Forest City Hospital, located in the Glenville neighborhood, was considered Cleveland’s first fully interracial hospital when it opened in 1957. The site of the hospital was on the grounds of the old Glenville Hospital at 701 Parkwood Avenue, which was eventually entirely razed for the development of Forest City. This construction was made possible by the Forest City Hospital Association, which was formed in 1939 by physicians and community members who supported the creation of an interracial hospital that could effectively serve Cleveland's Black population and provide an institution where Black physicians could find steady work. Some of the prominent founding members of the Forest City Hospital Association included Dr. Ulysses Grant Mason Jr., Dr. Middleton H. Lambright, and Dr. Samuel Freedlander.
Throughout the decades preceding the opening of Forest City Hospital, there had been active discussion among Cleveland’s medical community and public advocacy from local civic organizations for the development of such a facility. In 1930, about 35 Black physicians practiced in Cleveland, with only five being employed securely as staff of the Western Reserve Society Medical School. The rest were forced to seek positions at institutions where they might be subjected to outright discrimination through unequal working conditions and unjust terminations. Many African American physicians reported that though they were forced to work long hours, it was not an uncommon occurrence not to work directly with a single patient over an entire shift as white patients would request to see a white doctor while Black patients were routinely denied care by institutions for a variety of reasons. Along with physicians who pushed for the creation of a hospital where they would be accepted fully and find solid work, the ever-growing Black population of Cleveland also exerted pressure on the established hospital systems. Between 1910 and 1940, Cleveland's African American population grew from 8,488 to nearly 85,000. This increase in population, and subsequently patients seeking medical care, elicited unsatisfactory responses from Cleveland hospitals. Some institutions established specific days that served as the only times when Black patients were even considered to receive care, while some institutions enacted policies whereby Black patients were forced to wait and receive care in the oldest wings of a building and be treated only using the oldest equipment.
These major problems in the treatment of Black physicians and the care available to the entire Cleveland Black community led to the establishment of the Forest City Hospital Association in 1939. Of the 39 founding members, nine were Black physicians hoping to spark the creation of a new institution free from racial discrimination and bias. The association searched for properties where they could either build a brand-new building or renovate an existing one. Eventually, the organization decided that the site of the old Glenville Hospital would be suitable as it was in a prime location to serve the Black community in Cleveland’s east side neighborhoods. Throughout the 1940s and into the 1950s, the Forest City Hospital Association worked closely with the Cleveland branch of the NAACP, which they viewed as the likeliest source of significant funding for the construction of a new interracial hospital. However, this proposed cooperation in the building of a medical facility would be fraught with dilemmas due to disagreements on exactly where and how such a project would be undertaken. Specifically, the NAACP was continually reluctant to commit any large sum of money towards the building of a new hospital as they had already recently invested in building two other hospitals to serve black communities in New York and Chicago, each of which had proved to be a financial drag on the NAACP. In May 1954, the NAACP voted to formally disapprove of plans presented by the Forest City Hospital Association to tear down the old Glenville Hospital and create a new building. This vote effectively ended the NAACP’s involvement in the initial funding of the new facility. Opportunely, the Forest City Hospital Association had gained favor in the public eye and forged connections with other Cleveland organizations willing to help fund the project. In 1954, the Cleveland Hospital Fund granted $404,000 to the Forest City Hospital Association, allowing it to break ground at the old Glenville Hospital site. In 1955, with construction just underway, Ohio Governor Frank J. Lausche launched a public subscription campaign in support of the hospital. This effort, along with other fundraising activities conducted by the Forest City Hospital Association, contributed an additional $641,000 to the total fund.
After just over two years of construction, Forest City Hospital officially opened its doors to patients on August 4, 1957, with Cleveland's Call & Post newspaper declaring the institution to be "A hospital for all." The hospital initially held 92 beds, but it would eventually become a 103-bed facility. Among the care offerings at Forest City Hospital were general practice and family care, surgery, gynecology, emergency services, and state-of-the-art X-ray and imaging services. In just its first year of operation, Forest City Hospital admitted over 2,500 patients, conducted over 1,300 surgical operations, took over 4,500 X-rays, and was the site of over 500 births. Of 53 physicians on staff, 26 were Black, as were most of the other hospital staff such as nurses and technicians. For its entire time in operation, Forest City Hospital served as an institution where anyone, regardless of race, could receive high-quality and timely medical care without risk of discrimination or segregation.
Forest City Hospital functioned comfortably for nearly a decade until 1967, when concerns over the building’s ability to add more beds and facilities to accommodate an ever-growing population came to a head. For the next several years, the hospital embarked on a new fundraising campaign in an attempt to raise enough money to build a new expansion and effectively double the total amount of bed space. However, throughout the early 1970s total admissions fell and consistently occupied bed space declined, jeopardizing the plans for any new expansion. From the loss of this potential fundraising and the inability to renovate, the quality of services at Forest City Hospital reportedly fell. Moving forward, Forest City Hospital began to prioritize outpatient and supportive services, along with keeping a high-quality emergency care unit running. By the 1970s, nearly all medical organizations in Cleveland had removed major barriers targeting Black patients and healthcare workers from finding care and work. Coupled with the facilities of Forest City becoming outdated and with no hope of a renovation for the hospital, patients and physicians continually left for other Cleveland institutions. Beset by financial stress, low admissions, and a shortage of physicians and nurses, Forest City Hospital finally closed in 1978. Although it lasted barely over two decades, Forest City Hospital provided a crucial lifeline in an era of struggle for access to quality healthcare.
]]>St. Luke’s Hospital was founded on Woodland Avenue in 1894 as Cleveland General Hospital. Soon after being renamed St. Luke's in 1906, the hospital spent two decades on Carnegie Avenue before moving in 1927 to a much larger building on Shaker Boulevard in the Buckeye neighborhood that was styled like Independence Hall, where the founding fathers declared “All men are created equal.” The history of St. Luke’s does not match the architectural symbolism of the building as there are many cases of African American patients and staff being mistreated during the 1950s and 1960s. Some Black patients were physically assaulted, went untreated, or were segregated. St. Luke’s questionable history in its dealings with African American patients and staff remains relevant as events today highlight persistent issues that echo those that African Americans experienced decades ago.
The mistreatment of African American patients at St. Luke’s Hospital was common throughout the 1950s. For example, in 1957 a thirteen-year-old girl injured in a car accident was brought to St. Luke’s for medical attention. She was unconscious, but nurses and a doctor told her mother to take her home because, they insisted, she was “drunk.” The girl remained in an unconscious state for several days; however, a private doctor treated her at home. After she did not regain consciousness she was brought back to St. Luke’s, which now admitted her. The girl had to receive further treatment at home and the hospital for more than a year after the accident. She was never able to live a normal life after the accident and poor care from St. Luke’s.
Poor treatment of African American patients continued and in the early part of August 1957, St. Luke’s hospital staff rolled a white patient into an African American ward; however, the white patient had been dead for over a half hour. The woman had received a colostomy right before her death which produced a strong odor. While she was in a different ward, white patients complained about the smell. In an effort to appease white patients, hospital staff moved her to an African American ward, where they left her for over four hours. One patient said, “I’ll bet they wouldn’t bring an alive woman in here and leave her for four or five hours. If they don’t want to integrate the living patients then we don’t want integration because of somebody’s death. Especially when it's a case like this.” Later it became known that there was an empty room where the body could have been placed, but it was on the other side of the hospital.
Another incident, which involved another Black woman, Louise Ottrix, and her daughter underscores the poor treatment of African Americans. Ottrix took her four-month-old baby to St. Luke’s because the baby had fallen and hurt her head. Once Ottrix arrived her information was taken and she was told to wait. According to Ottrix she waited for about twenty-five minutes and then asked if her child could be seen immediately. She was told no and that she would have to wait her turn. After being denied timely service, she decided to leave and went to St. Vincent’s Charity Hospital where the baby was seen immediately. The baby had suffered from a skull fracture.
Protests erupted in February 1963 as a response to the treatment that African Americans received during the 1950s and '60s. The Cleveland Chapter of Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) charged St. Luke’s Hospital with segregating its patients. Arthur Evans, CORE’s protest committee chairman, led a protest where forty people were present with pickets on February 22, 1963. The protests involved people of various backgrounds, including white people. The protesters, most of whom carried posters denouncing segregation policies, circled the entrance of the hospital.
Not only did people protest outside St. Luke’s but prayer pilgrimages were held outside the hospital as well. People from CORE, the NAACP, Job Seekers, Freedom Fighters, and the Afro-American Institute participated in the prayers outside St. Luke’s. Those in attendance prayed to God that St. Luke’s would end its discrimination against those of different races, creeds, or colors. Many people who passed by joined in on the prayer. After the prayers were done people began to hold a traditional protest. Towards the end of March of 1963, CORE ended its protests at St. Luke’s Hospital as its leaders saw improved conditions of integration. St. Luke’s agreed to desegregate its wards and semi-private rooms.
St. Luke’s was not the only hospital during the 1960s to mistreat African American or minority patients. According to medical historian Rosemary Stevens, Blacks all across the country often received meager medical care during the 1960s. Poor African American patients often identified the impersonality and rudeness of large hospitals like St. Luke’s as the reason they avoided seeking health care.
St. Luke’s continued to exhibit problems in its treatment of African American patients and employees. During 1967 four hundred non-professional employees went on strike or tried to unionize. Only two of them were white. Joseph E. Murphy, who was in charge of the unionization push and the strike, believed that negotiations would have been easier if more members were white. Indeed, St. Luke’s was insensitive to its African American workers’ calls for pay increases. The NAACP sent volunteers to join the protests, and Congressman Michael A. Feighan called upon the St. Luke’s administration to recognize Local 47, Building Service and Maintenance Union.
Cleveland Mayor Carl Stokes worked hard to resolve the situation between Local 47 and St. Luke’s; however, by December 1967 he believed that he had “exhausted the maximum resources” of his office. Stokes also said that he could not force either the union or St. Luke’s to the table; however, he wanted to “bring about a settlement amicably and agreeable to all.”
The strike at St. Luke’s would continue to gain more and more attention as it stretched into the early months of 1968. Rev. Randel T. Osborn, an aide to Martin Luther King Jr., announced a plan to apply pressure on St. Luke’s through Operation Breadbasket. The goal of Operation Breadbasket was to increase African American employment across the country. Not long after Rev. Osborn announced pressure would be applied a deal was reached between Local 47 and St. Luke’s. On March 8, 1968, Mayor Stokes announced that the strike was over. The eleven-month strike ended with Local 47 being recognized as a bargaining agent with four hundred non-professional employees. Negotiations on wages and working conditions began soon thereafter.
St. Luke’s troubled past regarding its dealings with African American patients and employees have only become more relevant in today’s world. The troubles that Black patients and employees faced at St. Luke’s such as mistreatment, segregation, poor working conditions, and poor pay only touch the surface of what many African Americans experienced during the 1950s and 1960s and still face today.
]]>Graced with a particularly rhythmic and memorable address – 12345 Cedar Road – Doctors' Hospital was actually a converted eight-story apartment building: the former Edgehill Apartments. The structure stood slightly south and east of what are now the Buckingham Condominiums at the crest of Cedar Hill.
Transformed from a residence to a medical facility, Doctors' Hospital opened its doors in August 1946, following nearly ten years of fundraising by physicians associated with the Academy of Medicine of Cleveland. The hospital was governed by a new non-profit entity: The Cleveland Memorial Foundation, Inc. By the mid 1950s, Doctors' Hospital had more than 200 beds and a variety of medical specialties, including pediatrics, osteopathy and oncology.
Despite its value to patients and the community, Doctors' Hospital survived little more than 20 years, with myriad growth plans thwarted by space and zoning constraints. In 1953, a proposal to double the facility's size (including a proposed school of nursing and a basement bomb shelter) was rejected by the Cleveland Heights building commissioner and the City's Board of Zoning Appeals. According to The Sun Press, the reason (painfully familiar to many Cleveland Heights residents and visitors) was a lack of parking. Three years later, hospital officials unsuccessfully sought to build a second Doctors' Hospital in South Euclid at the corner of Belvoir and Monticello – property the city had originally purchased to use as a dump. By 1960, hospital officials also were eyeing building sites in Solon and Twinsburg, neither of which panned out.
The beginning of the end came in 1964, when the US Public Health Service announced that $1.7 million in grants would be made available to relocate Doctors' Hospital to 15 acres of donated land in Mayfield Heights east of SOM Center Road. In 1966, the City of Cleveland Heights announced plans to replace Doctors' Hospital with a fire station, as well as a new city hall (to replace the outdated building where Honda of Cleveland Heights now stands on Mayfield Road). The next year, the City bought the Doctors' Hospital building and land for $675,000. Shortly after, construction began on the Mayfield Heights facility, tentatively named Doctors' Hospital. The complex, eventually christened Hillcrest Hospital, opened in November 1968, with 31 patients transferred by ambulance from the doomed Doctors' Hospital in Cleveland Heights.
Doctors' Hospital was demolished in February 1969 and the new fire station and city hall were built elsewhere. Most of the Doctors' Hospital site, somewhat ironically, is now a municipal parking lot.
]]>Highland View Hospital was a Warrensville Township gem. Originally known as the Cuyahoga County Hospital, the name was changed to make the hospital sound private. Opening in 1953 as part of the Cuyahoga County Hospital System, with the goal of treating chronically ill patients, Highland View was known for treating and rehabilitating victims of strokes, those suffering from neuromuscular diseases, and the chronically crippled. The hospital continued a long history of rehabilitative institutional use of the Cooley Farms, named for minister and reformer Rev. Harris Cooley, in Warrensville Township. This land was outside of the Cleveland's corporation limit but was owned by the City of Cleveland. It was believed the "fresh air" of the pastoral area was good for the patients of the various institutions. By the mid-1910s, the land included the Cleveland Workhouse, Warrensville Sanatorium (later Sunny Acres Tuberculosis Hospital) and an Infirmary. Highland View Hospital was a county hospital on city property, making use of part of the former infirmary.
Highland View was a leading facility of its type in the country whose programs were innovative and proven to work. The hospital always had vacant beds, especially in the 1950s, because of a shortage of staff. Patients were not accepted for permanent placement, but the average stay of a patient was 67 days. The challenge the staff at Highland View faced was helping those under their care and getting them back into society and back to their regular lives. The hospital was excellent at helping people with spinal cord injuries. People who were expected to only live for another year at most were able to get the help they needed to return to an almost regular life. A unique service the hospital offered was the mobile dentist's office, which allowed patients with little mobility to get the dental care they needed in their own homes. Highland View staff helped their patients relearn not just simple things such as walking or how to maneuver around in the kitchen, but also complex things such as relearning to drive. The hospital had a mock kitchen to help patients relearn how to get around and do things in the kitchen with their new found disabilities. Dr. Charles Long II headed a program that helped handicapped patients relearn how to drive. The "automobility clinic" became a way to evaluate how patients reacted to driving situations and retrain them accordingly. "In all cases, those who (had) taken the driver's licensing examination (had) passed with above-average scores." The program gave hope to those with disabilities that they could get around by themselves when they left the hospital.
Not only were patients at Highland View Hospital prepared for their departure, but they were also mentally stimulated while at the hospital. Many patients needed some kind of activity to prevent boredom and possible depression. The two most popular programs were the Studio Greenhouse and the Art Studio. In the greenhouse patients could "work in soil, plant bulbs, root cuttings, clip faded flowers, arrange bouquets and do other small chores that are fun, and also good for muscles that need mild exercising." The plants and flowers provided a fun activity that surely added some joy to the patients' day. When discharged patients could take plants with them if they wished. In the Art Studio they could paint, draw, write, read or people watch. The staff members in the room were not there to supervise. All they did was provide advice or criticism if someone requested it. Those in the studio could express themselves in any manner they wished. Some of the art was even placed into the art sale held by the hospital or placed on display at the public library.
Despite all the good Highland View Hospital was doing, Beachwood Councilman Ralph S. Bing fought the hospital for years over the pollution pouring out of the hospital's two smokestacks. The hospital was confronted by the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency, which said it would deny air pollution variance applications made by the hospital because of unsatisfactory schedules for complying with state air pollution regulations. Ironically, patients came to Highland View for its pastoral setting and fresh air, yet the hospital was polluting the same air. In 1970 a proposal was put forth to the board to consolidate Highland View Hospital. The plan was to merge Highland View Hospital into Metropolitan General, a plan that took about six years to accomplish. In the last two years of the plan, people began speaking out against it. They wanted to polish Highland View into the gem it once was. People claimed a misuse of money from a levy occurred because the hospital board decided the money was better spent else where and that Highland View was beyond saving. The court ruled in favor of the hospital board and Highland View Hospital was closed and split between Sunny Acres and Metropolitan General.
]]>You have to be fairly old to even remember City Hospital. Founded in 1837, just one year after Cleveland became a city, it was Cleveland's first public hospital. In 1958, after 121 years in existence, and as a result of the growth of Cleveland's suburbs and recognition that the services provided by the hospital had become county-wide, it was transferred to the Cuyahoga County Hospital System, becoming Metro General Hospital. Today, it is the main campus of the MetroHealth System.
City Hospital had its origins in the great cholera pandemic of 1829-1837. It struck Cleveland in 1832, when soldiers on the Henry Clay, a ship that was transporting them across the Great Lakes to fight in the Black Hawk War in the West, contracted the disease while their ship was docked in Buffalo. They became sick as the ship sailed to Detroit, which, at least according to one Cleveland historian, stationed armed men on its docks to prevent the soldiers from disembarking there. Compelled to seek medical help elsewhere, the ship headed to Cleveland where the soldiers received treatment. Unfortunately, the cholera soon spread, killing 50 people within several months, which was at that time about five percent of the population.
In the aftermath of the epidemic, Cleveland created a Board of Health, and, in 1837, the Board took over the former Cleveland Township poorhouse, converting it into an institution that was initially called the City Hospital, but later became the Cleveland Infirmary. For a little more than a decade, the hospital operated out of the poorhouse, a two-story ramshackle building on the northwest corner of Sumner and Clinton (East 14th) Streets. It was located on the same grounds as Erie Street cemetery which prompted Mark Gottlieb, a journalist who wrote a history of University Hospitals, to note that that was "appropriate," because, in those days, people who went to hospitals usually died shortly thereafter.
In 1851, as Cleveland grew and in response to another cholera scare, the city purchased an 80-acre lot in Brooklyn Township along Scranton Road as the site of a proposed new and larger City Infirmary. Plans were drawn and, in 1855, the city completed construction of an Italianate-style red-brick building which had five stories, including its basement and attic. The land on which the new infirmary sat had formerly been the Brooklyn Township poor farm. That the first two sites for City Hospital were places where the community's poor had been housed provides an insight into society's perception in that era that a close relationship existed between poverty, morality, sickness and disability.
For the next three decades, medical treatment was provided in this building on Scranton Road, which became known as the "Middle House," because of the many annexes and wings that were added onto each side of it over the years. However, the building still served as primarily something other than a hospital during this time period. It was home--sometimes for decades, to an assortment of Clevelanders who were destitute, sometimes because of mental illness, sometimes because of disability, and sometimes simply because of poverty and advanced age. While some efforts were made to separate residents based on the condition which had brought them to Middle House, often the poor, the mentally ill, the disabled, the elderly poor, and even juvenile offenders lived in close proximity to one another and to actual hospital patients.
In the final decades of the nineteenth century as medical science entered the bacteriological era and as the medical profession became, well, more professional, major change came to City Hospital. Slowly it transformed itself from an institution serving society's destitute into a medical treatment facility. In 1889, a second building with the capacity to treat 200 patients was erected on the Scranton Road campus, just north of Middle House. While the latter building and its multiple annexes continued for several more decades to provide what were considered charitable services for the poor, the disabled, the mentally ill, and others, the new building, which was officially designated as City Hospital, served exclusively as a place where sick and injured patients received medical treatment.
In 1890, the quality of the medical services provided at the hospital began to improve markedly when, at the instigation of Cleveland mayor George Gardner, the Board of Health took first steps to begin ceding authority for hospital policy and procedure to a medical staff composed of a number of respected area physicians who were engaged in different fields of specialization. Among those early City Hospital physicians were Dr. George Crile, who would several decades later co-found the Cleveland Clinic, and Dr. Dudley Allen, who had married into the wealthy Severance family and became not only one of Cleveland's great surgeons, but also one of its great philanthropists.
As the twentieth century arrived, City Hospital was on a fast track to becoming one of the largest and best hospitals in the United States. The campus grew immensely during the first three decades of the century. In 1913, while a new multiple building complex was under construction, the hospital became affiliated with the medical school of Western Reserve University, further enhancing its professional standards. By 1937, which marked the one hundredth anniversary of its founding, City Hospital was the country's sixth largest hospital, with sixteen hospital buildings and 1,650 beds on the Scranton Road campus. It had come a very long way from its beginnings in the city's poorhouse located on the grounds of Erie Street Cemetery.
]]>In the wake of the Second Battle of Fredericksburg and the Battle of Chancellorsville in May 1865, Bishop Amadeus Rappe made a proposal to the Cleveland City Council. Bishop Rappe, the first bishop of the Diocese of Cleveland, proposed the building of a hospital to care for the streams of wounded soldiers returning to the city. The city council appointed a committee to investigate the proposal, and the committee immediately encountered resistance. Newspaper editorials attacked the idea of a Catholic-run hospital in a city that was nine tenths Protestant. Bishop Rappe made his proposal a second time, and this time he specified that the Sisters of Charity of St. Augustine would provide nursing care if the city would provide funding. Despite continued anti-Catholic rhetoric, the Sisters emphasized that they intended to care for patients of all faiths and those who were unable to pay would have their care paid for by the city. Eventually, city council agreed to the proposal and a site was purchased on Perry Street (now East 22nd) for $10,000. Taxpayers paid $42,000 of the $72,000 building cost. On October 5, 1865, St. Vincent Charity Hospital opened its doors.
A century later, St. Vincent undertook a project that for some undermined its relationship to the community. The hospital had outgrown its space, and the only place to expand was into the surrounding low-income neighborhood that city officials had come to see as urban blight without value. St. Vincent greatly expanded its campus in the early 1960s at the same time the city inaugurated the Erieview urban renewal project. Some 1,800 mostly low-income households were displaced over several years to build the Erieview Tower, One Erieview Plaza, and the Federal Building. The hospital campus was almost entirely rebuilt in the St. Vincent Urban Renewal Area. Only 600 of the 1,800 families received public assistance to relocate. The hospital that was created to serve the poor ironically displaced the people it served. Progress and urban renewal were defined as the removal of low-income families.
In November 2022, the hospital drastically scaled back its operations and services, ending both inpatient and emergency care. Two years later, the Sisters of Charity of St. Augustine announced the final closure and planned demolition of the entire hospital campus – save for a small faceless building on East 22nd Street. Not unlike the hospital's major expansion in the 1960s, these changes coincided with larger forces shaping the Central neighborhood. Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority had recently announced their own plan to demolish and replace the Olde Cedar apartments, one of the largest and oldest public housing developments in the United States. Similarly, the simultaneous sale of large plots of hospital land, the planned demolition of the nearby Juvenile Justice Center, and an ambitious reconfiguration of the I-90 Inner Belt promise to reshape the area, once again, from the top down.
]]>The Cleveland Clinic was founded on February 5, 1921. Frank E. Bunts, George W. Crile, and William E. Lower volunteered to serve their country as field surgeons and physicians in the Medical Corps of the United States Army during World War I. The military hospital experience impressed these men with the efficiency of an organization that included every branch or specialty of medicine and surgery. By the time that they returned home, Bunts, Crile and Lower had recognized the benefits that could be obtained from cooperation by a group of specialists. Along with John Phillips, they came together to found the Cleveland Clinic.
Many private practices and physicians were against the concept of opening a group practice. They believed that such a wealth of resources available to a group might give them an unfair competitive advantage. Fortunately, the founders of the Clinic were professors in one or more of the Cleveland medical schools and all had served as presidents of the Academy of Medicine. A core ideal emerged to create an institution in which medicine and surgery could be practiced, studied and taught by a group of specialists.
The Cleveland Clinic officially opened for business on Monday, February 28, 1921. The beautiful new building featured four stories, of which the upper three were built around a large central well extending from the second floor up to a glass skylight. The main waiting room was located at the bottom of the well on the second floor; while the office, examination rooms and treatment rooms opened onto the elegant second floor waiting area. The x-ray department, clinical laboratories and a pharmacy were located on the first floor. The fourth floor contained the art and photography department, editorial offices, offices for administrative personnel, a library and an executive boardroom.
The hospital quickly grew in popularity and Clevelanders accepted it so enthusiastically that plans for expansion were made within the first few years after it opened. By 1928, the Cleveland Clinic was a rapidly expanding, state-of-the-art hospital full of promise with potential to become one of the leading medical institutions in the nation.
]]>Veterans in the Cleveland, Akron, and Canton areas had fought for over a decade for a veterans' hospital in the local area. In 1938, President Franklin Roosevelt answered their call and authorized the building of a veterans' hospital in the Cleveland area. This became the Brecksville Veterans Administration (VA) Hospital, originally located in Broadview Heights Village. It carried the name Brecksville because Brecksville and Broadview Heights shared the same Brecksville post office. The Broadview Heights Recreation Center is now at the site of the former hospital. The remnants of the old VA Hospital can still be seen in satellite photographs of the area such as the tree-lined driveway. In the midst of the Great Depression, Roosevelt was interested in projects that would create jobs and provide valuable public services as part of the New Deal. The Brecksville VA Hospital did exactly that.
The Works Progress Administration (WPA) allocated $1,090,000 for the Brecksville VA Hospital. The state of the art hospital opened in November of 1940 to great fanfare and celebration. The hospital created 150 new jobs. Although economic conditions were not as bad as in the early 1930s, Clevelanders still appreciated new opportunities in 1940.
Tuberculosis patients primarily occupied the 278 beds at the hospital. A contagious respiratory infection, tuberculosis, often shortened to TB, was a common disease prior to World War II when it was often called consumption. Fever, chills, night sweats, and loss of appetite with attendant weight loss characterize TB. However, the most dramatic symptoms are chest pain and coughing and coughing up blood in particular. Tuberculosis was also terminal. The Brecksville VA Hospital provided long-term care for TB patients, as they needed to be quarantined to prevent further spread of the illness. Doctors and nurses could only make TB patients as comfortable as possible in the absence of a cure.
Beginning in the 1960s, antibiotics were successfully used were used to treat tuberculosis. Sanatoriums and hospitals that treated TB patients were no longer necessary and began to close. Brecksville VA Hospital was one of them. It closed its doors in 1965 and its remaining patients were transferred to the new Brecksville Veterans Administration Hospital. The original facility then became the Broadview Developmental Center, a psychiatric hospital until it also closed in 1993. The City of Broadview Heights demolished most of the buildings on the old VA campus.
]]>The Brecksville Veterans Administration Hospital had a tumultuous history that raised the question of whether the hospital was actually unhealthy for the environment. Although initially embraced by the community, the hospital soon became a lightning rod for concerns that would last many years.
The Brecksville Veterans Administration Hospital was a massive 999-bed facility built as a replacement for an earlier facility of the same name built in 1938 in the village of Broadview Heights, which at the time carried a Brecksville address. When construction was completed on an 87-acre site in Brecksville in 1961, the hospital was one of the largest veterans' hospitals in the U.S. After World War II the growth rate of long-term care patients in the Veterans Administration was over 1,000 a month. In late 1945 the federal government earmarked a generous sum of one billion dollars for the construction of hospitals to serve the large number of veterans needing care.
When the Brecksville facility was built, its designers chose to embrace nature, going so far as to incorporate a natural lake on the premises for use by the patients. However, concerns mounted over pollution generated by the hospital. In 1970 the hospital faced accusations of polluting the air in Brecksville due to the large amounts of coal it burned around the clock in order to heat the dozens of buildings and miles of hospital corridors. In 1971 the hospital administration admitted the Brecksville VA Hospital was severely polluting the air, prompting a switchover to cleaner-burning oil and gas.
The problems the hospital presented to the local community were greater than just pollution in the air and water. The 1970s saw a shift in the attitudes of many local residents toward the hospital. Some of this ill will can be linked to attitudes toward returning Vietnam veterans. At that time there was a prevailing shift in the nation's collective consciousness towards veterans, for never had the U.S. been embroiled in a war that was so controversial or, with the exception of the Korean conflict, with an end result that did not produce victory. In addition, much of the Brecksville communal backlash was due to the problems the Brecksville hospital presented to the community. The local press reported that mental patients from the hospital were escaping and wandering the town, which frightened some residents. In the late 1970s the hospital was also rocked by several scandals, including the theft and sale of prescription drugs. These crimes had led to several dozen convictions by the early 1980s.
]]>Geneva Medical College of New York admitted the first woman into its medical training program in 1847. What began as a joke within the male student body helped launch the beginning of new career goals for women. Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell was the first woman to enter and graduate from a medical program in the United States, yet even with this advancement, men continued to treat women as inferior. Dr. Blackwell was forced to travel to Europe to gain the necessary experience; Paris, France namely, which was the mecca for women interested in medicine at this time.
In the 1850s, Dr. Myra King Merrick emerged as a leading female physician in Cleveland. Dr. Merrick became interested in medicine when her husband became ill and his treatment fell upon her. She studied medicine at the Central Medical College in Rochester, New York, and worked as a nurse at the Hydropathic Institute in order to gain experience. In 1852 she returned to Cleveland with her family, and during the Civil War she relocated to Lorain County where she helped treat wounded soldiers.
In 1867, Dr. Merrick and Dr. Cleora Seaman founded the Cleveland Homeopathic College for Women on Prospect Avenue. When the Cleveland Homeopathic School of Medicine stopped admitting women into their medical program, Dr. Merrick and Dr. Seaman felt it was an injustice. Both doctors saw the dire need for women to have a place to learn and gain professional experience. The college produced a number of prominent Cleveland women doctors, including Dr. Kate Parsons, Dr. Sarah Marcus, Dr. Martha Canfield, and Dr. Josephine Danforth Gillette. These leading women physicians helped build the reputation of the Women's and Children's Free Medical and Surgical Dispensary, which eventually became Woman's General Hospital.
Dr. Merrick and Dr. Parsons founded the dispensary in 1878 and the other women doctors served not only as physicians, but also on the board of directors. Dr. Canfield in particular played an important role in the dispensary's transformation into a hospital. These women each helped pave the way for other women to achieve the dream of becoming doctors. They provided a place not only for education, but also for a chance to obtain experience in the field and pass their knowledge on to the next generation of women doctors.
]]>In 1951, newspaper reporter Al Ostrow arrived at the Cleveland State Hospital and managed to get hired on the spot as an aide. He wrote about his time at the hospital in a series of articles for the Cleveland Press. The title of his exposé, "Whose fault is this?," provides the intent behind Ostrow's investigative reporting. His articles are riveting pieces of prose that keep readers on the edge of their seats. He describes an overcrowded hospital in desperate need of trained staff--both problems that they cannot seem to overcome. In order to embed himself in the hospital, Ostrow gave very little information of former jobs or places of residence, allowing him the opportunity to witness firsthand the indiscriminate hiring practices of the hospital.
As an aide, Ostrow was able to see for himself the kind of treatment patients received in the facility at the hands of their aides. He describes aides beating and restraining uncooperative patients. Ostrow's investigations furthered the efforts of those in the Cleveland community who wished to reform the mental hospital, but there were factors that impeded any change in the grand scheme of the hospital's organization and patient care.
In 1955, only four years after Al Ostrow's stint in the Cleveland State Hospital as an aide, another Press reporter, Bus Bergen, was admitted as a patient. Previously, Bergen had gone undercover to pen an exposé on prison inmates. When Bergen arrived at the Cleveland State Hospital, he became patient no. 40591 under the assumed name Howard Berger, allegedly suffering from a mental illness. "Berger" spent time interacting with the patients as he lived with them and slept in the same cramped quarters. This view of the Cleveland State Hospital is even more upsetting than that of Ostrow's time as an aide because Bergen lived among the patients and had the opportunity to see them in an even more intimate setting.
Bergen describes the daily activities of the men in Ward C that are absolutely heartbreaking. Some patients carried around and fought over newspapers that were weeks old just to have something to pass the time. Cigarettes were used as currency and were often hard to come by. He describes patients who sat around all day with nothing to do, basically languishing in unkempt wards. Worst of all were the sleeping arrangements. Bergen describes hundreds of beds crammed into a large dormitory that range from two to 18 inches apart.
Such treatment of the mentally ill in state hospitals was hardly unique to Cleveland. State institutions all over the country as well as the state of Ohio had troubles with overcrowding due to an overwhelming number of new patients being admitted. For instance, the state hospital in Athens, Ohio, was known to have more than twice the number of patients than the building's capacity. Until exposés like those seen in Cleveland (as well as famous exposés nationally) started raising awareness of patient treatment, state hospitals were allowed to continue operating with poor conditions.
With exposés done by reporters like Bus Bergen and Al Ostrow, there was a significant amount of coverage in newspapers for everyday people to read about the lack of proper care in state hospitals. However, the trend of moving mental patients out of the state hospitals and back into the community was only considered once care conditions within institutions became more widely known and discussed. After World War II, a strong distrust of psychiatric facilities and scandals of controversial psychotherapies like lobotomies came to light that led to the idea of deinstitutionalizing patients and moving towards family or community care. This shift can be attributed to the increasing exposure of the type of care mentally ill patients received and the creation of medical associations founded to reform the medical community in general.
]]>Wednesday, May 15, 1929 was just another busy day at the Cleveland Clinic. A steamfitter had arrived early that morning to repair a leaky steam pipe in the sub-basement, which had been converted into a storage room for the hospital's x-ray film. This routine repair morphed into a national tragedy as the exposed steam came into contact with approximately 3-4 tons of volatile nitrate x-ray film.
Nitrocellulose film was developed by the Eastman Kodak Company during the late 1880s for use in both the field of medicine, as well as the motion picture industry. The Eastman Kodak Company's nitrate film developed a penchant for being highly volatile, unstable and extraordinarily flammable. If nitrate film ignites, it becomes extremely difficult to extinguish. Immersing burning film in water may not extinguish it, and could actually increase the amount of deadly gas emitted.
The steam acted as the primary catalyst, which caused the highly unstable nitrate film to decompose and emit a poisonous cloud of gas. The gas soon ignited creating two violent explosions, which rocked the clinic, practically blowing the roof off of the building. The explosions forced deadly fumes at a high rate of pressure into the pipe tunnel system and up the pipe ducts into nearly every room of every floor of the hospital almost immediately. The yellowish-brown smoke also found its way up the major stairways between each floor, thus trapping most of the 225 occupants of the hospital in an inescapable, terrifying cloud of imminent death. The toxic vapors caught most of the victims by surprise, as several doctors and nurses collapsed at their desks, while others only managed a step or two in their escape before kneeling over and dying. One hundred and twenty three victims almost instantaneously perished that day.
A few of the victims were miraculously able to escape the hospital, rescued by firemen, policemen or volunteers. Unfortunately, anyone who had inadvertently inhaled any quantity of the fumes succumbed to and died from the toxic vapor, some soon after and others not for several days. It had been reported by dozens of witnesses that the bodies of the first victims turned yellow and later green after being brought out of the building. This ghastly, macabre scene left an indelible legacy that forced officials to reexamine safety procedures.
The historic disaster that occurred at the Cleveland Clinic was unprecedented in its time and it captured the attention of people on a national, and even worldwide scale. Several of the investigating commissions that were charged with finding the cause of the fumes and fire made amendments to policy that would profoundly alter fire-fighting practices, hospital procedures and the methodology behind the proper use and storage of hazardous chemicals and materials in the United States and throughout the world.
]]>Founded in 1896, Lutheran Hospital is one not only one of Ohio City's oldest institutions. It is also one of the largest, its campus covering an area from Franklin Boulevard south to Jay Avenue, and from West 25th Street west to West 28th Street. The hospital has also had a major impact on historic Franklin Circle.
Organized by the Evangelical Lutheran Hospital Association, the hospital was first sited in the Beckwith House, located on the northwest side of Franklin Circle at 247 Hanover (West 28th) Street. That house was built by M.E. Beckwith, one of Cleveland's earliest professional photographers. (In the mid-nineteenth century, Beckwith operated a "photographic parlor and art studio" at the corner of West 25th Street and Detroit.)
In 1898, the hospital moved across the Circle and purchased the Marcus Hanna mansion at 2603 Franklin Boulevard. Hanna was the man who engineered William McKinley's successful 1896 presidential campaign and, as a result, became known as a political king maker. His mansion had been built in 1869 on land deeded to his wife by her father, Daniel P. Rhodes. A wealthy west side industrialist, Rhodes lived next door on the southeast side of the Circle at 2609 Franklin. Hanna and his family lived in their mansion on Franklin from 1868 until 1890. (In the latter year, they moved to the far west side into a new mansion at 10400 Lake Avenue, The area would later become known as Cleveland's Edgewater neighborhood.)
In 1922, Lutheran Hospital razed the Hanna Mansion (and the Warmington mansion east of it) and built in their place its first hospital building. In 1948, the hospital expanded west, in the process razing Daniel Rhodes' Franklin Circle mansion, which had been serving as the home of St. John's Orphanage since the death of Rhodes' widow Sophia in 1909.
In the decades that followed, Lutheran Hospital expanded its Franklin Boulevard campus an additional number of times, as a result of major projects in the 1960s and 1970s. Now well into its second century of operation, Lutheran Hospital, which became part of the Cleveland Clinic system in 1996, continues to be a large and vibrant institution in Ohio City and continues to have an imposing presence on historic Franklin Circle.
]]>Located along the shore of Lake Erie, where Villa Angela-St. Joseph High School now stands, was once the largest hyperbaric chamber ever built. The Cunningham Sanitarium was an institution that focused on clean-air breathing treatment. It was built in 1928, only eight miles east of the industrial heart of Cleveland, near East 185th Street at 18485 Lake Shore Boulevard. Named after a Kansas City physician specializing in hyperbaric oxygenation (or "tank treatment,") Doctor Orval J. Cunningham, and funded by Canton-based Timken Roller Bearings Company's owner Henry H. Timken, the Sanitarium's coastal property was chosen because it was aesthetically pleasing.
Dr. Cunningham based his treatment on the belief that diabetes and cancer are caused by living organisms that fail to grow in the presence of oxygen. Therefore, by increasing the oxygen, the organisms fail to multiply and eventually die off. To do this accurately, Cunningham would sequester his patients in highly oxygenated environments for long periods of time cycled with periods of normal atmospheric conditions.
The million-dollar facility, engineered by Alois Hauser, chief engineer of Timken Co. at the time, was considered the first "attempt in human history to house people in such a unique structure." After nearly a year of hard labor by the Melbourne Construction Company, the facility opened to the first of its patients on December 1, 1928. No luxury was spared in the the five-story, sixty-five foot, 900-ton sphere. Able to accommodate forty patients at a time, the climate-controlled environment maintained a steady sixty-eight degrees with sixty-five percent humidity.
Unfortunately, five years after the hospital's opening the depressed financial status of the economy forced Cunningham to sell. Desperate for a buyer, Cunningham offered the institution to his twenty-year-old protégé, James Rand Jr., son of James Rand, president of Remington-Ran New York. The half-million dollar sale took place on September 28, 1934. Renamed the Ohio Institute of Oxygen Therapy, the investment failed to attract patients or an income, and changed hands once again in 1936. Abandoning oxygen therapy and operating as a general hospital, Boulevard Hospital also closed quickly due to financial problems.
After years of being shuttered and unused, the sanitarium and hospital was sold to the Cleveland Catholic Diocese, which built St. Joseph High School next door and continued to operate the former facility in various ways. Under orders from the U.S. War Production Board, on March 31, 1942, the steel ball was dismantled and scrapped for a mere $25,000 worth of metal weight. In 2009, following its purchase from the Catholic Diocese by the Hospice of the Western Reserve, the former sanitarium hospital met a similar fate, with many of its building materials being salvaged for reuse.
]]>Rustling trees, wildlife, ponds, fountains, and students hustling between their cars and classrooms. The first impressions of Cuyahoga Community College's Western Campus would, most likely, not include hints of its significant military history. Yet, wounded soldiers, German prisoners of war, and an entire military "city" were once the occupants inhabiting the property at 11000 Pleasant Valley Road in Parma. The site's rich history began when Crile General Hospital was dedicated on Easter Sunday 1944.
Built as a "temporary" facility, Crile grew to be more than a hospital. Its barracks-type structures were in almost continuous use for thirty years and served a variety of purposes. The Crile complex provided medical care to veterans of two wars, held 250 German POWs during World War II, and housed a Nike anti-aircraft missile base during the Cold War. It became home to Tri-C's Western Campus in 1966.
Crile General Hospital was built by the U.S. Army and named in honor of George Washington Crile (1864-1943), an internationally renowned surgeon and founder of the Cleveland Clinic. Crile served in both the Spanish American War and World War I and was a pioneer in military medicine, leading research and treatment of shock, blood transfusion, and blood banking.
Crile General Hospital actually received its first patient weeks before the official opening. In early March 1944, Richard Currier, a severely wounded POW, arrived as the lone patient in a facility with nearly 2,000 beds, 7 miles of corridors, and a staff of 1,000. Other patients arrived a few weeks later. In December 1944 the first detachment of German POWs arrived from Camp Perry, Ohio and remained until the end of 1945. Repatriated to Germany at the end of the war, many returned to the United States and subsequently became citizens.
After the end of World War II, Crile General Hospital became Crile Veterans Hospital in June 1946. Crile General Hospital had treated and healed over 15,000 patients by this time. The capacity of Crile was reduced to 1,000 beds, but was reorganized for clinical study and teaching. Physical therapy, occupational therapy, and corrective therapy were additional aspects of the Veterans Hospital's program.
The Crile Hospital in Parma closed in 1964, relocating to a new facility in University Circle (now the Louis Stokes VA Medical Center). In the fall of 1966, however, life returned to its empty ward and hallways as Cuyahoga Community College's newly created Western Campus enrolled 3,000 students. In 1975, the barracks were torn down and a new campus rose on the site of the old hospital to meet the community's expanding educational needs.
The site's military legacy has not been forgotten, however. Dedicated to preserving Cuyahoga Community College Western Campus's rich history, the Crile Archives, housed at the Tri-C Western Campus, is home to artifacts, documents, photographs, and books chronicling combat medicine and veterans' experiences from World War I to the present.
]]>University Hospitals of Cleveland is a world-class, not-for-profit medical institution with close ties to Case Western Reserve University. Its roots go back to 1866, with the formation of the Cleveland City Hospital Association, a charitable society designed to provide medical care to Cleveland's poor. The association's hospital quickly outgrew its original facilities and in 1876 moved into the Marine Hospital at East 9th Street and Lakeside Avenue. Eventually it became known as Lakeside Hospital and, in 1895, was affiliated with Western Reserve University's Medical Department.
In 1925, Lakeside Hospital formally merged with Maternity Hospital and Babies & Children's Hospital - two other Cleveland medical institutions that formed around the turn of the century with the aid of charitable contributions. This merger created University Hospitals of Cleveland and led to the development of new medical programs, services, and facilities throughout the greater Cleveland area. Much of the new construction occurred in University Circle, where University Hospital's main campus remains today.
For more (including 7 images & 3 audio files) view the original article
]]>The history of Mount Sinai Hospital began in 1892, as the Young Ladies' Hebrew Association started collecting funds to "care for the needy and sick." In 1903 it was decided that those funds would be used to establish a hospital catering to the needs of Cleveland's east side Jewish population. Mount Sinai Hospital opened on East 32nd Street, later moving to a larger facility on East 105th Street in 1916. Despite its inception as a Jewish hospital, Mount Sinai quickly became the primary healthcare provider to Cleveland's urban poor population - regardless of race or religion. The hospital pioneered in many areas of research and education and is known for accomplishing the first ever separation of conjoined twins.
During the early 1900s, Jewish doctors in Cleveland faced immense difficulty finding employment in hospitals due to discrimination and antisemitism. Due to this, Mount Sinai became a prominent location where Jewish doctors could find jobs, establish medical practices, and perform research. These physicians established their view that healthcare was a basic human right, and should not be denied to anyone on the basis of race, religion, or economic status. This idea became embedded in the institution's core values for the entire time of the hospital's operation, and allowed for the poor and minority populations of Cleveland to seek medical care at Mount Sinai without fear of being turned away.
Throughout its time of operation, Mount Sinai Hospital distinguished itself as a pioneering institution of medical research and education. During the early 1900s, Dr. Myron Metzenbaum, an ear, nose, and throat specialist, became a leading national figure in the field of facial reconstruction through his work at the hospital, and taught his methods at clinics and research institutes across the country. Around 1910, Dr. Metzenbaum designed a pair of surgical dissecting scissors of which are still widely used and bear his name to this day. In the mid-20th century, Dr. Jack Geller brought further national and even international attention to Mount Sinai Hospital as on December 15, 1952, he performed the first ever successful separation of infant conjoined twins. These innovations among many others by various significant contributors allowed the hospital to be known across notional medical and Jewish organizations as a location of premier teaching and practice.
Despite Mount Sinai's renown and the great ability of its doctors through the century, it could not overcome the effects of changing financial circumstances. The high cost of providing care to uninsured patients, as well as the competitive healthcare economy in Cleveland, led to the hospital's closure in 1996. The hospital's legacy lives on in the Mount Sinai Healthcare Foundation, a non-profit funding agency dedicated to research, education, and continuing service to Cleveland's Jewish and urban poor communities.
For more (including 8 images & 3 audio files) view the original article
]]>Parklike University Circle is the cultural, medical, and educational center of Cleveland's east side. Named after a streetcar turnaround on Euclid Avenue just east of East 107th Street, University Circle attracted Western Reserve University from Hudson, Ohio in the 1880s. The university was soon joined by a number of other major institutions such as the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Cleveland Institutes of Art and Music. By the early 1900s, many of the wealthy benefactors of University Circle moved to the surrounding Wade Park neighborhood.
The area began to experience slow decline after World War II in the face of suburbanization. Following a gift from Elizabeth Ring Mather, who consulted with famed New York planner Robert Moses, University Circle institutions rededicated themselves to remaining in place rather than fleeing to the suburbs and commissioned a master plan in 1957 to guide the orderly development of the Circle. Although not all features of the plan were adopted (notably a controversial multilane loop road that drew student protests in the 1960s), University Circle Development Foundation (UCDF) formed in response to the plan's call to create an entity that could coordinate future institutional needs. As the Hough Uprising and Glenville Shootout broke out in the second half of the 1960s in the neighborhoods to the north and west, UCDF and its member institutions finally grasped the depth of resentment felt by neighbors who saw the Circle as an insular and exclusive island controlled by affluent suburbanites. By 1970, UCDF reorganized itself as University Circle Inc. (UCI) and attempted to recast the district's image.
Ironically, in recent years, UCI has labored to undo decades of attempts to erase the Circle's urban setting by doing what would have been unthinkable in the 1950s-60s--building "Uptown," a second downtown of sorts, along Euclid Avenue. Yet, the mix of carefully selected businesses in some ways shares more in common with suburbia than with onetime college hangouts like Adele's and the Jazz Temple, whose independence and, sometimes, disorder were, like the riots, uneasy reminders of the Circle's place in the city.
For more (including 8 images, 4 audio files, & 1 video) view the original article
]]>Four Cleveland physicians founded the Cleveland Clinic Foundation in February 1921, creating an institution dedicated not only to medical care, but also to research, innovation, and physician education. Three of the four founders had served together in a U.S. Army medical unit in France during World War I. The Cleveland Clinic X-ray fire of 1929 – a basement fire caused by combustible nitrocellulose film that left 123 dead – was a tragedy that temporarily set back the hospital's progress. After World War II, however, the Cleveland Clinic rose to become one of the nation's leading medical centers.
During the 1940s and 1950s, Clinic researchers pioneered dialysis and kidney treatment and were the first to identify carpal tunnel syndrome and isolate the neurotransmitter serotonin. The Cleveland Clinic also emerged as a national leader in cardiac procedures. Clinic physicians performed the first coronary angiography in 1958 and continued to make significant advances in heart surgery techniques in the proceeding decades. The Clinic's main campus, located along Euclid Avenue in Cleveland's Fairfax neighborhood, has undergone tremendous growth since the 1970s. As adjacent land has been purchased and numerous new facilities constructed in a process of expansion, it is no great surprise that the Cleveland Clinic has become one of the city's largest private employers.
For more (including 8 images & 2 audio files) view the original article
]]>