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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Up until 1852, there was only one Catholic church in Cleveland. It was Our Lady of the Lake—better known as St. Mary of the Flats—located at Cleveland Centre. That changed when the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist on Erie (East Ninth) Street was dedicated and opened for services that year, providing Catholics living east of the Cuyahoga River with a neighborhood church. And that, in turn, gave rise to requests by Irish and German Catholics living in Ohio City—which would soon become Cleveland's West Side—for parishes and churches of their own. Bishop Amadeus Rappe, Cleveland's first Catholic bishop, responded to the German Catholics by granting them permission to form a new parish called St. Mary of the Assumption and giving them temporary possession of St. Mary of the Flats church, pending construction of a church of their own on the southwest corner of Carroll and Jersey (West 30th) Streets, which was completed and dedicated in 1865.  

The Bishop also gave permission to the Irish Catholics living in Ohio City to form a parish of their own, which they named St. Patrick after their patron saint. In 1853, Rappe appointed Father James Conlan, his vicar general and an immigrant from Ireland, to be the first pastor of the new parish and authorized the parish to build a church on a lot on the south side of Merchant (later, Whitman) Street, between Woodbine and Kentucky (West 38th). It took four years to build and dedicate that church—a small brick Gothic-style building—though services were held in it, according to several sources, as early as Christmas of 1853.  

The new St. Patrick parish also soon made arrangements for the parochial education of its children. Initially, school-aged boys were taught in a temporary classroom within the nave of the church on Whitman and girls in another diocese-owned building on Franklin Circle where the Franklin Circle Christian Church stands today. More permanent arrangements were made in 1863 when a two-story brick building that held classrooms for boys on the second floor and girls on the first was erected on the lot on Whitman immediately to the west of the church. Two years later, a second two-story brick school building was built on Whitman on the lot immediately to the east of the church. When opened, this second building became the school for girls of the parish, and the building to the west now became exclusively the boys' school. 

The church and two school buildings on Whitman constituted the entirety of the St. Patrick parish campus on June 15, 1870, when 23-year-old Western Union telegraph operator William A. Manning married Mary Devine, a West Sider and second generation Irish-American, in that church. Manning's parents were Irish, but they had moved to Scotland where he was born in 1847. The family then immigrated to the United States in 1849, living first on the East Coast, before continuing west and eventually settling on Cleveland's East Side. They resided in rental properties until 1867 when Manning's parents purchased a house on Oregon Street (today, Rockwell Avenue) between Dodge (East 17th) and North Perry (East 21st) Streets. After he married, William Manning moved from his family's house on the East Side to the West Side and, in the process, became a member of St. Patrick's parish.   

The year 1870 was an important one for St. Patrick parish too. As a result of a large population increase on Cleveland's West Side in the decades of the 1850s and 1860s—much of it consisting of Irish Catholics—the parish church on Whitman had become too small to serve the parish. The Cleveland Diocese had addressed this population increase by consenting to the formation of two new West Side Irish Catholic parishes, St. Augustine parish on the South Side in 1860 and St. Malachi on the West Side in 1865. However, despite the formation of these new parishes, membership in St. Patrick parish continued to grow and the parish, still led by its first pastor Father Conlan, and with diocese approval, decided to build a new and larger church. Several lots or parts of lots were purchased on Bridge Street (Avenue), immediately south of the church on Whitman, and, by late summer of 1870, construction was begun on the new church—the one which still stands today on Bridge Avenue.

The original design of the new St. Patrick's church on Bridge Avenue was created by Samuel Lane of the Cleveland architectural firm of Koehler and Lane. However, in the early years of the project, architect Alfred Green superintended the building of the church. As a result of the Panic of 1872 and ongoing parish financing challenges, it took some 60 years to complete the construction of the church, although enough was finished by 1877 to allow services to be held in the church and enough additional work was completed by 1882 to permit it to be dedicated. Over the course of the years that followed, other architects weighed in and, at times, modified Lane's original design. 

That design, according to a Plain Dealer article on August 21, 1871, was for a Gothic-style church built with an exterior facade composed of two types of stone—in this case, sandstone and limestone—arranged in a manner known, according to architectural historian Tim Barrett, as polychromatic structuring. The building was to be 132 feet long and 67 feet wide, "exclusive of buttresses and sacristy," which were to be constructed "on the outside of the church." The walls of the church were to be 43 feet high "from table to wall plate, ninety-three from floor to ridge, and 230 feet from street line to top of spire." The interior of the church was "to have a highly enriched grained ceiling, and a main and two side aisles." The plan also called for an "elaborate stained and figured glass window at the back of the altar . . . which [was] to be one of the principal features in the sanctuary." The new church was expected to have a seating capacity for at least twelve hundred persons, which was more than double the seating capacity of the church on Whitman.

During the foregoing early period of the church's construction, the parish also added other buildings to the parish campus, including a residence on Whitman in 1873 for the Marianist Brothers who taught at St. Patrick's boys school and, in 1878, a parsonage or rectory, west of the new church on Bridge, for the parish priests. In 1890, St. Patrick parish turned its attention to its school buildings which had become overcrowded as the population of the parish continued to grow in this period. In that year, the old church and the two school buildings on Whitman were razed and, in their place, a large three-story school building was erected in 1891 which featured a parish hall on its third floor with seating capacity for 1,200 persons. At the time, as reported in the November 24, 1891 edition of the Catholic Observer, it was reputed to be the largest school building in the United States. According to a 1898 Diocese report, there were more than 900 students attending the school in that year.

With residences for the parish priests and Marianist brothers acquired, and the new school building on Whitman completed, parish attention turned once again to the uncompleted "new" church on Bridge. In the latter half of the 1890s, a number of improvements were made to the church in preparation for the 1903 celebration of the golden jubilee of the parish. In 1896, during the pastorship of Father James O'Leary, the interior of the church was frescoed; new windows, doors, altars, statues, and carpeting were added; and other various interior improvements made. Three years later, a new organ was installed in the interior of the church and chimes with eleven bells in the church tower. In 1903, during the tenure of new pastor Francis Moran, the tower of the church was finally completed, not with a steeple as contemplated by architect Samuel Lane in his original design, but instead with a pinnacled crown designed by Akron architect William P. Ginther.

In that golden jubilee year of 1903, William Manning, who had moved in 1897 from the Near West Side to the new streetcar suburb of Lakewood and in 1900 had become a founding member of St. Rose of Lima parish, returned to St. Patrick's to write a history of the first fifty years of the parish. Over the course of the nearly three decades in which he had been a member of St. Patrick's parish, he had been one of its most active members, had held a seat on the parish council for two decades, and, according to pastor Moran, had "charge of financial accounts and prepared the annual report." Manning had been acquainted with every pastor of the parish up to that date, and, as he noted in his history of the parish, was able to call upon a number of the older parishioners to fill in the gaps where his personal knowledge was not sufficient. If, as likely was the case, he had taken the streetcar back to St. Patrick while his history was a work in progress and stood on Bridge Avenue in front of the church to admire the pinnacled crown recently added to its tower, he would have seen nearly the same exterior as anyone who stands before it today—except the pinnacles he would have seen atop the crown are now gone. They were removed years ago when they began to crumble and fall, creating a safety hazard for pedestrians below.  

When he wrote his parish history, William Manning was very aware, as the lede to this story reveals, that many changes had come to the parish and its campus since its founding in 1853. And there were more to come, a good number of which Manning likely witnessed, as he lived for another 34 years, before dying in 1937 at the age of 90. In 1913, the parish built a 55-foot addition to the rear of the church designed by architect Edwin J. Schneider and within which a sacristy was added and the sanctuary and nave of the church enlarged. In 1931, the old wooden altars in the church were replaced with marble ones, a new pulpit was installed and the interior freshly repainted, leading to the consecration of the church on St. Patrick's Day of that year, an event 83-year-old William Manning would have almost certainly attended, health permitting.   

Another change to St. Patrick—the beginnings of which William Manning may have witnessed—was the thinning of the Irish population of the parish, which, according to Plain Dealer newspaper articles, may have begun as early as the 1930s. Irish Americans like Manning had been moving west to suburbs like West Cleveland (1871-1894), Lakewood, and others since the 1870s, leading to the creation of new Irish parishes, such as St. Colman on Gordon (West 65th) Street (1880) and St. Rose of Lima near the Cleveland-Lakewood border (1897). However, it is likely that it was the increased movement to the suburbs in the mid-20th century stimulated by the development of the interstate highway system and the post–World War II influx of Appalachian and Puerto Rican migrants to Cleveland's Near West Side that dramatically changed the ethnic composition of the parish. Moreover, in 1945, St. Mary of the Assumption church—located less than a quarter of a mile from St. Patrick's—became a chapel on the St. Ignatius High School campus when its parish apparently dissolved.  While some of its parishioners likely transferred to St. Stephen or St. Michael parish, both also historic German Catholic parishes in Cleveland, a number may have preferred to join St. Patrick parish, because its church was much closer, thereby also contributing to the thinning of the Irish membership there. (The ending of St. Mary parish also had another effect on St. Patrick's parish. Jesuit priests who previously had ministered to St. Mary's parish were reassigned. Included was Father Francis Callan who became pastor of St. Patrick's, and, for the next 35 years, Jesuit priests led the historic Irish parish.) 

By 1971, when St. Patrick parish celebrated the 100th anniversary of the laying of the cornerstone of the church on Bridge Avenue, it was noted in a March 16, 1971 Plain Dealer article that there were only a few "patches" of Irish left in the parish and that the parish was now one of many different ethnicities, with fifteen percent of it speaking Spanish as a first language. In the 1980s, as Jesuit priests departed and diocesan priests returned to St. Patrick parish, the new pastor, Mark DiNardo, along with co-pastor Edward Camille, became the first diocesan priests in the history of the parish to not have Irish surnames. In 1985, Father DiNardo, sole pastor of St. Patrick parish after the reassignment of Father Camille in 1983, initiated a series of outreach programs, designed to help the inner-city homeless and poor. While Father DiNardo retired in 2017 after serving the parish as its pastor for 37 years, the programs, which include a Hunger Center, Charity of the Month, and Project Afford, have continued. 

If William A. Manning were alive today to take a tour of the current St. Patrick parish campus, he would note with approval that many of the buildings that existed on the campus when he last visited are still standing, and he would likely be very sorry to hear that the grand school building on Whitman is not. It was razed by the parish in 1978, leading Plain Dealer columnist George Condon, an Irish-American, to advocate for the preservation of St. Patrick church as a "memorial to Irish immigrants." Manning might be most interested, however, to learn about the parish outreach programs and whether the parish had, over the years, reduced poverty, illness, and homelessness, and fostered a greater sense of community, in the Ohio City neighborhood, a feat that he believed the Irish immigrants who founded St. Patrick parish in 1853 had in their day achieved.

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Standing at 2227 Payne Avenue just east of downtown Cleveland is a building whose exterior is unlike any other in the city. Its two-story façade is deeply concave and dominated by five vertical panels of block glass windows beneath high-relief, Art Deco-style letters, perhaps ten feet high, reading “In Union There Is Strength”. In 1949, when the building was completed and the labor movement in America was approaching its postwar zenith, probably most people would have recognized the words as a rallying cry to join and support labor unions. Today, after decades of decline suffered by organized labor, probably most passersby are merely puzzled by these words.

In fact, the union which built this impressive headquarters, designed by local architect Milo Holdstein, was the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, once a pillar of the local and national labor movements. It was named the Sidney Hillman Memorial Building in honor of the founder and long-time president of the union, who had died in 1946 at the age of 59. However, the “Amalgamated,” or ACWA, which organized workers in the men’s clothing industry, began declining in membership and resources soon after this building opened, and, in 1999, fifty years later, the union, a mere shadow of its former self, abandoned the building, which has been, since 2004, the Norma Herr Women’s Center, an emergency shelter for homeless women.

Sidney Hillman and his colleagues founded the Amalgamated in 1914, following a revolt of more socialist-minded locals against the conservative leadership of the United Garment Workers, and by the next year, 1915, the new union was active in Cleveland. Apparently the first years here were difficult ones for the union; it made some headway among the smaller “shops,” or production units, but a Cleveland delegate to the 1918 national convention pleaded that a Bohemian and an Italian organizer be sent to Cleveland to help with the organizing (he claimed that 75% of the workers here were Bohemian).

A 1919 “general,” or industry-wide, strike resulted in a 44-hour work week, increased wages, and union security in many of the Cleveland shops, and a seven-week strike in 1921 against the Douglas Tailoring Co., which had shops in Akron and Canton as well as Cleveland, resulted in the union’s greatest organizing victory during its early years here. A young shop steward from the Douglas Co., Beryl Peppercorn, the son of a Jewish tailor from Austria whose family immigrated to Cleveland around 1900, was to emerge as the head of the local union; Peppercorn was not only the Manager of the Cleveland Joint Board of the Amalgamated from 1922 to 1958, but he was also instrumental in forming the first CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations) unions in Cleveland during the 1930s and in fighting Communist domination of these unions during the early 1940s.

Regardless of its successes in the smaller shops, the union’s welfare depended critically on its ability to organize the city’s three largest garment manufacturers, Kaynee, Joseph and Feiss, and Richman Brothers. Interestingly, all three were owned by Jewish entrepreneurs and developed national reputations for their progressive labor policies. Kaynee, which employed around 700 workers at its main plant on Aetna Avenue in the Slavic Village neighborhood, produced mainly boys’ clothing. Its factory contained, remarkably, a day care center, recreation room, dance hall, and movie theater, as well as medical and dental clinics, and an outdoor playground.

Likewise, the Joseph and Feiss Co., which employed some 2,000 workers at its West 53rd Street plant, combined scientific management and progressive welfare policies, resulting in well-lit and well-ventilated work spaces, work chairs and tables redesigned to maximize comfort and minimize injury, plus company-sponsored dances, choruses, athletic clubs, and more; in addition, Joseph and Feiss introduced the five-day, forty-hour work week in 1917, before Henry Ford did so in Detroit. Richman Bros., operating out of a 65,000 sq. ft. factory on East 55th Street, offered its thousands of employees two weeks (later three) of paid annual leave, paid maternity leave, interest-free loans in times of need, and many other benefits.

The union had made concerted efforts to organize both Joseph and Feiss and Richman Brothers since 1926, but it was not until 1934 that they could claim success at Joseph and Feiss. The firing of a worker for union activity resulted in a walkout, picketing by as many as a thousand employees, and finally, after intervention by Hillman, a vote inside the factory on whether the workers preferred the Amalgamated or the pre-existing company union – a vote won overwhelmingly by the ACWA. Later that year, the union called a strike at Kaynee, and after a two-month strike marred by violence and the company’s temporary closing of the factory, the company agreed in January 1935 to a contract providing union recognition, wage increases, and other benefits.

The one firm which the Amalgamated could never organize, despite thirty years of trying, was Richman Brothers. Management of this firm had always tried to achieve a work environment suitable for its big “family” of employees, and toward the end of the union’s efforts, in the early fifties, it complained that “the union plan has been one to crush our business. We think this is wrong…to put this kind of pressure on our family.” Beryl Peppercorn reported to the 1950 convention that Richman Brothers remained unorganized, but he was hopeful the new union label program would lead to falling sales for the firm and an eventual union victory. The union also shifted its organizing efforts to the company’s 64 retail outlets, which employed 800 workers, compared with 2,500 at the East 55th factory, and began picketing around half the stores in 1951.

This picketing prompted an amusing response from the Plain Dealer, whose editors wrote in June 1951 that “the ACWA organizers are by no means stupid. They realize that the Richman Brothers Co. would be a big, fat, juicy plum…The Richman Brothers Co. is not having labor troubles with its employees and never has had troubles with them. The union, its mouth watering for the juicy plum, is simply trying to gobble up a good thing.”

With the defeat of the union efforts at Richman Bros. in the early fifties, the Amalgamated began a process of slow decline not long after the Sidney Hillman Building was opened. New plant technology, changing markets, and much cheaper labor, first in the American South and then overseas, spelled the death knell of the local industry. In 1952 Aetna International bought a large share of Kaynee Co. stock and then sold it to Piedmont Shirt Co. of Greenville, S.C., which closed the Cleveland factory in 1958 (the building no longer stands). In 1969 Richman Brothers merged with F.W. Woolworth, which liquidated the Cleveland firm and closed the massive factory in 1992 (the factory still stands empty after many failed proposals for redevelopment). Finally, in 1995, Joseph and Feiss closed its doors after 150 years in Cleveland, and the main factory building was razed in 2003, though the office building was spared and redeveloped in 2017 as Menlo Park Academy, a charter school.

And as the industry declined locally, so did the union. It first merged with the Textile Workers Union in 1976 to form ACTWU, the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, which then merged with the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union in 1995 to form UNITE, the United Needle Trades, Industrial, and Textile Employees, and then, in 2004 merged with the Hotel and Restaurant Employees (HERE) to form UNITE HERE. A dissident group broke from UNITE HERE in 2009 to form Workers United, a union which represented around 150 workers in Brooklyn, Ohio, producing expensive men’s suits under the Hugo Boss label until that facility, too, was closed in 2019.

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