“The ideal resort for Cleveland Business Men. Give your family the benefits of the country, at the same time attend your business without inconvenience.” This was the pitch to convince Clevelanders to make the Lake Erie shore at Euclid into a retreat from the city bustle, one where they might enjoy a taste of the amenities that usually required much longer trips. Electric interurban railcars departed Public Square every 15 minutes, so they could leave their office building and, in little more than an hour, wade in crystalline blue-green water.
In 1903, the same year that Euclid was incorporated as a village, Cleveland streetcar magnates Henry Everett and Edward Moore formed the Cleveland, Painesville & Eastern (CP&E) Railroad. The CP&E operated a line from Public Square to Painesville and, through a subsidiary, all the way out to Ashtabula. A parallel CP&E route, the Shore Line, ran from Cleveland to Willough Beach before merging with the main line in Willoughby. As extensive as the CP&E was, it comprised only a fraction of the hundreds of miles of electric railway lines owned by Clevelanders. Indeed, Cleveland and Buffalo investors’ tracks did much to forge a continuous electrified system from Chicago to New York and New England.
The CP&E’s Shore Line — along with a Lake Shore Boulevard newly paved and lined with arc lights every 500 feet to the county line — also enticed lakefront real estate speculation between Euclid Beach and Willough Beach Park in western Lake County. Among the Cleveland investors was German immigrant and building contractor Isaac Stein. Not only did he buy a summer lake home in Wickliffe for his own family; he also opened two residential allotments in the village of Euclid. The first, Aronda Beach, opened near Stop 131 on the CP&E Shore Line in 1907 and was said to be “modeled after a famous California resort” (perhaps Redondo Beach). The second, Maplewood-on-the-Lake, opened at Stop 136–1/2 in 1911 with 66 building lots. There, Stein built five- and six-room cobblestone cottages that the A. E. Robinson realty firm marketed.
In keeping with Stein’s intent to fashion a resort on the lake, he opened the Maplewood Beach Hotel the following year. Originally envisioned as a five-story, 100-room hotel (with the lower two floors built below the level of the bluff but visible from the shoreline), the Maplewood Beach Hotel ended up being only three stories with one below the bluff. Built of white concrete with cobblestone trim and a red-tile roof with understated towers on either end, the resort hotel faced west, perpendicular to the beach. It featured 80 guest rooms, a large lobby and dining room/ballroom decorated in green and white and opening through French doors onto a spacious veranda, and a grill room, as well as six separate cottages.
Maplewood Beach Hotel billed itself as a well-to-do resort and touted the fact that its manager, H. M. Stanford, managed the prestigious Tampa Bay Hotel in the winter months. It advertised its wide beach, bathing, boating, fishing, and tennis. In an early ad, it promised: “No matter how hot, close, stuffy, dusty and disagreeable it is in the city, you will find it cool, clean, breezy, comfortable and restful at Maplewood Beach.”
Despite its attractiveness, the hotel proved short-lived. By its second season (1913), Stanford was no longer manager, having yielded to Cleveland’s L. J. Noble, who had previously run a small hotel overlooking University Circle. No ads appeared after 1915 (the fourth season), suggesting that the Maplewood Beach Hotel proved unprofitable. The next year, the new Cleveland Country Club opened at the former resort. The club, headed by an Akron attorney, renovated the hotel as its clubhouse. It, too, proved unsuccessful, leading to leasing the property in 1917 to the East Shore Country Club. The club increased its membership more than tenfold to 2,500 in 1919 and reopened as the Maplewood Shore Club.
In the ensuing years, the Maplewood Shore Club hosted a number of large tennis tournaments, swimming competitions, and other sporting events. Notably among these were long-distance swimming races from Euclid Beach to Maplewood Beach. Cleveland firms such as M. A. Hanna & Company and Central National Bank held their annual outings at the club. In 1926, the same year that the interurban ceased operation, a fire shuttered the former hotel, and it sat vacant in its damaged state for about a decade before being demolished. The site of the onetime resort lies immediately west of the two 18-story towers of Harbor Crest apartments that now stand on Lake Shore Boulevard at East 242nd Street.
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