— Jay B. Goodman, Treasurer of the S. H. Kleinman Realty Company (Cleveland Plain Dealer, October 31, 1926).

S.H. Kleinman Realty Treasurer Jay B. Goodman was not engaging in mere hyperbole when he stated that Carnegie Avenue was fast becoming Cleveland’s Fifth Avenue. In the decade of the 1920s, Carnegie Avenue was the place to be. Stretching eastward for more than three miles from East 22nd Street to Stearns Road in University Circle, it was, according to a 1928 article in the Plain Dealer, where 120 new commercial buildings had been erected in the previous four years and to where more than 129 companies had moved. Walker and Weeks, Cleveland’s premier architectural firm in the first half of the twentieth century, was one of them. In 1926, it moved its offices to a five-story building that it had designed at 2341-2351 Carnegie. In that same year, Howell and Thomas, the architects who built many glamorous Shaker Heights homes, designed and erected an office building for their firm at 3868 Carnegie. When Chicago-based Sears-Roebuck decided to expand to Cleveland in 1928, it selected a location at 8501 Carnegie Avenue for its regional offices and first store here. Dealerships for many of America’s most luxurious automobiles located on the Avenue during the decade, including Lincoln, Hudson, Pierce-Arrow, and Packard. And in 1923, the plush eight-story Bolton Square Apartment Hotel opened on the southeast corner of East 89th Street and Carnegie. And this is literally to name just a few of the many businesses that sought and found an upscale address on prestigious Carnegie Avenue in that decade.

The story of Carnegie Avenue begins in the 1890s during the City Beautiful movement. In the second half of that decade, when Chestnut Street (the original name of Chester Avenue) was first being considered as the northern thoroughfare to Cleveland’s new east side parks, planners eyed two residential streets located south of Euclid Avenue that were worthy candidates to form a future southern thoroughfare to those parks. Sibley Street had been opened between Perry (East 22nd) Street and Willson Avenue (East 55th Street) in the 1850s. East Prospect Street followed two decades later and, by 1874, stretched eastward from Willson Avenue to Bolton Avenue (East 89th Street). East Prospect’s western terminus at Willson Avenue was located only thirty feet south of Sibley’s eastern terminus, causing many Clevelanders to consider it little more than an extension of Sibley.

Before the two streets were reimagined by early planners as a thoroughfare, however, each was the center of a vibrant east side residential neighborhood. More than 300 single-family houses, many of Queen Anne architectural design, were located on the two streets. East Prospect Street, which was located just one block south of Euclid Avenue’s millionaire estates, was home to many prominent Clevelanders, including Lillian Towslee, one of Cleveland’s first woman physicians, who served as the second president of Women’s Hospital. From 1895 until her death in 1918, she lived in a large house at 8118 Carnegie Avenue designed by Cleveland architect Riley Austin Bissell. Three public elementary schools—Sterling, Sibley, and Bolton—were located on the streets, as were a number of other notable institutions. The Convent of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd, which ministered and provided shelter to women and girls in need, was located on the southeast corner of Sibley and Sterling (East 30th) Streets. The Gatling Gun Armory was on the north side of Sibley near Kennard (East 46th) Street. Next door to it was the Young Hebrew Men’s Association, operating in the former home of Brooks Military Academy. Maternity Hospital was located up the street in a single- family house at 134 East Prospect (6216 Carnegie). The First United Presbyterian Church (today, St. Timothy Missionary Baptist Church) sat on the northeast corner of East Prospect and Giddings Road (East 71st Street). Sibley even sported a baseball field near Kennard (East 46th) Street, called the Kennard Street Ball Park, where the Cleveland Blues of the National League played baseball from 1879 to 1884. From a late nineteenth century city planning perspective, however, what was most important about these two streets was that together they constituted almost two-thirds of the roadway needed for the proposed southern thoroughfare to the city’s east end. Newspaper accounts from that era suggest that residents of the two streets were also enthusiastic about the proposed thoroughfare, thinking that it would lead to the transformation of their streets into a leafy park boulevard with direct access to Cleveland’s new east side park system. On that score, they would soon learn that they were sadly mistaken.

It took the City of Cleveland nearly two decades to obtain voter-approved financing before it could begin acquiring land for the road extensions to create the southern thoroughfare. While the plans languished on the drawing table, several events contributed to the eventual transformation of Sibley and East Prospect Streets not into the anticipated leafy park boulevard but instead into a commercialized traffic corridor. First, in 1905, controversy erupted over what to name the new thoroughfare. When East Prospect residents learned that the City was planning to call it Sibley Avenue, they protested and petitioned the City to instead name it “Lincoln Avenue.” The City referred the matter to the Chamber of Commerce which recommended “Carnegie Avenue” as a nod to steel magnate Andrew Carnegie who earlier that year had traveled to Cleveland to testify at the criminal trial of Cassie Chadwick, a Euclid Avenue resident accused of having swindled several Cleveland banks by claiming to be Carnegie’s illegitimate daughter. Moreover, two years earlier, Carnegie had donated a large sum of money to the Cleveland Public Library to build seven new branch libraries in the City. East Prospect residents were not happy with the Chamber’s recommendation, but the City accepted it, and, in 1906, Sibley and East Prospect Streets officially became Carnegie Avenue. The second event occurred later that year when the Cleveland Board of Public Service director Daniel Leslie came out in opposition to making the two streets a park boulevard, persuasively arguing that the boulevard to the east side park system should be located closer to the Lake. And finally, within a few short years, the need to address growing traffic congestion from a proliferation of streetcars and automobiles became the City’s primary reason for building thoroughfares to and from downtown. All of the foregoing had an impact on Cleveland investors and the city’s business community. Before any road work was even started on the southern thoroughfare, commercial businesses began relocating to Carnegie Avenue in ever increasing numbers. Many were automobile-related businesses expecting to benefit from a location on the future southern thoroughfare.

By 1917, the City’s street funding problems had been sufficiently resolved to allow it to begin acquiring land for the first extension of the southern thoroughfare--from the eastern terminus of Carnegie Avenue at East 89th Street to East 100th Street. Over the course of the next two years, land was acquired and cleared, new roadway was built and paved, and, in 1919, the extension was opened to the public. The successful construction of this first extension was not without neighborhood cost. A total of 13 single family homes on cross streets were either moved or razed in the process. In addition to those houses, Hart Hall, a four-story, eight-suite apartment building on East 93rd Street, also in the way, was moved (with its tenants still in it) to a new site on Carnegie Avenue near East 89th Street, where it later became an annex to the Bolton Square Hotel. Four years after the first extension was completed, a second from East 100th Street to East 107th Street was constructed, which removed another dozen or so houses that stood in the way. This second extension connected Carnegie Avenue to Fairchild Road, the latter road soon being renamed Carnegie Avenue from East 107th Street to Stearns Road. While Carnegie Avenue’s eastward extensions to the city’s east end were thus completed by 1923, necessary westward extensions to connect the southern thoroughfare to downtown, as well as to the west side by a proposed new high level bridge at Lorain Avenue, stalled for nearly another decade as city officials deliberated both where to locate the eastern terminus of the new bridge and how best to connect the southern thoroughfare to it. While these deliberations were continuing, the City, in 1924-1925, widened Carnegie Avenue from East 22nd to East 55th to accommodate more automobile traffic and to better align it with the roadway east of East 55th Street. In 1930, after it had determined that the location of the eastern terminus of the new bridge should be at Central Avenue near Ontario Street, the City constructed a westward extension of the southern thoroughfare from East 22nd Street in 1930-31. At East 21st Street, the extension was angled in a southwest direction in order to connect it to Central Avenue at East 14th Street. Central Avenue from East 14th Street to the new Lorain-Carnegie Bridge, which was completed and opened In 1932, was then renamed Carnegie Avenue.

As noted above, the 1920s witnessed a dramatic transformation of Carnegie Avenue into a commercial corridor. In the next three decades, businesses continued to locate on the southern thoroughfare, further reducing the number of houses, and residents, on the Avenue. The 1930s witnessed the completion of the construction of the 12-story Gothic Revival style Cleveland Club (later the Tudor Arms Hotel) at 10600 Carnegie, as well as that of the eight-story art deco style Carnegie Medical Building at 10515 Carnegie. The 1940s saw, among other new arrivals, Central Cadillac, and the 1950s, Pratt-Webb Bakery, Reynold Machinery Co., and the General Electric X-Ray Department. The 1950s also saw the new Innerbelt Freeway cut a swath through Carnegie Avenue between East 22nd and East 28th Streets, resulting in the removal of seven houses and reducing the number of houses still standing on Carnegie Avenue to less than thirty. During these three decades, Carnegie Avenue became the busiest street in Cleveland, especially during evening rush hour, with tens of thousands of vehicles traversing it daily. It also became a motorist’s nightmare with its narrow traffic lanes, plentiful chuckholes, and distracting billboard signs. Some Clevelanders began to refer to it as “Billboard Alley,” others as “Agony Alley.” In the 1940s, Cleveland Safety Director Elliot Ness installed a new signalization system and prohibited left turns off Carnegie Avenue during rush hour, but neither solved the congestion problem. In 1953, the City began an “experiment,” making Carnegie one-way, eastbound only, during evening rush hour. The experiment worked and, for the next 50 years, motorists, during evening rush hour, could only travel east on Carnegie from Prospect Road (a diagonal roadway at East 46th Street constructed in 1931 to relieve traffic on Prospect Avenue). That half century long restriction was modified in 2003 to also permit traffic to travel westward on Carnegie during evening rush hour.

While Carnegie Avenue continued to be one of the busiest streets in Cleveland in the second half of the twentieth century, white flight and de-industrialization caused many of the commercial businesses, which had made it Cleveland's Fifth Avenue in the first half of the century, decamp to the suburbs and elsewhere, contributing to blight and urban decay on Carnegie, especially east of East 55th Street. Cleveland’s University-Euclid Urban Renewal Project No. 2 of the early 1960s targeted this area for renewal, but this designation produced no substantive changes. In the 1980s, the departure of businesses slowed, and blight and urban decay began to be addressed by joint efforts of the City of Cleveland and a number of profit and non-profit organizations, including Midtown Cleveland, Inc., which engaged in efforts to clean up Carnegie Avenue and recruit new businesses to locate on it between East 30th and East 79th Streets; the Cleveland Clinic, which dramatically increased the size of its campus lining Carnegie Avenue from East 85th Street to East 107th Street with medical buildings and parking lots; Cleveland State University which expanded its campus south to Carnegie, between East 18th and East 24th Streets; and the Gateway Sports and Entertainment Complex, which built a baseball stadium on Carnegie Avenue between Ontario and East Ninth Streets.

In 2019, the City, Midtown Cleveland, and NOACA (Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency) produced a new Master Plan for Carnegie Avenue. Nicknamed "Reincarnegie," the Plan calls for, among other things, the construction of street and other infrastructure improvements, which would better connect Carnegie Avenue to neighborhoods to the north and south of it; new residential housing and retail stores; and other improvements that would make the southern thoroughfare a safer place for residents, pedestrians and cyclists. While it obviously comes too late for them, the early twentieth century residents of Sibley and East Prospect Streets would undoubtedly be pleased with--perhaps even enthusiastic about--the new plan.

For more (including 22 images) view the original article

The Cinema Theater opened its doors to Euclid Avenue at East 17th Street on October 14, 1928. The movie house offered the “best of second-run pictures,” and audiences on that first night were shown “The Patent Leather Kid” starring Richard Barthelmess. The theater featured a Wurlitzer organ with seating for 1,000, and was “decorated in a blue and gold color scheme, with an indirect system of ceiling and wall lights.” Only two years later, the theater experienced its first of many reinventions when it was purchased by Warner Brothers and closed for renovations on November 18, 1930.

Warner’s Lake Theater reopened on Christmas Day 1930, but the commitment of Warner Brothers to the Lake Theater would only last a few years. In 1933, the production company took over the much larger Hippodrome Theater on Euclid Avenue, reopening that venue on November 21st with a glamorous “Hollywood Premiere” of “The World Changes” starring Paul Muni. Warner’s presence at the Hippodrome meant the programming at the Lake Theater would return to “a collection of B movies, move-overs and reissues.”

The building changed hands again in 1948, reopening as the 701-seat Esquire Theater under the local ownership of Community Circuit Theaters. The premiere featured Frank Borzage’s “Moonrise.” The 1948 renovation added a neon-lighted marquee, upholstered seats, updated sound and video equipment, and a beige, turquoise, and rose color scheme. Operating for only three years, the cash-strapped Esquire closed without ceremony on May 28, 1951, after showing “I Can Get It For You Wholesale.”

Ironically, the building’s next use was as a television studio, as the introduction of the television medium led to mass closings of movie palaces around the country. WXEL converted the old theater into a television studio with an audience capacity of 300, and on September 13, 1952, the station dedicated Studio D as part of a million dollar downtown expansion project. WXEL would later become WJW-TV, which broadcast from the former theater until 1975 when it moved to a new location at 5800 South Marginal Road.

The WJW building was almost lost in April 1972, when a man entered a fabric store next door at 1706 Euclid and poured gasoline on the floor, yelling “I’m going to burn this place down and there’s another guy on the roof.” The man then entered WJW, and again doused the carpeting and furniture with gasoline. Two WJW security guards subdued the would-be arsonist as he attempted to set a match to his spill.

The old Cinema/Lake/Esquire Theater was not the only Euclid Avenue movie house to be threatened in the spring of 1972. The State and Ohio theaters were scheduled for demolition in May of that year, during a time when the Playhouse Square Association was working to preserve them along with the nearby Allen and Palace theaters. The former would be saved by a grant from the Junior League of Cleveland one week later, and the Playhouse Square Association led by Ray Shepardson would begin to steward the theaters through decades of preservation and redevelopment. The Playhouse Square Association had to make careful choices about where to invest resources and capital, and the building at 1630 on the south side of Euclid was never a restoration priority, perhaps because the original theater had been so thoroughly reconstructed into a television studio, or because it quickly fell into disrepair after WJW vacated in 1975.

In 1976 the Gund Foundation donated the building to the Downtown Cleveland Corp., which planned to tear it down and extend East 17th Street as a one-way southbound artery, according to the plans for a Euclid Avenue pedestrian mall proposed by the architect Lawrence Halprin of San Francisco. In 1978, the Playhouse Square Association opposed the proposal to demolish the old building and extend East 17th Street south to Prospect Avenue, but not because they wished to save and restore the theater. The Association preferred extending East 18th Street into a loop road that would partially encircle the proposed Euclid Avenue pedestrian mall. The Downtown Cleveland Corp. quickly went out of business, and the building was returned to the Gund Foundation. The building was finally demolished in 1985, and East 17th was extended to Prospect decades later as part of the reconstruction of Euclid Avenue.

Playhouse Square did briefly own the building. In 1981, the Gund Foundation awarded the association a $500,000 grant plus the deed to the old theater to support an effort to raise $3.5 million in private matching funds and qualify for a federal historic preservation grant. In 1982, Playhouse Square resold the building to T.W. Grogan Co. for $270,000, with proceeds from the sale used to pay down debt that remained from the theater restoration efforts in the 1970s. The sale of the building to Grogan Co. was an ironic sacrifice of a 1920s movie house, done in order to support the theaters on the north side of the block. Through these property transfers, the old Cinema/Lake/Esquire Theater provides an early example of how Playhouse Square has financed its continuing development over the past forty years.

Today the Playhouse Square Foundation is a major landowner throughout Northeast Ohio, with a diverse portfolio of investments totaling over 1 million square feet of space, including most of the properties along Euclid Avenue between East 13th and East 17th. The Foundation reinvests profits from real estate into the restoration and preservation of the district’s theaters. The block on the south side of Euclid that once lost the theater has become a significant source of income for the continuing operation of the north side of the street, with the Hanna Building being a major anchor of the Foundation’s real estate holdings. In 1999, the Playhouse Square Foundation purchased the 16-story limestone building along with the Hanna Theater, adjacent parking lots, and the rest of the block bound by Euclid and Prospect Avenues, East 14th Street and what would become the East 17th Street extension. The Foundation considered the existing apartment and commercial buildings, as well as the vacant lot where the Cinema/Lake/Warner Theater once stood, as an opportunity to further develop real estate and underwrite as a “working endowment” the financial security of the theaters on the north side of the Euclid.

In 2020 the site that once housed the old theater will return to use when the Lumen Building opens. The 34 story apartment tower will be the Playhouse Square Foundation’s most ambitious use of real estate to support the greater performing arts district. When construction began on the tower in 2018, remnants of the old theater were unearthed. Excavators discovered underground heating oil tanks, spread footers, and the foundations of a building that is believed to have been the demolished theater. While the old Cinema/Lake/Esquire Theater was not able to be saved during the preservation of Playhouse Square, the site of this once forgotten theater will be making an important contribution to the ongoing restoration, reconstruction, and financial stability of Cleveland’s historic theater district.

For more (including 15 images) view the original article

In 1923, the Air Service, a part of the U.S. Army, published and distributed a basic how-to manual on airport construction for America’s cities. This publication, titled “Airways and Landing Fields,” contained information on the Model Airway program as well as a list of suggestions to be followed by a city on “How An Airport Should Be Built.” These suggestions listed in the Air Services bulletin regarded the location suitable for building, related to the size and shape, ground material, markings and accommodations. These attributes that the Air Service bulletin prescribed included being within proximity to ground transportation, merchandise and business districts of a city, which the City of Cleveland took to a different level for building its second an airport. The lakefront and its subsequent use or misuse, as the case may be, has been a point of contention among Clevelanders for decades. Before the turn of the twentieth century there had been a park on top of the bluff overlooking the lake, appropriately if unimaginatively named Lake View Park. Then during the Great Depression the shoreline between what is now called East 9th Street and East 12th Street was a dumping ground for the city’s refuse both material and human. In this area a makeshift “Hooverville” as shantytowns were christened after President Hoover, was constructed by the hundreds of jobless and homeless Clevelanders as a result of the Depression. To combat this refuse and homeless problem several influential and wealthy Clevelanders put forth an idea to clear the area and build a World’s Fair type event in the location. This event would be known as the Great Lakes Exposition of 1936. During the exposition, future ideas and plans were proposed, displayed and developed about what use the lakefront could be to the city. Eventually the most practical solution was proposed of transportation facilities either marine or aerial in nature. The proposal contained the early building blocks for a lakefront plan that included the entire shoreline of the city of Cleveland and would contain an aviation point which would become Burke Lakefront Airport. The Lakefront area where the refuse and Great Lakes expositions were once located was not suitable enough for a full-fledged airport according to the Air Services suggestions made in 1923. Nevertheless, a Lakefront location for an airport was seen locally as a huge draw for tourists, businessmen and Clevelanders alike. Proposed as only a short ten-minute drive from Public Square in the center of the city, it was viewed by many as what could be a great alternative to the more distant Cleveland-Hopkins Airport. In the early 1940s construction on a dike retaining wall in Lake Erie by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began, which was the outer support area, where within the interior was to be completely filled with hundreds of tons of dirt dredgings from the Cuyahoga River. The interior area was partially completed and secure enough in August 1947 for a temporary runway to be built and the first airplane to land at the site. On the shoreline, off Memorial Shoreway and in between East 9th and East 12th Streets Mayor Thomas Burke and Major John Berry, City Commissioner of Airports, were on hand to perform an opening ceremony with the first plane to land at the site. Over the next year the Army Corps of Engineers continued to develop what would become the permanent airport by depositing over 700,000 cubic yards of dredging on both the east and west ends of the temporary runway. Even though the completed airport was far from completion, within about five years, it still managed to set records for the numbers of flights and passengers traveling through the area in 1949. There was a total increase of about 200 aircraft and over 400 more passengers than in the previous year. The 1950s saw a need for the attribution of more money through bonds to make improvements and completions to the Lakefront Airport. The 1960s were a decade of change and celebration surrounding the nearly completed Lakefront Airport. Continuous flights were flying in and out of the Lakefront Airport, and the first commercial business, Lake Central Airlines, planned to move some operations to the Lakefront Airport. A Nike missile facility that was built near the Lakefront Airport in the late fifties was shut down with updates to technologies which rendered the site obsolete. Controversy and near closure followed the airport surrounding the proposed installation of a new heavy-lift crane at the West 3rd Street docks. The proposed site would have caused disruptions to the flight paths of planes into and departing the Lakefront Airport. This was such a controversy that even Port Director William Rogers proclaimed that he would quit if the city approved the proposed crane installation on the piers north face. Throughout all this, entertainment was still to be had in the form of high-flying action during the annual Memorial Day air shows held at Burke Lakefront Airport especially in the form of the "Girl on the Wing" (aircraft wing walks by stuntwomen). The 1970s saw expansion at Burke Lakefront Airport with a focus on attracting more small airlines providing destinations such as roundtrip flights to Detroit, Michigan. An increase in numbers of flights and passengers from the sixties into the seventies produced a need for construction of new West and East Concourses. The 1980s, on the other hand, saw no further expansion of buildings or rise in numbers of passengers or flights but instead the inclusion of a new opportunity for an entertainment location for the city. The first Cleveland Grand Prix (similar to the Indianapolis 500) was held on the airport's runways and approach aprons on July 4, 1981.

Over the years since its heyday, Burke Lakefront has steadily lost numbers in planes delivering cargo as Cleveland lost its onetime #3 rank as a Fortune 500 headquarters city, and as many companies moved toward larger planes that the airport could not support. The land on which the airport sits has also been a contentious subject for Clevelanders, although unlike Mayor Daley in Chicago with his midnight raid to destroy Meigs Field and avoid court proceedings and costs, Burke has remained as Clevelanders continue to discuss and debate the future of the airport. 

For more (including 12 images) view the original article