Travel back in time to the sixties, and the epicenter of Cleveland’s counterculture scene may well have been 11605 Euclid Avenue, where a small and humble bar was nestled in an ordinary storefront built in front of a turreted Victorian rooming house on the north side of the street between East 115th and 116th Streets. There, one could find an inclusive atmosphere that hosted patrons of many backgrounds and worldviews, a place where Marty and Sam would welcome their patrons with a pint of beer. This little gathering place was Adele’s Lounge Bar, which opened in 1954 in a commercial building that also housed L. Schwartz Antique Shop next door.

One faithful patron, Paul Hilcoff, recalls, “It was a long, fairly narrow space. When you entered from the street, the bar was along the wall on the right. An aisle ran behind the bar and the remaining space was filled with wooden tables. I'm fairly sure there were no booths…. By evening on most days, it was crowded, and there was a perceptible buzz in the air. On weekend nights you'd be lucky to squeeze in there at all, let alone get a table. Lighting was typical barroom-dim, but adequate to pick out faces at the other end of the room… just the usual stale-beer-and-cigarette-smoke background radiation that always permeated well-attended bars.” Yet there was something more important than appearances at Adele’s—the atmosphere and culture it created.

Adele’s is remembered for its diverse clientele, as it was home to bikers, college kids, poets, artists, musicians, hippies, members of the LGBTQ community, interracial couples, and the not-so-occasional high schooler. Hilcoff describes what made Adele’s important to its former patrons: “One of the chief attractions of Adele's, at least from my perspective, was that it was a place where outsiders and misfits could feel comfortable. This atmosphere had already been established by the time I started going there.” But by being home to so many diverse patrons, Adele's caught the attention of University Circle institutional leaders and the Cleveland and Circle police forces, who increasingly disliked the unpredictability and sometimes disorder along Euclid Avenue.

Adele’s peaceful bliss and coexistence within its own community would soon come to end. In the years after its formation in 1957, the University Circle Development Foundation (UCDF) set its sights on de-urbanizing the Circle as well as discouraging establishments and crowds that it believed would be undesirable for the community. Unfortunately, in its view, Adele's Lounge Bar and other popular hangouts along Euclid Avenue fit this description. 

As a home to countercultural ideas, Adele’s saw a lot of activism being conducted underneath its roof. Adele’s was also known as one of the few inclusive bars that were friendly toward LGBTQ people, which troubled a lot of traditionalists. In addition, Adele’s was home to underground activist and post-Beat poet d. a. levy, who infamously ran multiple periodicals such as Buddhist Third Class Junkmail Oracle and Marrahwanna Quarterly. Institutional leaders had no room for places like Adele’s in their new plans for the Circle.

Adele’s had a darker side that made it easier for its antagonizers to prey upon it. The culture of Adele's was not so different from the counterculture sweeping the rest of the country. Adele’s, neatly located near Case Tech and Western Reserve University, attracted hordes of young people, many of them from nearby colleges or the Heights suburbs, and some of them engaged in illicit drug use or consumed alcohol under age. By 1966 the use of marijuana, LSD, and other drugs started to catch the attention of the community and law enforcement. Some accounts suggest that dealers sold drugs to adolescents not only outside of the lounge but in it as well. There were also multiple accounts of alcohol being served to minors in the establishment. With violations of this nature, Adele’s soon found itself in the court systems.

The way to permanently shut down Adele’s Lounge Bar seemed to be through inflicting harsh punishments for liquor violations. Throughout its remaining years, Adele’s would spend a great amount of time temporarily closed or operating without a liquor license. Tragically, on February 3, 1969, a fire broke out in the early morning hours, leaving Adele’s completely destroyed and condemned by the city. Authorities blamed an arsonist for the fire, but the destruction of the business would go unpunished. Finally, then, fire accomplished what heavy policing and litigation could not—forcing Adele’s to close for good.

Though some in the media derided it as a haven for “alcoholics and LSD freaks,” Adele’s and similar establishments nearby served as oases for poets, musicians, and activists. And, as one article stated, Adele’s had been “perhaps the only place where an interracial couple wouldn’t feel watched, or where people could talk about socialism or the Bomb without being harassed.” Despite the backlash that Adele’s stirred, its community seemed to look back fondly on the decade of peace, love, and drugs when Adele’s was the heart of countercultural Cleveland.

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Wounded but forever pensive, The Thinker graces the Cleveland Museum of Art’s original main entrance. In 2017 he quietly celebrated the 110th anniversary of his casting and the 100th anniversary of his installation in Cleveland. In 2020 he’ll stoically acknowledge 50 years since the assault that ripped him from his base and shredded his legs below the calf. Ironically, that March 1970 bombing might have increased The Thinker’s metaphoric permanence: Lacking ambulation, University Circle’s marquis gatekeeper, philosopher and historical symbol is more intransient than ever.

The Thinker is one of 25 identical twins: 900-pound bronze casts based on a 27-inch-high clay and plaster model created by Auguste Rodin in 1880. Rodin supervised roughly ten of these castings, including Cleveland’s, but he died shortly before installation occurred in 1917. The Thinker model was part of a commission for the proposed Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris. The museum was never built but a number of Rodin masterworks emerged, including The Gates of Hell, The Kiss and The Thinker, all inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy. The bronze Gates of Hell (20 feet high, 13 feet wide and weighing eight tons) was slated to be the Museum’s front door. A small cast of The Kiss can be seen in the lower right section of the door. The Thinker (Le Pensure), originally entitled The Poet (Le Poète), resides atop the door panels. Some believe he is Dante observing his characters in The Inferno. Others postulate that The Thinker is Adam, musing about the destruction his sin brought upon mankind.

The Gates of Hell and bronze casts of The Thinker and The Kiss now reside at the Musée Rodin in Paris. Another of The Thinker’s identical siblings stands atop the graves of Rodin and his wife Rose, and a third guards the entrance to the Rodin Museum in Philadelphia. Other US cities in which he resides include Baltimore (2), Denver, Detroit, Louisville, New York (2), Pasadena, San Francisco and Kansas City. Thinkers can also be found in Argentina, Germany, Denmark, Japan, Belgium, Russia and Sweden. Cleveland’s Thinker is one of last casts that Rodin supervised personally.

At about 1:00 AM on March 24, 1970, a bomb equivalent to three sticks of dynamite exploded beneath The Thinker, knocking him from (and destroying) his pedestal and turning his lower legs to shrapnel. He landed face down, perhaps using the occasion to contemplate Hell more directly. The Cleveland Art Museum opted not to replace the statue and reinstalled it without repairing the damage. The decision’s prime motive was a desire to preserve and honor Rodin's original work which, in turn, might memorialize the turmoil of the Vietnam War years. It’s generally agreed that the attack was undertaken by a Cleveland faction of the Weathermen (aka., the Weather Underground) an ultra-radical political group that voiced its opposition to the Vietnam War (and US imperialism in general) by bombing government buildings, banks and other targets. A spray-painted message at the base of the toppled statue read “Off the ruling class.” No one admitted to, or was ever charged, for the crime.

Thus The Thinker goes on doing what he does best. Stabilized with Incralac (a copper and copper-alloy coating) and washed and waxed twice annually, he endures miserable winters and occasional scorching summers without complaint. If statues could only talk.

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On August 16, 1979, bulldozers leveled three homes on Rock Court to make room for a parking lot and expansion of the Pick-N-Pay supermarket. In what was probably a last act of defiance by those seeking to save the buildings, someone concealed the gas valves of each home under piles of stones.

This wasn't Rock Court's first protestor uprising. The battle began earlier in the year when nine tenants ignored eviction notices from their landlord and hired a lawyer to block demolition of the three homes. Their efforts to save the aging structures walked the line between community organizing and theater. Tenants collected signatures, attended council meetings, filed court papers, and staged a rally complete with music, dancing, and a march. Their efforts obviously failed, but the widespread support of the neighborhood reflected the friction that frequently existed between Coventry residents and "outsider" developers.

From the start, it was unlikely that the tenants would win. There was no disagreement that the homes had seen better days, nor was the property owner beyond his rights to demolish the buildings. Yet the homes' impending doom attracted public interest because Rock Court embodied both the history and contradictions of the Coventry area.

The houses that lined this narrow, unpaved street (which, at the time, linked Euclid Heights Boulevard with Hampshire Road) were likely constructed in the late 19th century for workers on the interurban lines and streetcars. From the 1940s to the early 1970s, Rock Court was populated by Hungarian and Italian immigrants. The three two-family homes on the west side of the street (backs facing the parking lot) were purchased and managed as apartments by A. Siegal, who had also built Pick-N-Pay. The Rock Court neighborhood was overseen by self-proclaimed "street mayors," whose primary responsibility was to discourage non-residents from driving through their community. The road was (and continues to be) so hideously bumpy that the street mayors may well have saved many a car-owner's axle.

By the late 1960s, a wave of counterculture types had begun to settle in the houses and apartments along Hampshire and Lancashire roads. The three homes on Rock Court bordering the lot--as well as several Rock Court homes to the north--were soon occupied by artists, musicians, writers, photographers and neo-dadaists. One of the homes claimed by the Pick-N-Pay lot even housed a new-age church.

Coventry's metamorphosis in the late 1960s and early 1970s forged a new identity for the area: a sort of Midwest Greenwich Village or Haight-Ashbury. Local demand for unique goods and services was quickly met by mainly local entrepreneurs. Stores that previously catered to the immigrant community were largely replaced by unique specialty shops geared to sightseers and the neighborhood's left-wing residents: places like Bill Jones Leather, Record Revolution, Rainblue, Green Tomato and the first Arabica.

By the late 1970s, however, increased demand for housing and retail space pushed up rents, infuriating new and old residents who often railed against what they perceived as malevolent inflation instigated by greedy landlords and real estate speculators. By the time Pick-N-Pay announced plans to expand its Coventry Road store, the tenants of Rock Court had no trouble finding sympathetic ears. Beyond commiseration, however, little could be done. Not only was the landlord on the right side of the law, but expansion of the supermarket and lot were needed to support the changing community. A handful of forested homes still stand near Rock Court's terminus at Hampshire Road. In fact, those who venture in from Hampshire may still encounter self-styled "mayors," as well as an abrupt and poorly marked end to the road high above what is now the Marc's parking lot.

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For decades, Irv's Deli, on the corner of Coventry and Hampshire Roads, was the place to wallow in Coventry Village’s eclectic edginess. The delicatessen and adjoining bar opened in 1959, when the street was mainly a commercial district serving the area's heavily Jewish population. In the thirty years Irv's was in business, Coventry Village changed drastically: at various and often overlapping times a hangout for hippies, biker gangs, punks, wannabes, gawkers, drug seekers, university students, and even middle-class families. For many years, restaurant owner Irving Gulko’s business model and customers kept pace with Coventry's many transformations. However, as Coventry continued to evolve, Irv’s came more and more into conflict with the neighborhood.

When Gulko opened his deli and bar, he served everything from Chinese food and pizza to shots and beers. Although Gulko came from a family of restaurant owners (his father and grandfather both operated delicatessens in Cleveland), his establishment was often associated with unappetizing food and poor sanitation. Rumors accusing the enigmatic Gulko of running prostitution, drug, and bookmaking businesses were common. What is known for sure is that Irv's Deli was indeed a hangout for down-and-outers, counter culturists, and motorcycle gangs such as the Outlaws and Hell's Angels. But it also was popular with other types. At 2:00 AM, one might find Irv’s still crawling with bikers, late-night munchies sufferers, and Case Western Reserve University students cramming for exams.

Irv’s problems escalated in the early 1980s. The neighborhood was becoming more family-friendly, but Irv’s was the epicenter of more and more crimes and police reports. In 1982 Coventry Neighbors, Inc. (CNI), a civic betterment organization formed in 1969, took action. It introduced a (winning) referendum on the 1982 election ballot that stripped Gulko's right to serve wine and liquor by the glass. Gulko fought the election results with little success. Starting in 1983, he could only sell beer by the glass and take-out alcoholic beverages. The facility limped along for another six years and closed in 1989.

Ironically, for a business associated with alcohol, crime and drugs, Irv's was for a short time a popular venue for Cleveland's straight edge hardcore community. Musical performances were organized by local teens, featuring bands like Confront, Project X, Gorilla Biscuits, and other acts known for their steadfast sobriety and lyrics promoting the virtues of "clean living." A decade after its closing, Irv’s also received a fictive cinematic treatment: the epicenter of a movie called The NightOwls of Coventry starring “Marv” as the restaurant’s somewhat too sympathetic owner.

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Those who reminisce about the Coventry Street Fair often recall an uncountable crowd interspersed with local business owners and outside vendors selling unique merchandise, clowns, magicians, fire eaters, musicians, and, most of all, fun. However, organizers of the fair have quite a different memory of the annual event. The Coventry Street Fair began in 1974 as an effort by Coventry merchants to draw new people to their shops. They were also eager to disprove rumors that the presence of the Hell's Angels, who frequented Coventry Village, made the area an unsafe place to visit. Unfortunately, it was not bikers but rather the fair's attendees that caused the summer events to be perceived as dangerous, both to people's safety and to the familial atmosphere the fair's organizers sought to promote.

The first decade of fairs were both run and enjoyed by the hippie generation. The City of Cleveland Heights gave permission for Coventry Street to be shut down between Euclid Boulevard and Mayfield Road, and what began as a sidewalk sale essentially turned into a carnival. As the years progressed, so did the size and cost of the fairs. More food vendors, merchants, and entertainers delighted the crowds that became increasingly rowdy.

Although the fairs became larger and more popular, the atmosphere of the fairs began to diverge from the original intent of its organizers and Coventry residents. According to the Coventry Village News, "Values of peace, love and tie-dye [had] been replaced with values of family, community pride, and homeownership." Furthermore, outside vendors had been brought in to help pay the tens of thousands of dollars it cost to run the fair. This destroyed the main objective of the fair, which was to promote Coventry Village businesses.

All of these issues coalesced in 1985 when Coventry Neighbors, Inc., (CNI), the group who organized the fairs, questioned whether to continue the eleven-year tradition. The street fairs continued for another year, until 1986, after which it was decided that the City of Cleveland Heights would no longer close down the street to accommodate the event. The fairs were revived eighteen years later and ran smoothly for several years. Then things changed. In 2011, a flash mob disrupted the fair, casting new doubt on the event's future. Because of concerns that similar incidents would occur, organizers decided against subsequent fairs.

But the story did not end there. Indeed, the spirit of those years has reappeared in new forms, bringing together those with and without memory of the street fair. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Coventry Village Special Improvement District began sponsoring Final Fridays, a name that reflected these events' being on the last Friday of each month. Then in 2021 the street hosted its first Juneteenth celebration, whose popularity led to its return in 2022, along with what might become a new tradition: the Coventry Street Festival. While the Coventry Street Fair is no more, its legacy lives on in a new generation of gatherings that enliven this meeting place in the Heights.

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Cleveland's industry and population grew rapidly during the last quarter of the 19th century. As a result, the city's affluent population began looking beyond the city limits for respite from the dirt and bustle of urban living. The area that is now known as Coventry Village was one of those destinations — originally developed as part of the upper-class planned community of Euclid Heights in the 1890s. In the 1910s, however, the bankruptcy of the Euclid Heights Realty Company forced the breakup of large properties for the elite, and led to the erection of several apartment buildings near Coventry Road. As a result, the neighborhood's population became more ethnically and economically mixed, bringing diversity and density to what originally was an exclusive enclave designed for a wealthy, Protestant, and native-born population.

The demise of the Euclid Heights Realty Company also spurred the development of a commercial district along Coventry Road in the 1920s. At the time, the intersection of Coventry and Mayfield Roads served as a key transfer point for streetcar commuters, making the stretch of Coventry between that juncture and Euclid Heights Boulevard a natural place for retail development. In 1919, The Heights Theatre, a 26,000-square-foot, 1,200-seat movie theater, opened at the corner of Euclid Heights Boulevard and Coventry Road. Food markets, drug stores, restaurants, professional offices, hardware stores, and banks also began opening in newly constructed commercial buildings along Coventry Road. The neighborhood's Jewish community, already present in the 1920s, continued to grow in the years after World War II, following the arrival of many Jews from Cleveland's Glenville and Hough neighborhoods. Their kosher meat markets, bakeries, delicatessens, and tailors shops occupied many of Coventry's retail spaces.

Coventry remained a largely Jewish community until the late 1960s, when the neighborhood became the epicenter of Cleveland's growing counterculture. University Circle redevelopment uprooted some of that population and Jews accelerated their migration eastward toward Beachwood and other suburbs. Coventry Village thus emerged as Cleveland's equivalent of Haight-Ashbury or Greenwich Village. Record stores, head shops, and restaurants catering to younger crowds soon replaced most of the Jewish-owned businesses. For a while, an uncomfortable relationship existed among new counterculture residents and visitors, remaining Jewish families residing primarily in the apartments along Hampshire, and several motorcycle gangs that staked out claims at bars such The Saloon and the C-Saw Café on the east side of Coventry. For the next three decades, Coventry sheltered both hippies-at-heart and adherents of the punk and progressive music movement before morphing yet again into the diverse district that it is today: one part offbeat destination, one part college-town hangout, and one part neighborhood meeting place.

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The Euclid Tavern was established in 1909 but became a prominent fixture in University Circle only in the late 1970s and early 1980s. With its laid-back atmosphere and unrefined reputation, the Euclid Tavern attracted a varied clientele that ranged from local college students to blue-collar workers and Cleveland police officers. Bob Jost and Paul Devito, owners of the Euclid Tavern during this time period, operated the establishment with no specific business model in mind. Reportedly, regular patrons were free to go behind the bar to get their own drinks and place money in the cash register themselves. When the bar ran out of pitchers for serving beer, the bartenders were known to fill empty Tropicana glass bottles instead.

During the 1980s and 1990s, the Euclid Tavern emerged as a popular place for Clevelanders to listen to local and underground bands and just have a good time. "The Euc," as it was known by many, did not try to compete with popular Cleveland dance bars like the Agora, Spanky's, or Filthy McNasty's. Instead, the Tavern embraced a more low-key style and scheduled weekly appearances by bands that played their own original music.

In the early 1980s, the co-owners of the Euclid Tavern had a difficult time filling the Monday night performance slot. In place of hosting a band, Jost, Devito, and Jimmy Cvelbar took employee Jerry Suhar away from making his "Pittsburgers" in the kitchen and placed him at center stage hosting an open mic night. Unfortunately, there were rarely any volunteers from the audience willing to perform. Suhar, a seasoned performer with training from Cleveland Institute of Music, took up the slack, singing and playing guitar for the college students who showed up on Monday nights. Suhar played in the Monday night slot from 1980 to 1990 and became known for leading sing-a-long arias and singing novelty songs like "Mighty Mouse" and Freddie Blassie's "Pencil Neck Geek."

When Suhar retired from performing at the Euclid Tavern, another employee from the tavern kitchen, Derek Hess, began booking Monday night shows featuring touring underground rock bands. Burgeoning "alternative" acts like Helmet, Pantera, Pavement, and Green Day - whose tours might have skipped Cleveland before Hess helped restore the city's reputation as a rock and roll destination - now had a place to play in Cleveland where they knew they would be treated well. As word spread among touring musicians, the Euclid Tavern's booking calendar grew fuller and the club expanded its musical offerings from Monday nights to hosting a concert almost every night. In addition to booking the shows, Hess, a Cleveland Institute of Art alumnus, also produced the show flyers advertising the bands. In time, Hess's poster art became a ubiquitous presence in Cleveland's art and music scene, helping to give the Euclid Tavern a distinctive identity and eventually propelling Hess to national prominence as one of the world's best-known poster artists (a number of Hess's works from this era have been added to the permanent collections of the Louvre and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum). Within a few short years, the Euclid Tavern had gone from one of the city's best neighborhood hangouts to one of the nation's best rock and roll clubs, losing none of its local character in the process.

The Euclid Tavern was also a filming location for the 1987 film "Light of Day" starring Michael J. Fox and Joan Jett.  The director of the film, Paul Schrader, came to listen to the Generators and decided to include the Euc in the film because he liked its atmosphere. The Euclid Tavern was the venue for Fox and Jett's fictional band The Barbreakers to perform at the end of the film. In preparation for the film, the Tavern was slightly uncluttered and was supposedly given the famous neon sign that still hangs in the front of the building.

In 1997, after nineteen years of ownership, Jost and Devito sold the Euc to Dan Bliss and John Michalak, owners of a number of local Cleveland establishments including Peabody's Down Under in the Flats. Unfortunately, the new owners were unable to keep the business afloat; the Euclid Tavern closed its doors in 2001. In 2013, after a series of failed re-launches, University Circle Inc. took ownership of the property. The Euclid Tavern re-opened as a second location of Happy Dog in 2014 but closed four years later.

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