In 1936, Cleveland newspaper columnist S. J. Kelly reminded Clevelanders of the loss of what was once the pride of the Forest City—Lake View Park. The origins of Lake View Park can be traced back to 1867, when a group of citizens visited Mayor Stephen Buhrer to request a lakeside park, leading the city council to recommend acquiring land. In 1869, the Ohio legislature passed a bill that enabled the city council to condemn and purchase land for Cleveland’s first park. Council approved buying property between the lakefront railroad tracks and Summit Street (a street that once ran a block to the north of today’s Lakeside Avenue) from Seneca (W. 3th) to Erie (E. 9th) Streets. In 1871 the mayor appointed the first Board of Park Commissioners, empowering them to levy taxes for park purposes. It took two more years before the land was fully appraised and purchases were completed to assemble ten acres.

In 1874 the park commissioners authorized issuing $50,000 in bonds for park development. The city then removed the shanties along Summit Street and graded and terraced the bluff. Landscape gardener C. T. Shueren devised a plan of improvements. City workers planted trees, sculpted ponds, and created decorative features. Instead of allowing the entirety of Cleveland’s downtown lakefront to be given over to shipping and industrial interests, the city had used its natural resources to its advantage, opening up the first city park as a showcase for the natural beauty of the lakefront. For the 1876 U.S. Centennial, the park offered a favored vantage point for Clevelanders and out-of-towners to watch a “sham” reenactment Commodore Perry’s battle on Lake Erie. Through ongoing beautification work, by 1885, Lake View Park was reportedly a showplace that must have impressed railroad passengers on the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern line that ran past the lower level of the park.

Lake View Park included many pathways which visitors could walk through to observe the gorgeous flower fields, rock grottos, manmade lakes, and unique features such as the large fountain—fashioned in the likeness of what observers variously described as a dinosaur, dragon, or lizard—which stood in the middle of the park grounds. The public reception to Lake View Park was overwhelmingly positive, with many praising the naturalistic environment that was in stark contrast to the dominant industrial and commercial sections of the central city.

Despite the attractiveness of Lake View Park, it was not without its problems. Periodic news reports make clear that by the 1880s, the park already had “acquired a tough reputation.” It was a “rendezvous” for “improper purposes,” “infested by mashers” (a Victorian-era reference to men who sexually harassed women), lined with saloons, and often “virtually deserted.” Given the park’s prime location alongside downtown, existing railroad rights-of-way, and the lake, not to mention the problems the park faced, the city entertained various proposals from business interests to redevelop the area. One proposal in 1889-90 was for a 10,000-seat exposition hall in the park, which it was held would rival similar venues in Detroit and Pittsburgh as a tourist attraction. However, iron and steel interests hoped eventually to expand the industrial usage of the lakefront, and some city officials decried the loss of Cleveland’s only central park on the lake. Ultimately the plan was dropped.

External pressure from rising industrial powers to replace Lake View Park would be enough for most local governments to consider the offers, especially with the promise of a future economic boom. However, Cleveland officials and citizens regularly pushed back against threats to close the park. Citizens formed committees and brought petitions to court to protect Lake View Park, and the local government regularly hosted events on park grounds to show that interest was still high. However, industrialists’ interest in the lakefront was unmoved by citizen interest in public access to the waterfront. Therefore, it came as little surprise that, in 1907, a new union railroad depot was approved for the Lake View Park site as part of the Group Plan. The station plan, however, met with severe backlash in 1910 from park supporters, who argued that the establishment of a railroad depot was antithetical to the very reason that Lake View Park was established and offered a less-people-friendly experience to visitors. Despite grievances from the public, city officials viewed the union depot as far too important to reject. Only the federal government’s concern during World War I about local rail traffic impeding cross-country traffic along the lakefront lines prevented the lakefront union station from reaching fruition.

Nevertheless, even as the debate over building a union depot raged, the decline of Lake View Park became apparent and too rapid to stop. The worsening pollution caused by the aforementioned railroad, as well as the numerous factories established through the city, suffocated the natural life in the park. The park’s trees and flowers began to wilt and die and its manmade lakes, which were once a beautiful highlight, became toxic and polluted. Despite preventing industrial society from directly destroying Lake View Park, the city was unable to stop the negative effects that industrialism had on the environment, which destroyed the park all the same.

The effect that pollution had on Lake View Park led to a further drop in attendance, but the park’s end did not come right away. Instead, as is usually the case with redevelopment, it awaited a firm plan that could make it off the drawing board. That firm plan came in early in the 1930s, soon after construction of the multipurpose Cleveland Municipal Stadium, when the city built an underground garage for nearby City Hall. By that time, “made land” (or fill) had shifted the water's edge some 1,000 feet to the north, making the “lake view” a more distant one. Ever an astute observer of Cleveland’s changing cityscape, Plain Dealer columnist S. J. Kelly noted that the dragon fountain, once the park’s conversation piece, was headless by that time and carried off by a junk dealer.

Despite efforts from citizens and local city planners, this beautiful and unique landmark which afforded a place to marvel at the majesty of one of the Great Lakes was allowed to waste away until its final demise went unmourned. Clevelanders today have no memory of Lake View Park, which has been buried beneath parking garages for nearly a century. Lake View Park was a final bastion of naturalist beauty and appreciation along a Cleveland downtown lakefront dominated by capital interests. With its demise, officials, planners, and citizens would struggle for the next century to give Clevelanders a people-friendly lakefront.

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For decades, motorists driving up and down Miles Avenue in Cleveland's Union-Miles Park neighborhood would not have noticed the Fuller-Collins House. Located on the northwest corner of that street's intersection with East 100th Street, it had been all but hidden from view by a string of commercial buildings that began going up on Miles Avenue in 1920. Nearly 90 years later, in or about 2008, two of those commercial buildings were torn down, exposing the beautiful house once more to public view. But though you can now once again see it as you drive up or down Miles Avenue, it remains a house filled with mystery and unrevealed secrets.

A review of tax records suggests that the house was most likely built in 1867 by or for Silas Fuller, a carpenter from Chagrin Falls, Ohio. Two stories in height, red brick-veneered and with a front and rear wing, it is of Italianate design, popular in America from about 1840 to 1880. Italianate houses are distinguished primarily by their wide eaves with supporting brackets, and by tall narrow windows, especially on the first floor. There are a number of subtypes of Italianate design, the most common being the simple hipped roof subtype, which features a rectangular box-shaped house with a hipped roof and often a central cupola. The Fuller-Collins House is a less common subtype known as a front-gabled roof. According to A Field Guide to American Houses, only about ten percent of surviving Italianate houses in America are of this subtype.

As its name suggests, the front-gabled roof subtype features a front gabled roof, similar to Greek Revival houses from which this subtype draws inspiration. Silas Fuller learned the carpenter trade from his father and older brothers during the period 1825-1860 when the Greek Revival style was in vogue. For this reason, he may have found this subtype of an Italianate house easier to design and/or build, or maybe he just preferred it to other Italianate subtypes. In addition to the above-noted elements of the Fuller-Collins House, it is further notable, according to local architectural historian Craig Bobby, due to its window and door hoods which combine flat and arched lines, and which have drip-moldings at both ends to carry away precipitation. Also notable is the two-story windowed-bay on the west side of the house, which has a non-Italianate modification at its top executed circa 1890. Additionally, the house at one time had a covered one-story porch which extended along the south and east sides of the house's front wing, which might have been original or a replacement executed at and near the time of the side bay alteration.

Silas Fuller owned the house for only three years, selling it in 1869. It is unknown why Fuller, who at the time was married and still raising young children, sold the house after such a short period of ownership. It is also actually not known whether Fuller and his family ever lived in the house at all, for no directory records to date have been found listing where he lived during that decade. By the time that the 1870 census was taken, Silas Fuller had moved to Portage County and the only members of his family that could also be found in that census were living apart from him in Geauga County. Adding to this mystery is an article about Fuller that appeared in the Cleveland Plain Dealer several decades later, on December 8, 1901. It stated that, from 1865 to 1883 — which included the year in which the Fuller-Collins House was built — Fuller was traveling through the Great Lakes region, covering some 27,000 miles, while engaging in his antique clock collecting hobby, which was the subject of the article. Therefore, why Fuller built the Fuller-Collins House, whether the Fuller family ever lived in the house, and, if so, why they departed after such a short period of ownership, remain a mystery.

Emmett F. Collins was the second owner of the Fuller-Collins House, residing in it with his second wife, Abigail. Emmett was a farmer, who, when he was nearly 60 years old, turned to real estate for a living. It was in the 1860s when Newburgh Village was beginning its transformation into a steel production center in northeast Ohio. He purchased and sold lots in residential subdivisions located close to the mills and other factories, and developed at least five residential subdivisions of his own in the Village and Township, becoming wealthy in the process. The lots in these subdivisions provided housing for many mill and factory employees, a large number of whom were immigrants. The first immigrants arriving in Newburgh to work in its mills and factories were from England, Scotland, Wales, the Isle of Man, and Ireland. Later, they came from Bohemia, Hungary, Poland, and other countries in Eastern Europe. In 1873, this industrialized area of Newburgh was annexed to Cleveland, becoming the latter city's Ward 18, famously known as "the Iron Ward."

It is possible that Collins and/or his wife Abigail made significant exterior changes to the Fuller-Collins house during their ownership to give it an even grander appearance on Miles Avenue. These changes, as noted above, may have included modifications to the two-story windowed bay and to the front porch, and may also have included modifications to the window and door hoods. Collins lived in the house until his death in 1880; his widow Abigail remained in the house until her own death in 1898.

During the time that the Fuller-Collins House was owned by the Fuller and Collins families, it was located in Newburgh Township; it sat on a narrow three-acre lot that fronted on Miles Avenue; and the surrounding neighborhood was largely rural. That all changed during the twenty-plus years (1898-1921) when the next family, the Daytons, owned the house. Matilda Dayton, a boarder whose family had rented rooms in the Fuller-Collins House from 1895 to 1898, acquired the house as a result of a bequest in the will of Abigail Collins. Prior to Matilda's death in 1909, she and her husband Eli deeded the house to their son William, who created a residential subdivision out of the three acres, with sublots on the west and east sides of new Dayton Street (today, East 100th Street). At about the same time that the Dayton subdivision was being created, this area of former Newburgh Township —it had become Corlett Village in 1907 — was annexed to Cleveland, putting an exclamation point to the reality that the Fuller-Collins House was no longer located in a rural neighborhood.

The Dayton family was the last owner-occupier of the Fuller-Collins House. As the immediate neighborhood, which was near the Polish neighborhood of Warszawa (today, Slavic Village) became populated in the early twentieth century with East European immigrants, the house was converted around the time of the Great Depression into a two-family dwelling and was occupied by renters. In the mid-twentieth century, while the neighborhood was undergoing racial transition, the house continued to be used as a two-family dwelling. However, in the year 2000, the Fuller-Collins House was acquired by a contractor, who appears to have renovated and made major repairs to the house, and converted it back into a single family dwelling. Several years later, the commercial building that had sat in front of the house, blocking it from view since 1920, was torn down. At about the same time, the house was acquired by its present owner. According to the best information available online, the Fuller-Collins House is today being used as a group home for disadvantaged adult men.

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The Colonial Hotel, now called the Residence Inn, is located on Prospect Avenue next to Cleveland’s historic East 4th Street. The hotel was built in 1898 in combination with the Colonial Arcade by designer George H. Smith, who was also the architect of “The Arcade,” Cleveland’s more famous shopping street under glass which was built in 1890. The Colonial Hotel opened on October 21, 1898, with an informal ceremony, which was attributed to the fact that it opened a day earlier than scheduled. The Colonial Arcade, however, was not fully complete until 1911, when John F. Rust hired architect Franz Warner. Warner was able to design an adjacent arcade that would link the William and Rodgers buildings on Euclid Avenue (one block to the north) with the Colonial Hotel, thus creating the Euclid Arcade. Today the interconnected Colonial and Euclid Arcades are known together as the 5th Street Arcades.

Within a year after opening, the hotel was already being improved with the addition of a 100-room wing on the Prospect Avenue side and parallel to the Colonial Arcade. Another expansion occurred in 1901, adding nearly one hundred rooms and expanding the hotel’s restaurant. The hotel during this period occupied a considerable amount of property on the Euclid side of the street, but the side facing Prospect Avenue was shallow in comparison. With this enlargement, the Colonial Hotel would be one of the largest hotels in the city. This renovation was started so the Colonial could keep up with the accommodations and luxuries that other hotels in the city were offering. In fact, it was speculated that the Colonial only decided to attempt this expansion to keep pace with the Hollenden Hotel, which, at this period, was one of the most luxurious hotels in the city.

In the 1930s, however, during the Great Depression, Cleveland’s unemployment rate rose to encompass nearly a third of its population, which impacted the hotel industry drastically. The Colonial dealt with this problem rather well, and in fact, some of their only concerns were simply competing with other hotels in Cleveland and attempting to attract more patrons with fresh new ideas and amenities.

Though the Colonial had survived the worst economic period in the nation’s history, the hotel eventually began to decline in later years as Cleveland took a turn for the worse. This occurred in the 1970s and the 1980s, a time when Cleveland lost close to twenty-five percent of its entire population. By 1975, Cleveland stood in the nation’s highest quintile among cities in terms of poverty, unemployment, poor housing, violent crime, and municipal debt. The Colonial Hotel also felt this pressure, first by changing ownership to the Milner Hotel Company, which was based in Detroit, Michigan. This transfer was all the Colonial could do to keep alive during this tough economic time. After this exchange, things seemingly got worse for the Colonial. The Colonial kept getting devastatingly bad luck, which reflected in the Plain Dealer, most notable being two deaths that occurred within five years of each other. The first death being Dan Duffy, a popular lawyer in Cleveland and a beloved patron to the Colonial Hotel. The second death was a John B. Caduff, whom tragically died in a fire, caused by Caduff carelessly smoking. Finally, however, to finish off these hard economic times, the Colonial Hotel closed in 1978.

This was not the end of the Colonial Hotel, however. Twenty years after the hotel's closing, an idea to re-open the hotel came into the minds of businessmen as part of broader attempts to preserve and revitalize Cleveland’s historic downtown area. This project finally got underway in 1998, when investors partnered with Marriott, a thriving hotel company, and wanted to open a Residence Inn in the former Colonial Hotel. The project would not only put a new hotel in the heart of downtown, it would also revitalize the Cleveland arcades. This eventually led to a $30 million project to renovate the space into extended stay lodging with 144 rooms of a Marriott Residence Inn and nearly 60,000 square feet of shopping. This hotel eventually opened in 2000 and would thrive amid a reemerging entertainment district.

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On August 13, 1970, the Cleveland Plain Dealer provided a chilling exposé on Cleveland's deteriorating air quality. The article ruthlessly reported, "To the casual observer – the stranger to the neighborhood – it was alarming; the odor stuck in your throat; the smell made your eyes water." For those living near the heavy industrial plants in Cleveland, air pollution was more than a nuisance or an inconvenience. With every passing day, Clevelanders residing in the Broadway area to the southeast of downtown needed to reconfigure their lives because of the constant presence of dirty air. Air pollution prevented residents from hanging clothes outside to dry and from engaging in a variety of outdoor leisure activities. They developed a multitude of respiratory conditions. Cancerous tumors riddled their bodies. They were forced to regularly paint their houses – anything to hold on to some form of beauty, amid their depressing living situations. While on site, conducting interviews for the exposé, two Plain Dealer correspondents noticed the "chemicals from the Cuyahoga River industrial valley were filling the air with an acrid smell. Most noticeable was Republic Steel Corp.'s coke works where giant smoke clouds were belched into the air, then slowly spread like a blanket over the neighborhood."

In 1937, Cleveland had welcomed Republic Steel as the newest addition to the city's industrial complex. Republic Steel's investment in the community was applauded and considered vital to the city's health. By the late 1950s, however, cities and industries had grown so rapidly that the air pollutants released by the industrial centers hit a critical mass. The overpowering presence of air pollution in urban areas, across the nation, could no longer be ignored. Republic Steel became the focal point of the air pollution war that raged in Cleveland from the late 1950s through the 1970s.

Clevelanders responded to the controversy over Republic Steel's contribution to air pollution in one of two ways. They either said, "What's all the yapping about?" or compellingly described the air pollution as so potent, "'You could actually taste it.'" A community member related, "If I had to choose between air pollution enforcement and [the] loss of industry, I'd say I'll take the air pollution." For some members in the community the answer to the debate was that simple. Steel workers accepted their much-needed paychecks, even though their work resulted in pollution.

The other side of the public debate on Republic Steel and air pollution eclipsed their opponents' voices. Resident-led anti-air pollution organizations ascended as the voice of the community. The citizen group members went to the local clean air functions, debates and meetings, and there they demanded answers from the City of Cleveland and local industrial complexes. Dramatic statements, espoused by the clean air organizations, expressed how passionate the members felt toward their cause. In a letter to the editor, Joseph F. Jedlinsky of the Southeast Air Pollution Committee declared, "The Indians were once the forgotten people, but now it seems residents bordering the vast industrial valley are the new forgotten people. Don’t let smog strangle our city." Citizens from the community gathered in strength to speak out against Republic Steel's and the City of Cleveland's disregard of the seriousness of air pollution. Anti-air pollution community organizations engaged in a zealous fight against Republic Steel and other industrial manufacturing companies. These groups sought to win the fight against industrial air polluters through citizen advocacy and local legislation. The anti-air pollution citizen groups were committed to the fight.

Citizen watch groups attempted to hold the local government accountable for its lackadaisical enforcement of air pollution codes aimed at industrial complexes. Casimir Bielen, the secretary of the Ohio Pure Air Association and a resident of Cleveland, expressed "that the primary responsibility for the regulatory control of air pollution rests with the local government." The city wanted to alleviate the public's pressure on the industrial complexes. But, the public looked to the local government to solve the city's air pollution problem. Indisputably, the residents of Cleveland were imprisoned by Republic Steel's air pollution.

There was no instant fix to the problem of air pollution. The City of Cleveland and the public had fewer options because of Republic Steel's and other industrial companies air pollution. As the corporation headed into the 1970s, Republic Steel's own perils from a business standpoint often went ignored. The public demanded results, but Republic Steel argued that results took time. Throughout the air pollution war that raged in Cleveland, the corporation's administration maintained that they "must protect Republic's interest to the best of our ability." Republic Steel's air pollution along with foreign competition, pension costs, and the rise of aluminum manufacturing contributed to its default, signified by the corporation's merger with LTV Steel in 1984.

Republic Steel appeased the public with a constant prattling of good intentions that argued that the air pollution problem was controlled. Republic Steel was caught between the unrelenting smoke abatement demands from the public, the City of Cleveland's proposed pollution regulations, and the need to stay competitive in the steel manufacturing industry. Industrial air pollution further exacerbated the already stressed relationships between Clevelanders, the City of Cleveland, and Republic Steel.

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