schlecht (Sullivan), along with a recent newcomer from Mishawaka, Indiana, Joe Lehner, formed the Cleveland Catholic Worker to live out the philosophy established by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin. In 1986, a group of Catholic Workers on Cleveland’s Near West Side considered locations in the neighborhood where they could build community and witness the Gospel through word and deed. As Cleveland’s Catholic Worker grew, there was a need for a location to broaden the hospitality offered to the community, specifically for unhoused people in the area. The need for hospitality became a topic of discussion among the core members involved.


Dennis Sadowski, Jim Doherty, and Jim McHugh, three Catholic Workers, had been discussing living in community and were pivotal in the foundation of Cleveland’s Catholic Worker House of Hospitality, located at 3601 Whitman Avenue. The house offered a central meeting spot for many of Cleveland’s Catholic Workers, but before it was the Whitman House it was known as the “Mission House.” The Mission House was purchased by Saint Patrick Parish in 1873 and became the home for Marianist Brothers who taught at Saint Patrick’s School. Other groups such as the Ursuline Sisters, Jesuit volunteers, and Marianist volunteers stayed in the Mission House before the Catholic Worker.



Throughout the summer of 1986, various core members prayerfully weighed the pros and cons of living in community. In the end, they agreed that living in community opened them to be vulnerable to the basic questions that called them to a belief in Jesus. They knew they had to overcome the barriers that often keep people from middle-class backgrounds from encountering people living on the margins of society. 



After several meetings and discussions with St. Patrick’s Father Mark DiNardo, they made an agreement that the Catholic Worker would rent the former Mission House in the names of Sadowski, Doherty, and McHugh for $200, not including the utilities. In October 1986, Sadowski, Doherty, and McHugh, along with two unhoused gentlemen living on the streets, John “Hugh” Fee and John “Whitey” Pavlison, officially moved into the Mission House. The Mission Home then assumed a new name, Whitman House, that forever marked the Cleveland Catholic Catholic Worker’s presence in the neighborhood. In the years to come, many individuals would find community, prayer, and a source of shelter within the walls of this former convent.


Sadowski was the first to leave the house in 1987 after living there for roughly four months. Doherty lived there for 15 months, leaving in January 1988, and McHugh stayed until about 1990. Fee remained at the Whitman house until 2002, when he passed away. The date when Pavlison left and his whereabouts remain unknown. Throughout the years, the Whitman House provided a place for many generations of Catholic Workers to meet, live, eat, and engage in meaningful prayer and dialogue. 



Cleveland’s Catholic Worker began publishing a quarterly periodical, Inherit the Earth, in the late '80s. Inherit the Earth invited members of the Catholic Worker to contribute to the paper through articles, poetry, artwork, reflections, photography, and even recipes. Many of the articles focused on updates in the community from Catholic Workers, young and old. Each quarterly paper also included the community mission statement, which stated, “We are forming a loving and caring resistance community with a strong spiritual base which will enable us to share our lives with those who are broken, not just for their benefit, but ours as well, knowing that we are all sisters and brothers.” Many of the articles in this periodical emphasized the community's resistance to war through political and social commentaries written by members. Nonviolence is one of the aims of a Catholic Worker. Resisting the Cleveland National Air Show has been pivotal in the Catholic Worker’s protest against war. Through their pacifist resistance, Cleveland’s Catholic Worker hopes to inform and educate the public about the real purpose of the planes flown for entertainment each Labor Day. 

For many years, each Inherit the Earth issue included an update on the Community, which kept everyone in the loop on events and individuals living in the Whitman House and the extended Catholic Worker community. In the early 2000s, Whitman House struggled to maintain stable live-in volunteers. It was not until 2004 when multiple volunteers joined the Catholic Worker and lived in community that the house started to pick up with live-in Workers. In the fall of 2004, one Catholic Worker provided an update on the Whitman House and introduced nine Catholic Workers living there at the time. These introductions, full of inside jokes about the Worker's hygiene, give readers a glimpse of the friendships made while living together and forming close bonds through the volunteer work in which they all were involved. 

In January 2009, a meeting was called to discuss the continuance or possible relocation of the Catholic Worker from Whitman House. St. Patrick, which was the landlord of the Whitman House, had been included in a Cleveland Catholic Diocese–proposed merger with three other Near West Side churches — St. Malachi Parish, Community of St. Malachi, and St. Wendelin Parish. This meeting was called and functioned democratically to address any misunderstanding and to discuss the pros and cons of living at the Whitman House or relocating elsewhere. This meeting highlighted the importance of the Whitman House being conveniently located near necessary services and Catholic Worker operations. This meeting also focused on the importance of landlord-tenant relations between the Catholic Worker and who they decide to rent from, whether that be St. Patrick or a new landlord. 


Ultimately, the Cleveland Catholic Worker decided to relocate. This move was a three-year-long process. Although much smaller than the Whitman House, the new house at 2082 Fulton Road opened at full capacity with nine live-in volunteers in 2012. The Fulton House celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2022. This milestone brought Catholic Workers who lived there at the time together with workers who once lived in both Whitman and Fulton House in prior years. A special edition of Inherit the Earth came out that fall to commemorate the move to Fulton House. This edition included many photographs of Catholic Workers, young and old, current and former, and also included photos of the extended community.



The ten-year celebration of Fulton House gave an understanding of the community that has formed on Cleveland’s Near West Side. Catholic Workers celebrated the lifelong bonds they had made with one another and the awareness they had spread on issues regarding war and poverty, along with the importance of nonviolence. From the teachings of Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin in the early 20th century, their philosophy of personalism, prayer, and ultimately love have been a part of Cleveland’s Catholic Worker community for forty years.

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In the summer of 1975, Art MacDonald was 25. He had been kicked out of the Navy a few years before for his orientation. He had since partnered, and founded and continued to lead a Metropolitan Community Church (MCC) congregation in spite of death threats aimed at him, serious harassment and assaults on his congregation, and his lack of theological education. He had also founded High Gear the year before and continued to write for it, and he co-founded the Gay Educational and Awareness Resources (GEAR) Foundation earlier that year and continued to lead it.

GEAR intended to provide activities and services in hopes of uniting the lesbian and gay community. One of GEAR’s main purposes was furnishing information, through High Gear and a hotline, and another was providing social space, through the Gay Community Center. High Gear covered a wide variety of topics but mainly focused on political news affecting the gay and lesbian community and on lesbian and gay events in northeast Ohio. The hotline was staffed by volunteers and answered evening and weekend calls. Some callers were simply going out of their way to harass the community, but the majority of calls were actually from gay and lesbian people with a variety of concerns: those considering suicide, individuals looking for nonjudgmental healthcare for STIs, folks wanting information about the bars and baths, and people who were just coming out. GEAR was concerned about gay and lesbian youth, but ambivalent or uncertain about how to interact with them or allow them space without reinforcing negative public perceptions of lesbian and gay people. In the early 1980s, the organization focused on helping youth through the hotline.

GEAR’s founders and board members were against gender and racial discrimination, at least in principle, but active inclusion was more difficult to achieve. The composition of GEAR’s board of trustees shifted from all men to nearly half women and back again from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, while that of the foundation membership remained fairly steady at approximately one-third women. Bisexuals, transgender people, crossdressers, and people involved in the drag scene were seen as less a part of the community, and very few of these individuals were involved with GEAR. Participation by straight allies was also uncommon in the 1970s and 1980s, with most of the few around being parents in Parents of Gays (now PFLAG). GEAR did host groups for black and Asian gay men, but participation of people of color in GEAR was limited.

With the discriminatory social climate and limited financial resources, GEAR was frequently looking for suitable space to host Cleveland’s lesbian and gay community. Before opening the Gay Community Center, GEAR initially met at MacDonald’s home, but he moved to Chicago early in 1976 to attend seminary. Starting around November 1975, GEAR had its office and the hotline at 2999 W. 25th Street, in a shared space with the offices of the Cleveland Gay Federation and the Cleveland MCC congregation. On March 27, 1977, the Gay Community Center had its first open house in GEAR’s new location, a few rooms in the CoventrYard building, a mini-mall at the corner of Euclid Heights Boulevard and Coventry Road in Cleveland Heights. Eleven months later, CoventrYard was destroyed in a fire. GEAR moved into a basement room at New Dimensions, a club downtown at 1012 Sumner Court, across from Erie Street Cemetery. The room was cold and small, holding only fifteen to thirty people at most, and quite loud when the club was operating. GEAR began to look for another location but didn’t find a suitable place until 1980.

In February 1980, GEAR’s board made its initial decision to buy the former Bernard Furniture Building on the northeast corner of West 14th Street and Auburn Avenue in Tremont. The wooden building was approximately 80 years old and needed substantial work, but GEAR’s trustees assumed they could gain enough rental income from the upper floor to make the finances work, and moved forward with the purchase. After GEAR made the down payment early in March, a few neighborhood organizations got wind of the planned move and disapproved of it. GEAR became concerned over safety and attempted to back out of buying the building, but the organization couldn’t find a way to without losing its down payment. The board initially planned to resell, but renovations progressed slowly, and with no immediate incident of significant prejudice GEAR moved in to save money. However, the problems of owning a building – particularly issues with tenants and the physical state of the Bernard building – quickly exacerbated GEAR’s money woes. By September 1982, the building had failed a city inspection, almost all its utilities were past due, and some had been disconnected. The next month, all the trustees resigned and the mortgage was foreclosed. A meeting of the foundation membership was held in November, electing new trustees who began to turn the situation around, and GEAR continued to use the Bernard building into the fall of 1983 before moving to a board member’s home at 2100 Fulton Road by December 1983.

The Gay Community Center continued despite GEAR’s decline, and became the stable foundation of Cleveland’s LGBT community over the next thirty years. It moved only three additional times over that period, and with a few name changes continues to exist as the LGBT Center of Greater Cleveland.

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Visitors to the Moreland neighborhood in Shaker Heights are greeted with picturesque sights of an idealized inner ring suburban community. Attractive tree lawns line its residential streets, which lead past rows of well-maintained Cleveland Doubles, American Foursquares and Bungalows. City parks and designated recreation grounds are scattered throughout the neighborhood, with vacant lots appearing to receive the same high level of maintenance as their green space counterparts. Commercial and retail buildings stand along the main throughways, with many of the stores consolidated within a highly uniform suburban shopping strip. A stately civic building, now home to the public library, acts as the symbolic center of the neighborhood. The area seems to effortlessly combine the feel of city life with hallmark traits of suburbia. A tradition of intensive municipal planning and management, however, underlies the history of these commercial, residential and public spaces. The civic engagement of Moreland residents proved key to the success of these efforts. 


Since the early 1960s, Moreland’s community associations helped formulate, shape and implement nearly every urban renewal and redevelopment project initiated by the City of Shaker Heights in the neighborhood. The Moreland Community Association (MCA), established in the spring of 1962, was the first of these groups. The organization acted as the front line for identifying and publicly addressing perceived threats to community stability, and functioned as an intermediary between local residents and governing organizations. From the minutia of announcing everyday community activities to the tackling of contentious social, religious, economic and political matters, MCA had a hand in nearly every aspect of life in Moreland. Their resume of achievements included helping to guide the development of the Shaker Heights Service Center, Chelton Park, the Sutton Townhouse Development Project and Shaker Towne Center. The association also galvanized public support for urban renewal projects, advocated for street improvements, aided in implementing and educating residents about housing code enforcement, offered funds for housing upkeep to low income residents, precipitated a minor barricade controversy, purchased and rehabilitated vacant homes, published newsletters, sponsored public debates and held street fairs. By consolidating and amplifying the voices of neighborhood activists, MCA offered a platform for select residents to have a say in defining the future of their community. 


The establishment of MCA grew from concerns over the impact of integration in the southwestern region of Shaker Heights. A small group of Moreland residents began meeting in the fall of 1961 to discuss what they perceived to be the potential complications and benefits of African American settlement in the neighborhood. Racial tensions had mounted following the emergence of a small African American community in the neighboring community of Ludlow beginning in the mid-1950s. Panic selling ensued, and the garage of an African American resident was bombed in 1956. To further complicate the matter, realtors and banks steered potential white purchasers away from homes in the neighborhood. The Ludlow Community Association, composed of both African American and white residents, was formed in 1957 to quell fears over integration and counteract the institutional forces that discouraged white families from buying houses in the area.

While modeled after the Ludlow Community Association, the community meetings in Moreland were initially only opened to white residents of the neighborhood. The Moreland community was home to a large population of middle- and working-class southern and eastern Europeans and their descendants. The gatherings were meant as a forum for these residents to express concerns over integration, with the goal of dispelling fears and deterring any physical violence against African American community members. The first racially inclusive community meeting of the MCA was held in February, 1962. Nearly 400 residents attended. A statement of purpose was adopted: “It shall be the common goal of the Association to encourage, to develop and to maintain the quality, stability, high standards and community interests of the area, to promote the general welfare of the entire Moreland Community and to achieve these goals through a democratic community open to all races and religions.”  Following the drafting and ratification of a constitution during the next few months, the MCA was officially established. A second public meeting held in April also attracted 400 persons. The organization’s message to the surrounding community was simple: Panic was the only thing they had to fear.


Despite efforts to stave off panic selling and block-busting, the neighborhood witnessed an unprecedented rise of homes being placed on the resale market by 1962. MCA received a $9,330 grant from the Cleveland Foundation the following year as seed money to fund its operations. To counteract the dissuasion of white families from purchasing homes in the neighborhood by banks and realtors, the community association immediately formed a real estate committee. A listing service was developed to bring together home buyers and sellers, and marked the organization’s first endeavor to proactively attract white residents to rent and buy homes in Moreland. Early efforts to stabilize the community also focused on pressuring the City of Shaker Heights to enforce housing code violations. The City was urged to acquire and demolish homes deemed unsuitable for rehabilitation, thereby increasing the visual desirability of the community while decreasing its population. 


Moreland’s community activists quickly forged an alliance with the City of Shaker Heights through their work with School and Recreation Boards, the Mayor and City Council. As noted in a 1966 newsletter, MCA enlisted municipal help to “maintain a good neighborhood —clean, attractive, convenient, served by good schools, good municipal services, good recreational facilities, and good business establishment.”  The underlying objective of the association’s efforts was to create a stable, attractive and integrated neighborhood. While not presuming “to define by numerical ratio the idea of ‘racial balance,’” MCA advocated for a “neighborhood in which people of many racial, religious, and ethnic groups can live in fellowship and mutual trust.”


The African American community in Moreland continued to grow throughout the 1960s, facilitated by the increased number of homes placed on the resale market. While the integrated community association eased neighborhood tensions during a time of rapid racial transition, its successes in attracting new white home owners to the area were limited. 
 By the mid-1960s, MCA shifted its emphasis to advocating for large-scale urban renewal projects. A task force, composed in part by Moreland residents and representatives of the City, recommended the development of a master plan for the community in 1966. These efforts culminated in the Styche-Hisaka Plan, an ambitious locally funded urban renewal project that focused on the redevelopment of Shaker Heights’ southern neighborhoods. Plans for Moreland included the revitalization of its commercial district, street improvements and the removal of older, high-density housing stock. A civic center, townhouses, park spaces and service center were proposed to replace many residential homes. While the civic center was never realized due to objections by the Moreland community, homes would be demolished to make room for the Shaker Heights Service Center and a park-townhouse development. 


Lateral efforts to renew housing in Moreland were initiated by MCA beginning in 1967. The Shaker Foundation was established by the association to purchase and rehabilitate rundown houses. Properties were then rented or placed on the real estate market for sale. Loans with below-market interest rates were offered by the foundation to entice potential buyers. The community group was also represented in the Shaker Heights Housing Office, which hired one member of the Moreland, Ludlow, Lomond and Sussex community associations to act as housing coordinators. As an arm of the municipal government, the Housing Office’s committee worked to attract white homeowners into the southern region of Shaker Heights and combat practices by realtors and banks that discouraged neighborhood integration. Cooperative work between MCA and the City extended to pursuing private-sector investment for a $2 million revitalization of the Chagrin-Lee-Avalon shopping center in 1969. 


By focusing efforts on these City-sponsored urban renewal efforts, the work of MCA became intertwined with municipal government operations.  The association continued operating as a community group into the 1990s, but efforts to promote both integration and urban renewal projects were increasingly pursued by members through their involvement with City boards and committees. These official mechanisms for promoting the stabilization of Moreland emerged during MCA’s first decade of existence, and were largely a response to work undertaken by the organization. Projects implemented and advocated by the community organization during the 1960s and early 1970s guided the development of the neighborhood over the subsequent three decades, and helped redefine both the physical landscape and character of the Moreland community.

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