Cleveland History Blog

OHRAB Archives Institutional Achievement Award call for nominations

2011-09-16T16:27:00.000-04:00

Announcement received:

The Ohio Historical Records Advisory Board Achievement Award recognizes significant accomplishments in preserving and improving access to historical records in any format by an Ohio archival institution.

All Ohio institutions responsible for archival records that provide public access to at least a portion of their collections are eligible. Eligible accomplishments include recent special projects or on-going programs that:
- build significant collections
- implement successful preservation strategies
- enhance access to archives
- develop effective digitization programs

Preference will be given to projects or programs that can be adapted for use by other institutions.

Because the award recognizes institutional achievements, individuals are not eligible. Departments employing members of OHRAB are not eligible, but other departments in their institutions are eligible.

Nominating letters should be no longer than two pages, 12-pt, single spaced, describing the institution's program/project along with its goals, accomplishments, and significance. Each must include the nominee's institutional name along with a contact person's name, mailing address, phone, email address.

Send nominations via email or U.S. mail to:
Janet Carleton
Ohio University Libraries
Alden 322
30 Park Place
Athens, OH 45701
carleton@ohio.edu

Nominations must be received by October 14, 2011.

Self-nominations are encouraged. Winner(s) will be selected by OHRAB at its October 28 meeting.

Winners of the 2010 Award were Cleveland State University's Michael Schwartz Library Special Collections Department and Montgomery County Records Center and Archives.

Download the flyer and see more info on last year's awardees: http://ohsweb.ohiohistory.org/ohrab/index.php?title=Awards_Committee

Questions? Contact Janet Carleton at carleton@ohio.edu or 740-597-2527.

The Ohio Historical Records Advisory Board is the central body for historical records planning in the state. Board members represent Ohio's public and private archives, records offices, and research institutions. http://ohsweb.ohiohistory.org/ohrab

An Exciting Day West of the Cuyahoga

2011-06-25T22:35:00.011-04:00

I'm often kidded about my east-side mentality and tendency to get lost on the west-side, but today we took in two west-side and one east-side neighborhoods for the terrific Garden Walk Cleveland and I came away thrilled by the Detroit-Shoreway area in particular.

Garden Walk Cleveland was modeled on a successful program in Buffalo and threw open over 100 private and community gardens in four neighborhoods: Harvard/Lee/Miles, Hough, Tremont, and Detroit-Shoreway, between 11:00 a.m. and 7:00 p.m. today only. This was no expensive fundraiser, showing a dozen properties, but rather a free celebration of gardening all across town, though focusing on these four areas this year. What a treat!

We skipped H/L/M because we didn't think we would last through them all and it was the most spread out. I rarely last more than a couple of hours on foot, so we wanted more compact collections. So we started at Hough and it was really nice to get into that neighborhood, where historically many Clevelanders still associate with the civil unrest of the 1960s. We found it delightful and particularly enjoyed meeting a Mrs. McGregor, who was funny, friendly and full of stories about the plants -- especially cacti -- she's spread around to her neighbors. There was also a newly-constructed clay oven in the Blaine Avenue Community Garden that was being fired up to bake things later in the day. We wanted to come home and build one for ourselves.

Moving on to Tremont, which we visit from time to time anyway, such as during their art walks, we cruised up and down Literary, Professor, Jefferson and other streets, checking out some lovely gardens and interesting shops. Many of the restaurants and pubs weren't open yet, but we were amazed at how many intriguing ones there are and how few we've been in. We need to go back sometime for dinner, instead of always hitting the same places in the Heights.

But Detroit-Shoreway was the big hit. I have to confess to knowing little about it, beyond that it's on Detroit and that Gordon Square is the new cultural center of the area. We are regulars at the Ohio City home tours, but don't get that far out Franklin to experience Detroit-Shoreway. Today's garden tour was heavy up and down Franklin and Clinton streets, in the West Seventies, and it was a really nice experience. Architecturally, it reminds me a little of Lakewood, farther west, and I was most impressed with the sense of community these folks have. Everybody seemed to know everybody in the area and were especially welcoming and informative about their homes, their gardens and their neighborhood. Just a great group of people!

And wonderful gardens, too! We saw a rooftop garden of local prairie grasses and flowers that required almost no maintenance and had a beauty we hadn't seen since visiting the prairie grass garden in Chicago's Millennium Park. We saw a forest of pines and bamboo in an area that was a perfect spot for yard parties. We saw a double driveway behind a house that was completely ceilinged over with a low, thick grape arbor, giving the back yard a distinctive European feel. We even saw one yard that was completely filled with a large outdoor model train layout.

And everywhere we went we saw flowers. If you can imagine it and it can grow here, we saw it. In spades. Beautiful beds and banks of all manner of flowering plants and artful arrangements of herbs, ferns, hedges, bushes and small trees, laid out in rocky beds, brick walks, outdoor sculptures, fish ponds, and some man-made accent pieces. A lot of thought, time and even money went into these yards and we were glad to see them.

We also noticed at least three different houses sporting bee hives -- two of which were up on roofs -- and a couple keeping chickens, the latter something we couldn't do in Cleveland Heights.

But I was most happy to learn about Detroit-Shoreway, to see Gordon Square a little bit more and to discover a quaint little neighborhood called Italian Village closer to the lake. Surprisingly, we did the whole eight hours pretty much and the time flew by.

We're looking forward to next year's Garden Walk Cleveland, wherever it takes us that time, as this was a wonderful introduction to so many, many beautiful gardens. Almost too many, as we'd rather have had each neighborhood or two on a separate weekend, so we could get to see everything.

Thanks to ParkWorks for thinking it up and thank everybody for making it so special!

(This illustration is of a striking spiral garden arrangement, found in the Dunham Community Garden behind the Dunham Tavern Museum.)

Views from the Terminal Tower Observation Deck, Then & Now

2011-06-18T14:29:00.040-04:00

Thanks to the generosity of Tower City Archivist Drew Rolik, some local archivists got to see the Terminal Tower's observation deck, the Van Sweringen's personal offices, and the Greenbrier Suite yesterday.

The views from the observation deck reminded me of similar scenes from our Cleveland Union Terminal Collection in Cleveland Memory, shot in the late 1920s. So here below are some I happened to snap with my cell phone, going clockwise around from Public Square.....

LOOKING DOWN ON PUBLIC SQUARE

LOOKING NORTH UP ONTARIO

LOOKING NORTHEAST OUT SUPERIOR WITH LAKE IN BACKGROUND

LOOKING EAST OUT EUCLID AND PROSPECT TOWARD THE AT&T BUILDING (LEFT)

LOOKING SOUTHEAST ALONG EAST BANK OF THE RIVER
(OLD CENTRAL MARKET IN THE CENTER OF THE INTERSECTION)

LOOKING WEST TOWARD COLUMBUS PENINSULA

LOOKING DOWN ON THE INTERSECTION OF WEST SUPERIOR AND HURON ROAD

Presentation on Cleveland Heights history

2011-06-07T15:52:00.006-04:00

Press release received (click on image for larger version):

Balancing Developers' Plans and Downtown Preservation

2011-05-22T14:02:00.008-04:00

There is a bit of contention about plans to install a skywalk diagonally across the intersection of Prospect and Ontario, linking a new parking facility with the casino being built in Higbee's (1) and destroying historic landmarks in the process (2). There are a multitude of architectural renderings of what this would look like and it upsets a lot of people who feel that it will trash the appearance of venerable Higbee's and remove gamblers from the city street, into some sort of hamster habitat designed to cocoon them from the real Cleveland. Cruise ships and mega-resort hotels do this too, as a way of harvesting all the spare change they can from the pockets they have in their facility at the time.

This is all a bit ironic, as that's exactly the strategy the Van Sweringen brothers employed in building the Cleveland Union Terminal on Public Square, including Higbee's. While passengers were interchanging between railroad trains, the Shaker Rapid, streetcars, automobiles or simply walking, the intermodal point was so valuable that the brothers surrounded it with every convenience they could, to maximize the dollars they could harvest from the passengers. A department store, a hotel, a series of restaurants, shoeshine stands, and the complex of office buildings behind the Square (Landmark Office Buildings), capped off by the iconic Terminal Tower. So we begrudge the twenty-first century's developers the right to control the environment to grab every nickel? How must many of the merchants have felt, viewing the Vans' plans for the C.U.T. around 1920?

But on the issue of the skywalk and its affect on Higbee's and downtown ambiance, here's part of a message I posted in reply to a friend's Facebook message....

Some of us -- myself included -- remember Cleveland as a walking city, with hundreds of pedestrians churning up and down the streets, crowding the intersections waiting for the light to change and catching streetcars and buses. Lots of urban interaction. And the buildings were right there off and towering over the sidewalks. But we ran through the drizzle, suffered our umbrellas blown inside out in the wind howling down Euclid and sloshed through the slop and snow banks to get around in the winter. Now at CSU, I'm traveling from East 24th Street to East 17th Street indoors, in shirtsleeves, in any kind of bad weather and enjoying it. I pay extra to park in the central core and never go outside if I don't have to and do so when I worked in the Hanna Bldg, too. And I interact plenty and comfortably with others I encounter.

If you thinking about it, historically what's the treasured Old Arcade except an early hamster habitat for Clevelanders trying to escape our weather and why do we speak so fondly of cities with underground dimensions we lack, be they shopping centers or merely subways? Our great old architecture was designed for a time when people apparently had fewer choices for getting around downtown (again, the arcades being early exceptions), so the skyline and streetscapes reflect that.

I'm all for preserving the historical ambiance of Cleveland -- you must suspect that of me -- but I'm not happy with the preservation community's habit of waiting until something is far advanced and then deciding the plans suck and some building few have ever heard of is endangered. There aren't, IMHO, that many buildings out of the multitude downtown that are so important that the future needs to be unduly hung up about them and I don't think that any of them are in peril here.

No one loves the Cleveland Union Terminal more than me, but plugging a skywalk into the face of Higbee's back side doesn't automatically make me shudder (the Public Square face, yes of course), but we do need discussion on how reversible it would be (the first principle of preservation, after all). Suburbanites have voted for indoor shopping with malls in past decades and whatever Legacy Village sorts of retro downtowns tell us, I suspect staying dry and warm is still a virtue for attracting them downtown (or even keeping some from moving to Florida). Sure, ya gotta be tough to live in Cleveland and all that, but let's realize that the notion of a city is evolving and skywalks might be something to incorporate, as sci fi illustrators have drawn for decades.

But more than anything, we as a preservation community need a lot, LOT better advance planning and tougher ordinances to identify the buildings, districts, skylines and vistas (a topic I'd like to pursue someday) that we really cannot live without and set up means of protecting them long before developers get this far into their planning.

Forgive me if all you were criticizing was the fanciful, ethereal nature of "renderings," which drive me mad sometimes too, but I think that's a separate issue and the very idea of a skyway is the most disturbing factor here, no?

The Hat: a novel

2011-04-26T19:09:00.004-04:00

Press release received:

Babette’s father & uncle were killed by the Jewish Mafia in Cleveland during the ‘30s and she has just released a historical novel based on what she experienced.

The book was endorsed by the Cleveland Press and Cleveland Jewish News and the author is under feature consideration at Cleveland Magazine & the Plain Dealer.

The Hat (Sunstone Press, 3/31/11) by Babette Hughes (TX), former Cleveland Plain Dealer & Cleveland Magazine Contributor and Cleveland Press journalist.

Prohibition era mystery/thriller about coming of age amidst the Jewish Mafia, hardcover, 198 pages, $26.95, 9780865347847.

Endorsed by National Jewish Book Award for Fiction Winner Joseph Kertes and two-time Pulitzer Nominee Albert Fried.

“Babette Hughes is particularly good at drawing the blithe lack of self-awareness of an inexperienced young woman, as well as pointing out the self-centeredness of youth.”
- Historical Novels Review

“The Hat is a terrific story that chronicles the beginning of the Mafia and its revelations that profoundly changed lives forever.”
- Jewish Book World

Ghost Signs on Cleveland Buildings

2011-04-24T14:07:00.006-04:00

Nice article by Marcia Pledger in this morning's Plain Dealer about old signs on the sides of buildings, harking back to Cleveland's industrial heritage. They are called "ghost signs" and I see at least a couple in Cleveland Memory, such as this great one about Eliot Ness.

We'll have to consider this as a category to add to Cleveland Memory.

That said, there is an organization interested in such signs, called the Society for Commercial Archeology and there's also various Flickr groups about ghost signs.

Cleveland Disaster Expert John Stark Bellamy Returns

2011-03-14T12:54:00.004-04:00

Press release received:

CLEVELAND, OHIO — Cleveland crime and disaster expert John Stark Bellamy II returns to town April 4-16, 2011 for a series of talks based in part on his newest book, "The Last Days of Cleveland" (Gray & Co., Publishers).

Bellamy will share stories about some of the gruesome crimes and scandalous events from Cleveland's past including: the suicide of two West Park girls (ages 10 and 11) who died after eating rat poison in their grandmother’s basement; the wild prophecies of the Rowenites who announced the apocalypse would take place at midnight on February 6, 1925 then gathered on rooftops in Garfield Heights to wait for the end; and the murder of George Saxton, playboy brother of President William McKinley whose sensational death and the murder trial of his mistress riveted an entire nation.

The author of six story collections and two anthologies and the former history specialist for the Cuyahoga County Library system, John Stark Bellamy retired to Vermont in 2004. He visits Cleveland periodically to speak about his work.

Bellamy’s library talks will take place at the following dates, times, and locations. All events are free and open to the public.

For another online version of this schedule, visit: http://www.grayco.com/events/index.shtml#Bellamy

For more information, call the listed libraries, or call Gray & Company, Publishers at 1-800-915-3609. Contact: Jane Lassar; 1-800-708-2819; jlassar@grayco.com.

S.J. Kelly and Nathan Ambler

2011-03-07T10:57:00.005-05:00

A researcher just reminded me that S.J. Kelly did a large number of columns on early Cleveland history for the Plain Dealer about 80 years ago. George Condon has given me a quite a few of them he'd collected, to promote the memory of a fellow PD columnist whose work he respected, and I've thought about mounting them to the web. Meanwhile, here's a sample of one by Kelly, about dentist Nathan Ambler, whose home was a landmark on the promontory near what's now the Baldwin Filtration Plant, and whose name now graces Ambler Park. The home was surrounded by his artificial "ruins" and is pictured above, from the 1874 Cleveland atlas by Titus.

A Little Bit of NE Ohio in S Florida

2011-01-19T14:06:00.004-05:00

This is fun! Chris Dawson discovered that there is a subdivision in Naples Florida with streets bearing names of towns in NE Ohio! Wickliffe, Mentor, and Kirtland are some of the names of those streets. Called (in keeping with the theme) "Gates Mills," you can see an interactive Google Map view of the allotment here.

Lost Cleveland: Seven Wonders of the Sixth City (New book)

2010-12-29T20:42:00.006-05:00

Michael DeAloia, Cleveland's emeritus "Tech Czar," has authored Lost Cleveland, a new book by the History Press, about seven of his favorite historic landmarks from the city's past. With the 75th anniversary of the Great Lakes Exposition -- one of the places he discusses -- coming up this summer, here's a great way to bone up on that amazing event.

Michael has been signing copies all around town and reports that the first printing is almost sold out, so rush out and get yourself a copy.

I wrote the foreword for this book, but neglected to negotiate a royalty split with Michael before it went best seller like this. :-)

Listening for the Stories of an Old House

2010-12-26T18:53:00.013-05:00

Christmas Day my wife and I dropped in on my brother Jack, in Mentor. After a few hours of sitting around in the "library" of this house, which has been in our family since 1967, I got to thinking about all the family members who used to be there in that room in Christmases past: our father and mother, a grandmother, an aunt, a housekeeper and a dear family friend, all of whom are gone now (shades of Dick Feagler's annual Christmas column).

But looking above the mantle, I spied this photo of the house taken in the 1870s, when it was already forty or fifty years old, and realized how many family conversations must have taken place in this room over the course of the home's 180-year history. Prior residents may have discussed the new Ohio and Erie Canal that had just opened in downtown Cleveland. They could have debated the issues of slavery and states rights, wondering whether it would come to war, and so on, down through most of the nineteenth century and all of the twentieth.

Joseph Sawyer had the house designed by famous Western Reserve master builder Jonathan Goldsmith and his family owned it for sixty years. Following them, it was the Lake County summer home of several different Cleveland businessmen. (In this picture some Sawyers are posed on the front lawn, playing croquet, and the wing of the home containing the library is the part closest to the camera.)

Announcing winners of OHRAB Achievement Award

2010-11-12T14:37:00.003-05:00

We all greatly appreciate this important recognition from the Ohio Historic Records Advisory Board, in awarding us one of their two awards in kicking off their new achievement awards programs.

However formally awarded, this is an honor shared by all the community. The nomination stressed the multi-level community collaboration of CSU departments, KSU library practicum students, various partnering public libraries, historical societies and government agencies sharing resources and the partners in the Ohio's Heritage NE, all collaborating to make information on the region's history available to its citizens. We felt the process by which Cleveland Memory (and OHNE) were built is as important as the digital content it provides.

Thank you all for your participation and I hope we can forge even closer relations in the coming months and years, especially as the economy challenges us all to find new sustainable models to achieve our goals.

-------------

OHRAB Achievement Award Announced.

Winners of the 2010 Ohio Historical Records Advisory Board's Achievement Awards are Cleveland State University's Michael Schwartz Library Special Collections Department and Montgomery County Records Center and Archives.

Cleveland State's Special Collections Department has led the Cleveland Memory Project since its beginning in 2002. Institutions as diverse as the Cuyahoga County Engineer's Office, Berea Children's Home, Rocky River Public Library, Hathaway Brown School, and Lakewood Historical Society have contributed materials from their collections to Cleveland Memory. Project partners have made more than 42,000 images and other historic items available online. Practicum and internship opportunities provide real world experience to students while bringing fresh from the classroom perspectives to practitioners. Cleveland Memory is a model of multi-institutional collaboration melding local collection knowledge, shared infrastructure, and professional development opportunities. OHRAB congratulates Cleveland State University and its partners for expanding access to Ohio's historic resources.

Cleveland Memory - http://www.clevelandmemory.org/

In 2006 the Montgomery County Records Center and Archives faced every archivist's nightmare. Active mold, cracked spines on bound volumes, and inadequate storage threatened the existence of the county's historic records. Through a systematic program of compliance with neglected records disposal schedules, environmental improvements and monitoring, and conservation treatment, Montgomery County Records Center and Archives staff have demonstrated that even monumental problems can be mitigated if approached with determination and creativity. The results of their efforts include reduced storage costs, improved access, and the confidence that the early records of Montgomery County will survive. OHRAB recognizes the Montgomery County Records Center and Archives for preserving Ohio's public history records.
Montgomery County Records Center and Archives - http://www.mcohio.org/services/recordarchives/about.html

Nominees for the Achievement Award represented small towns and large cities; public and private institutions; universities, historical societies, and records centers; and a full range of historic records - maps, photographs, marriage, birth, death, and estate records, and more. Common to all their successes were collaboration, determination, creativity, and a passionate commitment to the preservation and expanded use of Ohio's historic records. Clearly, Ohio's historic records community is achieving admirable results.

For more information please contact awards committee chair Jill Tatum at 216-368-4106 or jill.tatem@case.edu.

The Ohio Historical Records Advisory Board is the central body for historical records planning in the Ohio. Board members represent Ohio's public and private archives, records offices, and research institutions. http://ohsweb.ohiohistory.org/ohrab/

Able to Leap Fenn Tower in a Single Bound!

2010-10-06T16:32:00.004-04:00

Bill Becker, the CSU Archivist, just shared this document with me, which is a 1942 letter from the Dean of the School of Business at Fenn College, to the instructor of a drawing class, letting him know that Joseph Shuster, the illustrator of Superman comics, was enrolling in his class. He said:

Feb. 19, 1942
Mr. Hans Busch:

Yesterday I registered for the class in freehand drawing Mr. Joseph Shuster who is the artist who draws the SUPERMAN comic strip in our newspapers. I think you will probably find Mr. Shuster an interesting student and will be glad to work with him in terms of his individual needs and interests.

If you do not read SUPERMAN, please call at this office and I will introduce you to this particular branch of Literature.

P.R.A.
[note, this is Dean Paul R. Anders]

The Annals of Cleveland are now on line!!

2010-09-23T14:37:00.004-04:00

Our colleagues over at the Case Western Reserve University Kevin Smith Library report that they have mounted a searchable digital edition of the Annals of Cleveland to their Digital Case web site. The Annals were a WPA project which abstracted articles from the city's newspapers, primarily between 1818 and 1876, but including some related series that I'm not sure if are included yet or not.

For more background information on the Annals, please visit our earlier site about its history.

This is great news and I compliment the folks at the CWRU/KSL and Digital Case for this effort. You might poke around Digital Case and note the other collections they have there.

CTS crane in Hilton Garden Inn

2010-09-22T16:27:00.002-04:00

The old Cleveland Transit System repair shop on Carnegie, near Progressive Field, was incorporated into the new Hilton Garden Inn and serves as meeting rooms. I found it fun to look up one day and notice the Armington overhead crane still in place, along with some other historic remnants on the stairways and elevator. The Hilton sent me this description:

George Armington founded the Euclid Crane & Hoist Company in 1924. The company specialized in earth moving vehicles and equipment. One project was to design and build a crane for CTS (Cleveland Transit System). This crane, known as the Armington Crane, was built to service the electrical transformers inside what is now the Hilton Garden Inn Gateway Conference Center on Carnegie Avenue. These transformers operated the street car system for the city of Cleveland. There was a central control panel located on the second floor that monitored any transformer/electrical outages. The Armington Crane was built to lower and hoist the transformers for servicing. The crane is geared and can be operated by a single person and uses a hawser rope that will handle 15 tons of lift. Today the Armington Crane can be seen in the Armington room and is still operable and the name plate is gilded in gold with the “Armington” name.

Another funny little historical survival.

The Beet Lady is Grandma Rose!

2010-09-03T16:40:00.004-04:00

One of the iconic shots from the Cleveland Press Collection, one that we have used often in displays and our Cleveland Memory Project, is “The Beet Lady,” shown here. There’s something really charismatic about her and people always respond to this picture. But for the past decade since we came across it, we’ve known nothing more than what you see. Today, however, she has a name: Grandma Rose Thomas! There’s great joy around the library as a result of this discovery.

The news came as a result of the photo being run in Cleveland Magazine. Grandma Rose is now deceased, but a close family friend called to give them a report, which was passed on to us today.

Grandma Rose was a young widow from Lebanon who came to America in her 20s, about a century ago. Here she met her husband, Al, peddling sundries in Pennsylvania. They were poor and slept in barns at one point before moving to Cleveland. Here they were running a couple of produce stands at the West Side Market when this photo of Rose was taken in 1947. Her husband died young and Rose and their daughter Elizabeth lived in Parma, where Elizabeth worked as a secretary and Rose tended her garden and cooked. Rose died in 1975, at the age of 89.

The family friend saw this photo of Rose in Cleveland Memory some years ago and again when it appeared in a book about Cleveland. Then she showed it to Elizabeth, before she died. When it turned up again in Cleveland Magazine, she decided to tell them who the woman was. We are all very happy to put a name next to this remarkable face.

White Collar Hobo: the Travels of Whiting Williams

2010-08-14T21:36:00.005-04:00

Just finished reading an interesting book, White Collar Hobo: the Travels of Whiting Williams, about a prominent Cleveland-based national human relations counselor, whose client list in the first years of the 20th century read like the period's Fortune 500. He'd research (not spy upon) a company's labor force from the inside, adopting the manners & dress of its unskilled laborers and working alongside them secretly to find out what motivated them, what troubled them and what they really wanted from their job. He was famous in corporate circles then and his innovative ideas widely adopted, but since he wasn't writing for an academic audience (despite teaching part-time at Harvard and Dartmouth), his management philosophy was generally credited to later writers.

Luftwaffe learns dive-bombing in Cleveland

2010-06-01T16:53:00.004-04:00

CSU’s archivist, Bill Becker, made the interesting discovery of this Press Collections photo of Ernst Udet at Cleveland’s 1931 National Air Races and the following quote, pointing out the importance of Udet’s visit to the future of German military aviation:

“In 1936 I visited Berlin during the Olympic Games and made my first acquaintance with the new Luftwaffe in the person of Colonel Ernst Udet, enthusiastic proponent of dive-bombing then head of the technical department of the German Air Ministry. In the early 1930s he had witnessed a demonstration by the U.S. Navy Curtiss Helldivers at Cleveland, Ohio, and was so impressed that he influenced the placing of a contract for the design of such aircraft on 27 September 1933. The Junkers Ju 87 was the result; the prototype made its first flight in late Spring 1935 with a proud Udet as witness.”

(Captain Eric M. Brown, Duels in the Sky, Annapolis, MD, U.S. Naval Institute, 1988, quoted in Len Deighton’s Blood, Tears and Folly: An Objective Look at World War II, Castle Books, 1999, p. 349.)

From this visit to Cleveland came the Junkers Ju 87, better known as the Stuka dive bomber, a major weapon of the Luftwaffe in World War II. Udet had been Germany’s second leading ace in WWI, behind only Manfred “Red Baron” von Richthofen.

Cleveland Disaster Expert John Stark Bellamy Returns

2010-03-29T09:18:00.005-04:00

Press release received:

Cleveland crime and disaster expert John Stark Bellamy II returns to town April 19-24 for a series of talks based on his new anthology, "Cleveland's Greatest Disasters!” (Gray & Co., Publishers).

Bellamy will share stories about the most shocking and gruesome events in Cleveland history, including the tragic Collinwood School Fire of 1908, in which 172 schoolchildren perished; the apocalyptic East Ohio Gas Co. explosion of 1944, which destroyed an entire east side neighborhood; and the grisly 1928 drama in which two workmen were buried alive in cement beneath Terminal Tower.

The author of five books about Cleveland crime and disaster and the former history specialist for the Cuyahoga County Library system, Bellamy retired to Vermont in 2004. This is the first time he has been back to Cleveland to give public talks since 2008.

Click here for a complete list of dates, times, and locations for Bellamy's talks in April: http://www.grayco.com/events/events1.shtml#Bellamy

All events are free and open to the public. For more information, call the venues listed or contact Gray & Co., Publishers; 1-800-708-2819.

Boxer Johnny Kilbane

2010-03-16T11:45:00.004-04:00

Cleveland Area History just mentioned boxer Johnny Kilbane in their Facebook post and this is merely to provide a link to Kilbane resources in Cleveland Memory. There's also mention of him in the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History.

Dave Davis also posted about Johnny Kilbane, to the Shh, It's the Plain Dealer Library blog.

The Problem with Preservation is Poor Planning

2010-03-13T18:52:00.007-05:00

The news that the Cleveland Clinic had demolished an old Hathaway Brown building on its property, which came as an unhappy surprise to Cleveland preservationists, underscores the problem with saving historic structures: our approach is too unplanned, piecemeal and last-minute to be effective. Witness that the long-time head of the Cleveland Restoration Society didn't know that the demolition was in the works until she saw a fence go up around the building.

This isn't an indictment of CRS, as its mission is not a grassroots activist organization designed to rally troops against impending demolitions. Nor are our other local history and preservation groups equipped for the task, like the Cleveland Landmarks Commission, or the Western Reserve Historical Society. Most attempts to block demolitions come from individuals and ad hoc groups formed around particular crises, such as the Committee to Save the Huletts, and events moved too fast for the Hathaway Brown house.

What would be a big help would be if someone like an Ed Hauser took it upon his- or herself to monitor all the demolition filings, Landmarks Commission meetings and other venues where earlier notice of threats could be identified. But even this is really approaching the problem too late. Rather we need to systematically examine our preservation ordinances for weaknesses, such as the gap in coverage that applied in this case, to work for stronger ordinances before a particular problem arises, and to identify which are the buildings and districts so valuable to understanding Cleveland's history that they cannot be allowed to get to the point that an owner or developer has invested too much money and ego in a project to back down. Working these structures into an economic development plan, partially centering around tourism or adaptive reuse, and actively promoting them with markers, local and national landmark designations, and literature about their contribution to the city would go a long way towards announcing that these structures are not to be threatened.

As it happens, I don't think the Hathaway Brown house was one worth fighting for, given the nature of the situation. But which ones are? The big old churches on Euclid near the Clinic? The Play House complex? Look at the tremendously built-up nature of East 105th and Euclid a fifty years ago (vs. today) and imagine how that district could possibly have been preserved in anything like its historic use. But it once replaced the village ambiance of nineteenth century Doan's Corners, so many of today's landmarks were yesterday's new developments that leveled cherished buildings then.

I'm not arguing that all Progress stop, or that historic preservation is a losing proposition, but rather to point out that we're drifting from crisis to crisis because no one is doing the hard work of crafting a vision of how history should be preserved in Cleveland and taking the steps to ensure its success.

My favorite painter of Cleveland scenes dies at 94

2010-03-04T21:18:00.008-05:00

Tonight I received notice that Martin Linsey had died in New Mexico. He was 94, so it wasn't entirely a surprise, but I'm nevertheless sadden by the passing of a very nice man with whom I'd had enjoyable connections.

Sometime in the 1990s I became aware of his watercolors and black & white drawings of Cleveland scenes and collected a number of his prints personally. They now hang where I can gaze upon them regularly. Sometime a few years ago I decided to include artistic scenes of Cleveland in our Cleveland Memory Project, so tracked Mr. Linsey down in New Mexico and asked for permission. He said he had slides he could send me and we consequently mounted the first installment of them to Cleveland Memory. But when I tried to send them back to him, my package was returned by the post office, who had no forwarding address. I was very uneasy for many months until I finally got back in touch with him.

More recently, the donor of our magnificent collection of photographs of the building of the Terminal Tower was in town and came to visit. While chatting he mentioned his father and I politely said "Oh, is he still alive?" Bob replied that he was, living in New Mexico. Suddenly I put two and two together, realized Bob's last name is Linsey and confirmed that Martin Linsey was his father. So all the time I'd been frantically trying to find Martin, I had his son's number on my speed dial. I may have felt dumber in my life, but this was right up there.

Meanwhile, we continue to build a Cleveland Memory presence about Martin Linsey and, coincidentally, just this week arranged for the purchase of a set of his black & white prints, not knowing of his impending death. This is all very sad, but we hope to help keep his memory alive.

Obituary for Martin Linsey, Cleveland Artist

2010-03-04T21:13:00.009-05:00

Received tonight from his family:

Obituary for Martin Louis Linsey of Los Lunas, New Mexico
Deceased on March 3, 2010

Martin Louis Linsey of Los Lunas, New Mexico, was born on November 20, 1915, in Cleveland, Ohio, to Dr. and Mrs. Philip Robert Linsey. He is preceded in death by his parents, a brother, Dr. Eugene Victor Linsey, and his first wife, Arline Frances (Schwartz) Linsey. He is survived by his wife, Maria Major Linsey, two sons, Robert Henry Linsey of St. Louis, Missouri, and David Martin Linsey of London, England, and a daughter, Elizabeth Arline Linsey of Aberdeen, North Carolina. Additional surviving family includes a nephew, Peter Linsey of Park City, Utah, two nieces, Barbara (Linsey) Monahan of Bozeman, Montana, and Susan (Linsey) Binsfeld of Steamboat Springs, Colorado, four step-children, eight step-grandchildren and four step-great grandchildren.

Martin’s childhood included an unending exposure to musicians, painters, sculptors and architects who visited the family homes in Cleveland Heights and Mentor-on-the-Lake, Ohio, and instilled in him the love of art and music at an early age. After graduating from Cleveland Heights High School he attended Western Reserve University and the Cleveland School of Art.

Impatient with school, however, he took the first of many odysseys working on boats in the Caribbean, painting watercolors and oils of street scenes in Miami, shrimp boats in St. Augustine, and beach scenes in Key West, Florida. His body of work from that period also reflects trips to The Bahamas; the yacht basin in Nassau as well as native villages. He traveled to Mexico in a Model A Ford, served as First Mate on a small freighter bound for Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as a Deckhand on a shark-fishing boat to Central America and as an Illustrator aboard a banana boat.

While in the Bahamas on a native fishing boat he was to learn of the attack on Pearl Harbor. He tried to enlist in the Marine Corps but was rejected, of all things, for being color-blind. The 661st Army Combat Engineers, however, were willing to accept a color-blind artist and Martin subsequently found himself producing maps in the combat zones of Italy, France and Germany.

Even in a war zone he was able to paint watercolors which were sent to Cleveland. An art critic was prompted to write that Martin Linsey tried to block out the horrors of war by painting lovely villages that had escaped war damage, with his works attesting to the beauty he always found and sought to express.

After the war he returned to the Bahamas to paint and sail while living, for a time, on a fourteen-foot dinghy. Upon return to Cleveland he resumed his schooling, earning a Bachelors of Education in Secondary Art and a Masters in Art History at Western Reserve University. He then worked at a variety of jobs in the fields of photography and industrial design. He worked for the architectural firm of Dalton and Dalton as a delineator and model-maker and, in 1960, joined the staff of the Education Department of the prestigious Cleveland Museum of Art where he was to remain for the next twenty years.

He traveled to Europe some thirteen times and photographed some of the most historical and world-renowned buildings and sites for lecture use. Many of his watercolor paintings emanate from that period. His body of work includes photographs housed at many universities throughout the United States and have been represented in many publications throughout the world. He has won numerous awards for his watercolors, many of which are in private and corporate collections including the American Red Cross, the U.S. Department of the Interior, the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Standard Fruit and Steamship Company.

After retirement he and Arline settled in Scottsdale, Arizona. After Arline’s death, he met Maria Major with the couple marrying in 1987. They resettled in New Mexico with the sailboats being replaced with four-wheel ATV’s and the seas being supplanted by the expansive skies of New Mexico. Much of their spare time was spent on the ranches of Martin’s brother-in-law, Buddy Major, and he found himself photographing the branding corrals and cowboys. He lent his expertise at painting to Maria who is an artist as well. He introduced her to Europe and taught her to sail. Maria, in turn, showed him the ranch roads of New Mexico.

Martin Linsey was a soft-spoken, quiet, gentle, kind and refined man. He loved his art and was happiest when he was painting or relating his many adventures and travels to friends and family. He could find beauty in a street scene or landscape that many would miss. In recent years you would often find him sketching in the little villages of New Mexico or close to home.

more...

Gerald E. Brookins Collection now at CSU

2010-02-22T17:55:00.007-05:00

The Gerald E. Brookins Collection, containing thousands of images of streetcars, interurbans, railroads and everyday Cleveland area photographs, many from well-known transit authority Harry Christiansen, has been donated to Special Collections in CSU's Michael Schwartz Library by the Lake Shore Electric organization who put on the huge auction of streetcars on Dock 32 a few months ago. Mr. Brookins was the owner and creator of Trolleyville and the Brookins Collection contains historical material from Trolleyville as well as streetcar models crafted by Morris Stone. All in all, this is a very important collection and our thanks go out to the Brookins family and the LSE members for this donation. We will be gradually processing it and some of the material will be imaged and put up in the Cleveland Memory Project.

Searching the Plain Dealer, 1845 to 1969

2010-02-04T13:43:00.005-05:00

I just learned* that the Plain Dealer has mounted a search engine on its Cleveland.com site that permits keyword searching of all its issues between 1845 and 1969! Here it is. We'd already had the power to search from 1914 to 1922 through an expensive commercial database that libraries subscribe to, but this PD database is only $20 a month, putting it within the range of serious researchers, genealogists and the like.

By the way, in a similar vein, the Call & Post is available for free on the Cleveland Public Library web site, here. You just need a CPL library card to use it. It covers the period 1934 to 1991.

* (Thanks, Kieth!)

Christopher Busta-Peck

2010-01-07T22:17:00.004-05:00

A colleague pointed out (thanks, M.H.) that the Cleveland Public Library home page acknowledged that one of its own librarians, Christopher Busta-Peck, has been doing some good work researching and promoting the preservation of Langston Hughes' home. Christopher has a blog, Cleveland Area History, which he co-authors with local writer Christine Borne, which is well worth subscribing to. I hope his identification of a home that Jessie Owens lived in might receive equally profitable results.

A Historic Identity for Northeast Ohio

2010-01-01T12:09:00.003-05:00

The article below, about Ohio Historical Society's further reduction in hours, mentions a big collection redevelopment project taking place. The morning Plain Dealer today has a big article that continues the call for more regionalism. The question that comes to my mind, prompted by a stimulating discussion last night on this subject, is what does it mean to be a resident of Ohio and/or Northeast Ohio? What is our identity, as opposed to someone from Indiana or Florida?

When several NE Ohio libraries formed our Ohio's Heritage Northeast site several years ago, it was partially to support the greater call for regionalism with some collaborations around the history of Northeast Ohio. But what is "northeast Ohio" geographically and what historical character, what unique identity do we who live here have? Ultimately we decided that the boundaries would be those of the Western Reserve and the next original land survey tract below us, the U.S. Congress Lands N.E., the boundaries of which would be East Liverpool west to a point SW of Mansfield, then north to the west side of Sandusky. This corresponds reasonably well with most definitions of NE Ohio by economic development and environmental sustainability folks and it has the historical virtue of including the Point of Beginning for all the federal surveys under the Land Ordinance of 1785 and has as part of its southern boundary the Greenville Treaty Line.

But that does little to say what it means, historically, to be a resident of NE Ohio. Do we have any defining character or identity? And for that matter, what does it mean, historically, to be an Ohioan? What is the sound-bite, bumper-sticker message we want to send out to the world to tell them something about ourselves? Once upon a time we tried "The Best Location in the Nation," and "Cleveland Is A Plum," and now we're hawking "Cleveland Plus," but these slogans are artificial and don't mean anything that's unique about our area. Plums? Maybe there is nothing unique about our story and living here has no particular thing to say to the world, but I wonder. Any ideas?

State's Attic's Overhaul: Ohio Historical Center to Trim Hours

2010-01-01T12:01:00.002-05:00

Article noted:
Ohio Historical Society to reduce the hours of its museum to only 9am-5pm on Saturdays and for the library to only 9am-9pm on Thursdays while a big collection redevelopment project takes place.
State's Attic's Overhaul: Ohio Historical Center to trim hours - Ohio Historical Society's MySpace Blog |

Broadway/Rockefeller Bridge to be Demolished

2009-12-29T12:56:00.004-05:00

Today's Plain Dealer announced that the Rockefeller Bridge, closed since 2003, is slated by RTA to be demolished. This bridge was constructed in 1929 as part of the Cleveland Union Terminal (Terminal Tower) construction project in the '20s and '30s as the Broadway Bridge. The recently-replaced Adelbert Bridge beside CWRU was another old C.U.T. concrete bridge that time has overtaken.

Horace Wade, Boy Author

2009-12-21T17:08:00.006-05:00

Cleveland's own Horace A. Wade was a published author at age 11, with his book In the Shadow of Great Peril, and went on to write numerous other works, especially about horse racing.

The buttons are mostly about Herbert Hoover. This Cleveland Press photo was taken in 1920 and I just got a kick out of it.

Timken Tank at Cunningham Sanitarium

2009-12-21T14:19:00.011-05:00

I was recently asked about the "Timken Tank." Never having heard of it before, I imagined some sort of Army tank manufactured by the Timken Roller Bearing Company of Canton. But in examining it further, I discovered that it was this giant live-in medical treatment facility on the NW corner of Lake Shore Boulevard and East 185th Street. Looking like some Buck Rogers era space ship had landed, it was installed at the Cunningham Sanitarium (more shots) as an experimental device to deliver healthful properties through living in a high-pressure environment, the Timken Tank was a landmark until being scrapped in 1942. The metal thus recycled might have fittingly gone into actual Army tanks, who knows.

First United Methodist is merging with Epworth-Euclid Methodist

2009-12-11T14:41:00.005-05:00

I missed this when it was announced in the Plain Dealer last week. First United (left) is a major building on Euclid, at East 30th, and I'm sorry to see the congregation leave, even to shore up the equally-grand Epworth-Euclid (below).
With all the Catholic churches closing (and some depressing photos of the gutted St. Joseph Byzantine Church on Kinsman someone just showed me today), it seems like the city's sacred landmarks are taking a tremendous hit in our time.

A Season of Memories

2009-12-05T13:02:00.008-05:00

With the holidays upon us, this is the time of year when everyone starts remembering celebrations in years past. For those who grew up in Cleveland a half-century or so ago, that's the lavish Christmas shopping displays downtown. There are a lot of photos of those times in the Cleveland Memory Project and we are starting to get the usual and frequent requests for the words to the Mr. Jingeling song and the recipie for Higbee's frosties.

Some more links about that are here

Mr. Jingeling (Wikipedia)

Earl W. Keyes of Lakewood

Earl Keyes, Jr., 1919-2000

Euclid Avenue Memories (Plain Dealer, includes mention of frosties)

Historic Interiors in the News

2009-11-26T11:33:00.004-05:00

I just noticed that the Plain Dealer has been full of news on historic interior spaces this week. On Sunday the Culture section had an article on the best seat in Severance Hall and in the Drury Theater at the Cleveland Play House. Then there was a two-part series on the issues with the Medical Mart, which included a photo of the mammoth Public Auditorium. Finally (?) today there's an article on one of my favorite buildings, the old Cleveland Trust Bank at Ninth and Euclid, including a wonderful shot of the main lobby and dome. What's next? The Huntington Bank lobby? The old Society for Savings lobby? They all appealed to me more than the artist's rendition of the proposed Medical Mart.

(Returning to the issue of Public Auditorium, I haven't seen any discussion of why, if we determine that the Medical Mart developers are correct in their assessment of Public Auditorium's condition, we wouldn't just increase the cost of the project and fix the hall so it can be included. Surely we cannot afford to have conventions coming to town over then next few years think it's a safety hazard, so we may have to address that problem anyway. And while we're at it, finish the negotiations with the property owners on Ontario and St. Clair, or take the land by eminent domain. I have a bad feeling about the idea of a glass box on Mall C and want to see the original plan restored.)

Sustainable Access

2009-11-09T18:49:00.002-05:00

In library, museum and archival circles there appears to be a conflicting dichotomy between Access and Preservation: between the goal of using rare materials and the goal of keeping them from being damaged. Professionals see these goals as two sides of the same coin, but patrons encountering limited or no allowable access might view preservation measures as "hiding things away so no one can ever see them."

In actually, preservation is nothing more than a long-term access strategy. Or to put it another way, the dichotomy is between ensuring both short-term access and long-term access. We want things to be accessed and used, of course, but also need to provide for access and use in the near and distant future. It is a continuum of access over time that I've taken to calling "Sustainable Access." We want to sustain the same level of access and use over an unspecified length of time and employ preservation methods to this end.

Mysterious Eastside Building to Become Doubletree Hotel

2009-11-05T10:05:00.011-05:00

Cleveland east-siders all recognize this building, on the southwest corner of Carnegie and East 107th Street, but few know anything about it. Some could mention that the Jobs Corps was in there, but feel unsatisfied with that reply, since the age and style of the building doesn't fit the idea of a governmental social service agency. And with the demise of the Carnegie Medical Building a couple of blocks to the west and with this building's upper stories wrapped in netting to prevent pieces from falling on the sidewalk and street below, we all have had the apprehension that its days were numbered, whatever exactly its history.

This morning's Plain Dealer solved the mystery (was I the only one?) and hopefully the apprehension when it announced that the old Tudor Arms Hotel had been sold to the Maron family of developers to be turned into a Doubletree Hotel. This is terrific news and I for one hope it goes through. According to the article, the building started life in 1931 as the home of the Cleveland Club -- shades of CSU's Fenn Tower, which started about the same time as the National Town and Country Club -- and then a hotel, a home for students and the Job Corps over time. Becoming a residential property again seems very fitting. Keep your fingers crossed.

(Photos from the Cleveland Press Collection, Michael Schwartz Library, Cleveland State University, are dated 1960.)

New Book: "Gimme Rewrite, Sweetheart"

2009-11-05T09:57:00.002-05:00

Announcement received.

NEW BOOK CELEBRATES BYGONE ERA OF CLEVELAND NEWSPAPERS

Fifty-four veteran Cleveland reporters, editors and photographers swap stories about the life and times of the newspaper business in a new book: Gimme Rewrite, Sweetheart: Tales from the Last Glory Days of Cleveland Newspapers (hardcover / $24.95 / 256 pages).

The book, which was compiled from interviews conducted by John H. Tidyman, provides an oral history of the period between 1950 and 1982. During that time, fierce competition between the “Cleveland Press” and the “Plain Dealer” made working for a daily paper an unusually interesting job. (The Press ceased operation on June 17, 1982, a date many people consider the sad end of an era.)

“It was a job unlike any other,” Tidyman said. “Reporters, photographers and editors were envied, threatened, beatified, fooled and thought to be the luckiest s.o.b.’s around.”

Contributors to the book are former staffers from the Plain Dealer and Cleveland Press, many of them familiar to readers from their bylines — Dick Feagler, Brent Larkin, Marge Alge, Don Bean, William Miller, Dan Coughlin, Dick Peery, George Condon, Helen Moise, Mike Roberts, Bob Dolgan and Bill Wynne, among others.

All of them share a common nostalgia for the bygone era when Cleveland had competing daily newspapers and newsrooms were filled with the sound of typewriters and the ring of the newswire bells.

The stories they tell range from funny to tragic and sometimes outrageous. For example:

-Jim Dudas (Press) once bribed a prisoner with a carton of cigarettes to refuse an interview with the rival Plain Dealer.

-Whitey Watzman (Plain Dealer) ventured onto a crime scene and stumbled upon half a dozen officers, guns drawn, waiting in the dark for the real criminal.

-Wally Guenther (Press) infiltrated and wrote about the Ku Klux Klan.

-William F. Miller (Plain Dealer) put on a hardhat and passed himself off as a Salvation Army worker to cover a Great Lakes ore boat fire.

The book groups stories thematically, including chapters on the police beat, sportswriting, the women’s department, drinking on the job, and hazardous assignments. Short anecdotes from different storytellers are interspersed so that the text reads like an informal conversation among longtime colleagues.

More samples and information can be found online at:
http://www.grayco.com/cleveland/books/10169/sampleChapter.html

About the Author
John Tidyman was ordered by his father to take a touch-typing class the summer before high school. Tidyman often cites that incident as the reason he became a writer. After graduating from Lakewood High School, he was drafted and fought in the Vietnam War. He returned a 19-year old “buck sergeant.” Before he joined the Cleveland Press as a reporter, Tidyman worked as a waiter, a warehouseman and an airfreight agent. He is the author of eight books and has also written for almost every area publication.

Price and AvailabilityGimme Rewrite, Sweetheart ($24.95 / hardcover / 256 pages) is available at Northeast Ohio bookstores, online from Amazon.com, and from the publisher’s Web site. For more information, call Gray & Company, Publishers at 1-800-915-3609, or visit their Web site: www.grayco.com.

ASM Int'l Dome on Nat'l Register

2009-11-03T13:21:00.005-05:00

The ASM International dome has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places, according to this morning's Plain Dealer (earlier article).

New blog: Cleveland Area History

2009-11-03T08:13:00.002-05:00

Christopher Busta-Peck has branched out from his blog about restoring his Shaker Heights home to writing about Cleveland Area History in general, with an emphasis on the preservation of historic properties. It's well worth following!

More on Cleveland's Balloon Boy

2009-10-30T13:07:00.005-04:00

The Plain Dealer recently ran a story about Cleveland's "Balloon Boy," a 6-year-old kid whose father floated him high over the city as a publicity stunt during the Depression. Think flagpole sitters and other attention-getters during those hard times. In these days, when Michael Jackson was lambasted for dangling a child over his balcony, you can imagine the response today if some father sent his 1st grader soaring up over Municipal Stadium in a home-made balloon, indeed the recent story of Falcon Heene is enough indication of how feelings have changed. Read the PD story for the story of Cleveland's Balloon Boy, but here are a couple of photos from the Cleveland Press Collection, at CSU's Michael Schwartz Library Special Collections.

BTW, in the PD story the child is identified as Billy Crawford, who they quote in the story as an 82-year-old today, whereas the Press calls him Don Crawford, which was the father's name.

Preserving Our Cultural Heritage (BGSU)

2009-10-29T13:54:00.004-04:00

Announcement received:

Preserving Our Cultural Heritage
Pallister Conference Room (1st Floor)

Jerome Library, Bowling Green State University

Bowling Green, OH 43403
December 9, 2009 7PM - 8:30PM

The Ohio Preservation Council and the Intermuseum Conservation Association jointly developed this statewide preservation outreach initiative. The inaugural session was held in late 2008 at Stan Hywet Hall and Gardens in Akron, OH. The 2009 session will be presented in northwest Ohio at Bowling Green State University. Topics covered will include: a definition of preservation; the difference between preservation and conservation; appropriate types of supplies; disaster preparedness; print and online resources; and strategies for preservation fundraising. This program is free and open to the public.

To ensure that we have adequate handouts, please RSVP to ICA Director of Education Nicole Hayes by December 7, 2009.

Nicole M. Hayes
Director of Education and External Relations
Intermuseum Conservation Association
2915 Detroit Avenue
Cleveland, OH 44113
t: 216.658.8700 f: 216.658.8709
www.ica-artconservation.org

Planning Local History Projects on the Web

2009-10-29T10:44:00.005-04:00

I always thought that the best way to launch a big undertaking like creating the Cleveland Memory Project was to get all the issues planned in advance, to secure major outside funding, to research and select the best hardware and software, to train the staff in the new technology, to perform some dry runs and then digitize thousands of items before announcing the product. I call this the "Spanish Armada" approach, acknowledging the similar preparations that must have gone into sending that massive fleet off to war.

Lacking the patience to do things the "right" way and eager to see what would work, I just started doing some local history web work in 1996 and gradually recruited other kindred souls on the CSU Library staff to join in. We made mistakes, back-tracked to undo unwise decisions, digitized whatever our whimsy led us to and generally made it up as we went along. I call that the "Dunkirk Model," where you just find something that will float and start paddling like crazy.

Our goal was to reach the New World of digital history as fast as possible. At any moment in the following decade, we expected to hear of a local Spanish Armada being launched, which would blow our effort out of the water, but it never sailed. Instead our fleet of collaborators just keeps growing and we're still operating in a whimsical fashion to a large degree, but we've discovered that this process is a whole lot more fun and is more sustainable, as we're not always worrying about where the next big grant's coming from to keep us afloat.

One outgrowth of this has been the Greater Cleveland History Digital Library Consortium, which will be meeting next on November 5th. The Consortium was formed from a meeting at CWRU in 2004 to help local institutions mount resources on the web about the region's history. Email me for details if you're interested.

THATcamp: The Humanities and Technology Camp

2009-10-27T11:42:00.003-04:00

Announcement received:

What is THATcamp?

THATCamp (The Humanities And Technology Camp) is a user-generated "unconference" on digital humanities inspired by the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University.

At THATcamp 2009, CHNM floated the idea of holding regional camps around the country, an idea that quickly took hold, leading to events in Austin, Texas (THATcamp Austin) and Washington state (THATcamp Pacific Northwest), as well as a planned event in Michigan (THATcamp Great Lakes).

THATcamp Columbus, a collaborative effort of the Ohio Humanities Council and the Center for Public History and Digital Humanities at Cleveland State University, will be held in January 2010 in Columbus, Ohio.

What is an "unconference"?

According to Wikipedia, an unconference is "a conference where the content of the sessions is created and managed by the participants, generally day-by-day during the course of the event, rather than by one or more organizers in advance of the event." An unconference is not a spectator event. Participants in an unconference are expected to present their work, share their knowledge, and actively collaborate with fellow participants rather than simply attend.

Who should attend?

Anyone with energy and an interest in digital humanities. That includes academics, librarians, archivists, cultural activists, curators, students, educators, and professionals in all fields where technology and the humanities collide.

What should I propose?

That's up to you. Sessions at THATCamp will range from software demos to training sessions to discussions of research findings to half-baked rants (but please no full-blown papers; we're not here to read or be read to). You should come to THATCamp with something in mind, and on the first day find a time, a place, and people to share it with. Once you're at THATCamp, you may also find people with similar topics and interests to team up with for a joint session. You might want to check out the original THATcamp blog or some of the regional camps to get an idea of the scope of topics, but don't feel limited by those examples. If it falls under the topic of the humanities and technology, and impacts you, your organization, or the field of digital humanities (broadly defined) then it's fair game.

Where and when will THATCamp be held?

The event will be held on Friday January 15th and Saturday, January 16th, 2010 in Columbus, Ohio. We've yet to set an exact location so get in touch if you live or work in Columbus and want to help out!

Where's the schedule? When is THATCamp?

We'll create the entire schedule on Day 1, but the important parts go as follows: Day 1 begins with registration from 8:30-9 (breakfast included), and we'll begin promptly at 9am. Day 1 will end at 5:30pm, and we'll resume for day 2 at with breakfast (yes, we'll have lots of coffee) at 8:30am and sessions beginning at 9am. Following Day 2 sessions, we will hold a panel discussion, inviting institutional stakeholders to join in the dialogue.

How do I sign up?

Unfortunately, we only have space for 40-50 participants, so we have to do some vetting. The application form is here: http://thatcampcolumbus.org/about/apply.

Apply Now!
How much?

THATCamp Columbus is free to all attendees, but a $25 donation towards materials, snacks, beverages, and t-shirts (yes, t-shirts!) will be much appreciated by the organizers.

How do I sponsor THATCamp?

A limited number of sponsorships are available to corporations and non-profits. Shoot us an email at thatcampcolumbus@gmail.com.

A Central Park for Cleveland (in 1935)

2009-10-22T16:43:00.003-04:00

On the last day of 1935, The Cleveland Press reported that City of Cleveland parks director Hugo Varga had proposed that we build our own version of New York's Central Park on under-utilized land on the near east side. The acreage he had in mind was bounded by Chester and Euclid avenues, between East 21st and East 40th streets. Today that "under-utilized" land is the site of Cleveland State University! The report went on to discuss wider plans then afoot to develop today's MidTown area with housing projects and smaller parks, but this "Central Park" was to be the centerpiece.

Today we're back to examining ways to turn the depopulation of Cleveland into a new, green, urban agriculture project that in some ways is reminiscent of this Central Park plan in returning portions of the urban landscape to more natural uses.

Superman Signature Bridge

2009-10-20T14:55:00.008-04:00

Howard Maier, Executive Director of the Northeast Ohio Area Coordinating Agency, recently sketched a whimsical drawing of a new signature bridge to replace the Innerbelt Bridge, where the iconic element is Superman, astride the deck, holding fistfuls of cable stays in his hands. The idea was to honor the Man of Steel in his birthplace, the City of Steel, as other supporters of Superman have been trying to realize.

I'm sure it's a well-received slide for his presentations, but it got me wondering how feasible it would be.

The current Innerbelt Bridge is 95 feet above the Cuyahoga, so let's say the new one has to be at least 100 high. Using the proportions of the ideal human body, which Superman certainly should be, we find that the middle of the figure's thighs should be 3/8 of the total height. If the deck is passing mid-thigh on Superman, that means he'd be 267 feet high overall. The Statue of Liberty is 151 feet high, without the pedestal, the Colossus of Rhodes of ancient wonder was 107 feet high, the Washington Monument is 555 feet tall, the Terminal Tower is 708 feet high, and St. Louis' Gateway Arch is 630 feet high. One structure the same size was the original Ferris Wheel at Chicago's 1893 Columbian Exposition, at 260 feet, so Superman would certainly stand out, as Howard's drawing suggests, but not necessarily be impossible to construct.

Back to the ideal proportions, a figure that tall would have arms about 116 feet in length, hanging down to about the bridge deck. Angled out 45 degrees to either side, the span from one fist to the other would be some 164 feet and they would be 34 feet above the deck. I'm no bridge designer (and my trig may not even be up to this challenge), but I wonder if these fists would be in a position to properly support the river span section. Maybe a civil engineer will tell us.

Superman's crotch would be 33 feet above the deck, so the federal standards for minimum overhead clearance of 17 feet is no issue. I doubt that there'd be any way to save the cape, however.

I'm sure this would be far more interesting than anything ODOT has planned for the bridge.

Statement from the Western Reserve Historical Society

2009-10-09T15:33:00.002-04:00

Press release received:

Subject: A Statement from the Western Reserve Historical Society

The Crawford Auto Aviation collection is an integral component of the Western Reserve Historical Society and is here to stay. We would like to set the record straight and tell the real story:

The Western Reserve Historical Society has a significant debt burden – due to the ill-fated project known as the Crawford Museum of Transportation and Industry (CMTI), a proposed new high-cost museum intended to house significant parts of the Crawford collection. The CMTI project ended for a variety of reasons in 2004.

Many community and WRHS leaders, including Crawford supporters, were advocates for CMTI. Sadly, when all finally agreed CMTI could not go forward, some $18 million had been spent on its development – creating a significant debt burden for the Historical Society and damaging donor relationships.

In 2007, the Board brought in a new President and Chief Executive Officer, Dr. Gainor B. Davis. She immediately made elimination of the debt a priority. Dr. Davis and the Board of WRHS drew up a plan to eliminate the debt burden and create a stable and sustainable future for the Historical Society. The total debt is approximately $5.4 million with $2.8 million of that due in 2010. The Board set a January 2010 deadline to pay off that portion of the debt.

At the same time, WRHS instituted aggressive budget cuts including staff reductions, pay cuts, increased deductibles for health care benefits, and suspension of the retirement plan match. Variable costs were cut to the bone. Revenue projections were conservative. All told, in the past 18 months we have cut $2 million, 35% of our operating budget. We feel we are positioned to move into a stable future as soon as the debt is paid off. Leading this effort with Dr. Davis is a new CFO who is improving the business methods and making sure we are good stewards of donor funds.

So how to pay off debt? You can’t fundraise for debt. Donors support projects and even general operating – not debt reduction. As with any organization that is fighting for financial stability, or any individual or family for that matter, the Historical Society had to turn to its assets – its collections – to work itself out from under the debt burden.

We have carefully selected those items to be sold from our collections, limiting them to duplicates or those that are not mission-related (more on that later). Selected items are not integral to the collections or the Historical Society’s work and programs. Our collections will maintain their integrity – including the Crawford which will still hold about 150 vehicles.

This is not a route any historical or museum professional wants to take. We know, as well as anyone, that selling collections in order to pay debt is not acceptable under current museum standards (however, given the current national fiscal situation and its impact on museums, some are calling for a review and revision of those standards).

Let us ask you this: what’s the alternative? Would you rather we close our doors entirely?

The belief that the Crawford Auto Aviation Museum is an entity separate from WRHS is baseless. The nucleus of the collection was an unrestricted gift from Thompson Ramo Wooldridge (later to become TRW Inc.) to the Western Reserve Historical Society in 1963. It is a unique and important collection, and a valued part of our educational programming. The Historical Society’s internal operating divisions, the Crawford, the Archives-Library, the History Museum and Hale Farm and Village are simply that – departments within a single entity. The collections in each support and rely on one another. None are financially self-sustaining, and no department or set of collections is more important to our mission than another. Collection assets from all WRHS departments have also been sold over the years in order to reduce the debt. The Crawford is not and has not been singled out.

We recognize that among our assets is our volunteer corps which numbers some 600 people with about 10%, or 60 volunteers, working directly with the Crawford collection. Volunteers are and will remain major and appreciated contributors to the Society’s workforce.

Organizations grow, change and evolve – they must in order to survive. To believe we can and should operate today, with the identical mission as we had in 1867 when founded, or even in 1963, is not realistic. These tough economic times has forced all nonprofits, including WRHS, to narrow and focus their mission. Overly broad missions, trying to be all things to all people, are the death of organizations – especially nonprofits. We should be recognized for tightening and refining our mission – not criticized.

We know what we are and need to be in order to be a true asset to this community – and that means being the purveyor and storyteller of the history of the Western Reserve. That means using our vast collections: our archives, our photographs, our decorative arts, our buildings, our costumes, and our cars and airplanes to tell the WHOLE story – as no other institution in this region is able to do. That means using our cars to teach math and science to thousands of students. And using our Hale Farm & Village to teach about sustainability. And using the history of our steel industry to teach about entrepreneurship and motivate our next generation. And using our library to help people discover their heritage – where they came from – so they can build their own future.

This is the Western Reserve Historical Society, where we take history personally.

Being tourists afoot in downtown Cleveland

2009-09-22T23:22:00.005-04:00

In August my wife and I visited Chicago for a week of touring ethnic neighborhoods and downtown architecture. Before we left, I’d always considered Cleveland a small Chicago, but after that experience I came back thinking it was a large Dayton. That observation caused one fellow Cleveland history and tourism associate to say “ouch,” but I’ve since backed off that harsh assessment, since Dayton doesn’t have the Orchestra, the Rock Hall, the Clinic, three professional sports teams and Lake Erie, to name a few of our assets. But the gulf between my Cleveland aspirations and Chicago’s realities remains sizable. When we visited Manhattan the summer before, we knew that there’d be no city this side of London to match it, but somehow Chicago was the bigger eye-opener.

So I decided to get more familiar with Cleveland as seen by tourists and determine whether I was missing more than I realized. Yesterday and today Charlotte and I re-routed our intended trip to Pittsburgh to see Cleveland instead. Yesterday we took the car to the west side and today we bused into Public Square and walked the Square and Warehouse District. Although I’ve seen a lot of the city during the twenty years I’ve been back, there were many places I’d never made it to and today was meant to start fixing that. There were some pretty neat places and there were some things that I felt needed improvement, so here’s my report.

Prologue: Returning from New York in 2008

One thing that struck us as we returned to Cleveland from the Manhattan trip last year was the Red Line from Hopkins Airport. In NY we’d ridden in taxis, buses, boats, subways, rental cars, Amtrak, and the Long Island Railroad, but getting off the plane at CLE and catching the Red Line home, we were struck by a) how nice it was and b) how empty it was. It was somewhere between the LIRR and the Amtrak in size and comfort (certainly better than the subways) and the trip into Tower City was really pleasant, but we were virtually all alone in the car. After those long, 8-car subways packed with people and leaving every ten minutes, this quiet little 2-car Red Line seemed to be serving no one. The route map was funny too. In New York you could buy neckties with its complex patterns of subway lines and the same sort of transportation map ties were all over Chicago, too, but our little stubby Red, Blue and Green line route map seemed better suited for a bow tie. On that point, why don’t we have a line running out through Lakewood and one down south, say to Parma? I’d think there’d be riders for the southern route, based on the commuter traffic crossing the Innerbelt Bridge.

Yesterday’s trip to the west side

With our passports ready, we ventured across the river yesterday morning, to visit a few places that would take too long by public transportation. First stop was the West Side Market, a place near and dear to us all. I’ve been there from time to time, but never actually did any produce shopping at the outdoor stalls, so yesterday we did. I must say that the experience was deflating. The hustle and bustle is attractive, if you like the vendors trying to get your attention in ways you don’t experience at the Food Giant produce department, and the architecture indoors is captivating. But it appears you’re paying for that architecture in the form of either mediocre food or higher prices. Compared to the produce department of the local supermarket, the quality, selection and price of what we purchased yesterday was no better, perhaps worse. We were misled by the “Market” part if the name into expecting something fresher than what we received. It’s an institution I very much want to succeed, but I cannot imagine going back to buy food there, so I hope my experience was unusual and plenty of other people are very happy. Charlotte remembers better experiences in the past.

From there we drove down Pearl to Old York Road, where we had lunch at the Udupi Café. We always hit Indian restaurants in our travels, so this was our Cleveland venue of choice today. From there we drove up to the Lorain Antique District (mostly closed on Mondays), and then the Gordon Art District, which was undergoing a big telephone pole replacement project. But we did visit the West 78th Street Studios (note: they’re having a big open house on October 9th & 10th). We’ve been to the Beck Center and Lakewood Public Library, so didn’t bother hitting that district this time. The message is clear that we should schedule our Cleveland city tours later in the week, as unlike Chicago and New York everything shuts down right after the weekend. Still, it was a nice outing.

Today: Public Square and the Warehouse District.

Charlotte convinced me this morning that experiencing Cleveland as though we were in strange new city didn’t have to extend to taking the #41 bus from home to Windermere Station, so we drove there instead. Coming home we were happy to have the car waiting.

We took the Health Line bus from Windermere to Public Square, running down the new Euclid Corridor the whole way. I’ve driven on parts of Euclid Avenue lately, but generally have avoided it in favor of Chester or Carnegie each day on my commute from Cleveland Heights to CSU. So this was a treat to see Euclid without the hassle of driving my car. Windermere Station is pretty nice, being new and all. But it seems under-manned somehow. The ticket window was empty, the restaurant was closed and generally it didn’t feel like a point of entry for the city’s transportation system. One tired old, beat-up ticket machine greeted us and we were getting the feeling that the station was succumbing to the general malaise of East Cleveland around it. But then we rapped on a door and got a really nice RTA employee who walked us out the new ticket machines and helped us buy a couple of all-day passes for $5 each. Parenthetically, that almost seemed unnecessary, as there’s an honor system in place for the Health Line, where you board without showing anyone a ticket and perhaps will be asked for one en route, as unlikely as our trip made that seem. Anyway, we climbed aboard a waiting long articulated bus and were off in good order.

Cruising down Euclid, we picked up passengers at many stations and were pretty much full the whole trip. One problem I noticed was that this bus must not have had bike racks, as two guys came on board with their bicycles, which when added to a lady with a kid in a stroller made for clogged aisles most of the trip. Later I noticed a Health Line bus with a bike rack on the front (and another without one), so I gather not all buses have them yet.

East Cleveland is my hometown, since my parents were living with Dad’s folks there when I was born. It was once a very wealthy city and you can still see some remarkable architecture from the bus and we plan on driving up some of the side streets to view the houses more closely. It’s all pretty sad now, but I have some faith that the city will turn around eventually. We need to do something about jobs and get some money circulating there again, for one.

Arriving at Public Square, our first stop was the Positively Cleveland visitor center in the ground floor of Higbee’s. Right there we noticed a problem, as there are no public restrooms in the visitor center. Very apologetic everyone was, but one would still have to make a long trek to the far reaches of Tower City Mall to find relief. Seems like a visitor center should be equipped to get visitors comfortable and ready to take on the city.

The large literature room in the visitor center was very nice, with a commanding view of Public Square from its windows on the corner of the perimeter road and Ontario. Lots of display racks of brochures, a running video and other amenities. The person behind the counter was very friendly and helpful and I especially liked the pad of city maps that allowed you to tear off a map to aid in getting you around the city. Chicago and NY were glad to sell you a city map, but I don’t recall anything as handy as this pad of maps. I want to see if I can get some for the CSU library.

One thing this history-minded guy noticed was that history wasn’t much of a selling point here at Positively Cleveland. Sure, the various tours for which they offered pamphlets undoubtedly were heavy with historical content, but the showroom itself didn’t say anything about this being the gateway for a city whose chief appeal lies in the wonderful things its industrial wealth bequeathed it. I know that the organization’s membership is focused on selling merchandise, dinners, hotel rooms and opportunities for companies to move here, not in dwelling on the past, but I find it hard to imagine that shorn of the vestiges of the past that anyone would want to come to Cleveland any more than to Rocky River or Fairport Harbor. Am I overstating things again? Shouldn’t some portion of the “sell” include the historical treats the city has to offer?

Another thing was a sign that mentioned the "5-acre Public Square." Now as any surveyor or historian should know, Public Square is 9½ acres in size, so I’m not sure what the sign was talking about. From the context it might have been referring only to the four individual quadrants themselves, less the area contained in the streets, but it worried me that we might be misleading folks as to the true size of the historic Square.

From there we ventured out to walk around those 9½ acres of Public Square. First stop was the Park Building, across Ontario. The Park Bldg overlooks the Square and is being converted into apartments or condos. I remember once seeing what a great view the Van Sweringens had from their Greenbrier Suite up in the Terminal Tower Building further over, so I’m sure waking up each morning to that view of the Square from the Park Bldg. would be equally splendid. No one was on duty to show us the model suite, so we’ll have to make an appointment for another day.

That, by the way, was usually the case as we stopped in the Bingham and other apartment buildings and condo projects: it wasn’t possible to actually see any potential residential units. Now granted it was Tuesday, but still I’d think that buyers would be so few and far between that some provisions would be made for anyone who dropped in expressing an interest. As a former Realtor, I’d sure have hated to miss a client.

Bypassing the May Company building (what’s to see?), we circled the Soldiers & Sailors Monument, only to find that it was under rehabilitation. Another missed opportunity, but we are visiting out-of-season.

Then we went into 200 Public Square Building, the original SOHIO Building and later BP Building. Eh! Nice big high lobby, but little to excite someone with a love of old buildings. Bet I would have loved the Cuyahoga and Williamson buildings better, but they were torn down for this kinda-boring building. No public bathrooms here, either.

Continuing widdershins around the Square, we ducked into the old federal courthouse/post-office/customs-house building on the corner of Superior, now the federal bankruptcy courthouse. Once we got all the metal off our persons and safely through the security devices, the friendly guards let us wander around the huge marble lobby and into the enclosed light-well center of the structure. On the way we discovered a series of remarkable paintings of the history of mail delivery that had been restored and hung here. We also found a public restroom.

Back out on the Square, we entered the Key Tower lobby which wasn’t much more entertaining than the SOHIO Building’s had been (BTW, let’s stop calling that building by the name of the intermediary foreign firm that ultimately sold out and instead go back to calling it the SOHIO Bldg, as 200 Public Square isn’t very exciting). I admit to being no fan of modern architecture, so I’ll stop criticizing it just because I don’t like it. But anyone would agree that the saving grace of Key Tower is its connection to that really beautiful bank lobby in the attached Society for Savings building next door. Built in 1890, it was designed by the Burnham and Root firm in Chicago that did so many of the wonderful old buildings in the Loop right after the fire. We’d been in and out of the Monadnock Bldg. and the Rookery in Chicago and felt right at home in the Society for Savings version here. The old light pole attached to the outside corner of the building is really nice.

One disappointment was that the Key Tower doesn’t have an observation deck upstairs anywhere. The Willis (formerly Sears) Tower in Chicago managed to upgrade to a terrific plexi-glass room hung out over the street and the Empire State Building’s observation deck still figures into major motion pictures, but the Terminal Tower’s observation deck remains closed (can anyone explain why?) and Cleveland doesn’t offer visitors any elevated platform for viewing the city. If we cannot find the means to offer even a token example of major city delights, why should anyone care what we have to offer?

Pulling ourselves away from the Society for Savings Building, we crossed Ontario and entered the Old Stone Church. Now I don’t know how I’ve lived in Cleveland this long and never made it into that storied church, but it was really worth the wait. Not since seeing the interior of Pilgrim Church in Tremont have I been so impressed with a church interior. Beautiful barrel vaulted ceiling and tons of polished dark wood everywhere. Remarkable!

Breaking from the Square for a moment, we went up Ontario to the Standard Building next door to the church. This building was built by the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and is that organization’s national headquarters. What I wanted to see was their newly-installed mural of railroad history. It used to be housed in their former headquarters building, which was torn down for the Key Tower, then it was moved elsewhere and somewhat-forgotten until the BLE’s managers tracked it down and had it installed here.

Returning to the Square, we visited Tom L. Johnson’s statue, sitting there with a copy of Henry George’s book, “Progress and Poverty,” that transformed this streetcar millionaire into the city’s best mayor ever. I hope one of Cleveland’s millionaires has a similar epiphany soon, as we could really use a Tom L. Johnson about now. Until then, the Plain Dealer and FBI will have to do.

A quick peek into the lobby of the Renaissance Hotel and we were back to Tower City. I love the Cleveland Union Terminal, its Terminal Tower and really hope Tower City succeeds. It was full at noon, when we passed through it the second time, but practically no one was carrying a shopping bag, so I’m afraid this traffic was either there for the food court or the RTA station and not the shops. But with no where to sit except down by the food court and fountain, with the air too warm and not circulating, and with really annoying up-tempo shopping music playing, we fled.

We surfaced in the lobby of the MK Ferguson Plaza next door. This was where the U.S. Main Post Office landed when it moved from the Old Federal Courthouse across the Square. It later moved out to its present location on Orange Avenue, but the new owners preserved the post office lobby, with the nice carvings and brass counter windows.

From here we exited out onto Huron Street, right were we’d caught the Megabus to Chicago a couple of months ago, and headed NW towards the Warehouse District. We bypassed the new Stokes Federal Courthouse, on the theory that they don’t look like they wanted visitors, and the Lauche State Office Building, ‘cause I can’t imaging what it would have interesting to see. If I’m wrong about either, let me know.

Crossing Superior, we angled up to the Rockefeller Building, on the theory that anything of that period that bore his name would probably be worth the trip. The outside certainly is, but inside was a real disappointment. Nothing to see. Maybe JDR’s famous distaste for ostentation is to blame, but driving by is pretty much the whole show for this landmark. Still, I’m glad Cleveland retains something with his name on it, since his house at East 40th and Euclid and his summer home, Forest Hill, -- not to mention Standard Oil and SOHIO – have vanished. But then, we still have him, in eternal sleep out at Lake View Cemetery.

(When I went to New York last year, it was partially to address a conference of librarians. I told them that I had another agenda for my trip: to retrieve John D. Rockefeller, Hart Crane and Superman as New Yorkers and return them to their native Cleveland and to prevent LeBron James from going there. As a consolation, I told them they could keep George Steinbrenner.)

Back west along Superior, around the corner onto W. 9th and FINALLY, we were in the Warehouse District. This southern part of the district struck me right away as containing an awful lot of acreage taken up by parking lots. A lot of lots. I think I’ve read that one developer or another has talked about providing something that would connect the Square to the older buildings in the district and it’s badly needed. The northern part is charming, but the streets off of Superior are at least half parking lots and really empty of life.

While I’m griping, let me say here that Cleveland has a remarkable lack of places to sit. Walking on concrete all day tires out old legs and there are only so many restaurants you can visit for rest stops. If homeless people sleeping on benches is the problem – and I cannot really imagine any other reason why the city or the district doesn’t provide comfort stations for visitors – then just fasten some attractive single seating units to lamp poles, or otherwise provide single-seat devices that no one could curl up and sleep on. But here too I’m probably missing some other reason.

Whatever the Rockefeller building was lacking in novelty and charm, the ancient Western Reserve Building more than made up for. From the street is looks like another Burnham & Root heavy masonry structure, such as the Society for Savings Building, but inside is another story completely. Whereas the SfS interior was open and lit with a beautiful stained glass ceiling, the WR felt like entering the London sewers, but without the rats and other less-enticing elements. The entrance and surrounding corridors were low, heavy vaulted arches of brick that were very entertaining to experience. The doors leading off the corridors were glass with steel frames in radiating patterns. The overall effect was like nothing I’ve seen elsewhere and I loved the whole thing.

Here we resolved our problem of being tired by breaking for lunch at Mallorca. Excellent decision. The food was really good and sitting out on the sidewalk kept us connected to the city and the ambiance of our tour. We were the only souls outside and there were only a few people indoors, but it was nearly 2:00 on a Tuesday. Besides, plenty of waiters were available to attend to us.

We gradually walked up W. 9th Street, across at Lakeside, and then down W. 6th. At the RTA headquarters we ducked in to rest up a bit (remember, no place to sit along the street) and take stock of our options. We elected to take a break from walking and rode the B-Line on a circuit of Superior, East 12th and Lakeside back to the HQ. Nice, but not particularly thrilling. But the driver and all the folks at the HQ were really nice and helpful. The driver was listed on a nameplate as an “Ambassador” and she lived up to the responsibility. There were a good number of riders on the trip and we loved that it was free.

RTA is housed in the Bingham Building, which is a big monster of a structure that dominates both Lakeside and W. 6th along here. Really interesting building, as were several other prominent building “blocks” that we passed, like the Hoyt Block.

Fatigue was setting in by now, being nearly 4:00, so we dragged our weary bodies over to the Illuminating Building (actually anonymously named the 75 Public Square Building) because Charlotte admired it from afar. Then we walked back down to Tower City and caught the Red Line back to Windermere.

Summary

We’d intended to visit The Mall, the Library, the Federal Reserve Bank, the Old Arcade, the East Fourth Avenue District and make our way out Euclid to Playhouse Square, but that’ll have to wait for another day. Besides, that part of Cleveland is more familiar to both of us. I’m always jumping on the E-Line and running down to the City Club, Pickwick & Frolic and other venues along there. I really hope the Health Line and other improvements will bring Euclid Avenue back, just as I hope various projects will fill in those parking lots in the Warehouse District, but it seems like we’re distracted by other development priorities, such as along the east bank of the Flats, where it doesn’t seem to be needed as much.

All in all, this was a terrific experience. For each of us the most memorable things were the Burnham & Root buildings: for Charlotte the Society for Savings Bldg, which I’ve seen before, and for me the Western Reserve Bldg. We really liked the friendliness and convenience of the RTA personnel and buses (I guess they deserved their best-in-nation award, despite the recent issue with the circulator buses). The downside, besides parking lots, was the generally feeling that Cleveland isn’t doing enough with its historical legacy. Signs and markers are too few in number and not well coordinated or identified; creature comforts aren’t addressed well enough (restrooms and benches); there are no open observation decks to view the city; and we cannot attract enough people to launch really good tours (okay, there are the boat tours, CityProwl’s self-guided walking tours, some neighborhood tours – see below – but nothing like the Chicago Architectural Foundation’s array of tours of that city and, apologies to Lolly the Trolley, nothing like the double-decker buses everywhere in Chicago and Manhattan). This is Cleveland and we are in fact not one of the biggest couple of cities in North America, I realize. But it seems to me that we could be doing a lot more to promote the city’s heritage than we do.

Terminal Tower Souvenirs

2009-09-22T17:31:00.004-04:00

Here's a cool blog site about a private collection of souvenir objects that once were sold in the Terminal Tower. The blog says: These Terminal Tower souvenirs are charming reminders of the romance of train travel. And relics of a desire to take with us a sweet reminder of where we have been."

ICA's 3rd annual "Subsidized Survey Program"

2009-09-22T17:15:00.007-04:00

Press release received:

The Intermuseum Conservation Association (ICA) is pleased to announce its third annual “Subsidized Survey Program.” The purpose of the program is to help a cultural institution identify its preservation needs. The information gained through the assessment can help an institution raise funds or apply for grants to address those preservation needs.

The ICA will offer a collection survey focusing on a pre-selected group of artifacts within an institution. An ICA conservator will visit the institution to examine the objects on-site for up to two days, and written condition reports and treatment recommendations will be provided. The institution will be asked to contribute only the travel costs associated with on-site visit(s). Any non-profit cultural institution that can demonstrate a commitment to collections care is eligible to apply for this survey.

The application form can be found here. Applications can be mailed, e-mailed, or faxed and are due October 30, 2009. Preference will be given to applicants in Ohio and its adjoining states. Contact Director of Education Nicole Hayes at nhayes@ica-artconservation.org or 216.658.8700 with any questions.

The Intermuseum Conservation Association is the oldest not-for-profit regional conservation center in the United States. Founded in 1952, the ICA treats artifacts of all types including paper-based materials, paintings, textiles, outdoor sculpture and architectural elements, and three-dimensional objects in many media. For additional information, please visit our website at http://www.ica-artconservation.org or become a fan on our new Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Intermuseum-Conservation-Association/115017542950.

JOB: Electronic Records Archivist at the Cleveland Museum of Art

2009-09-21T18:38:00.003-04:00

Posting making the rounds:

Electronic Records Archivist
Library and Archives

The Cleveland Museum of Art seeks an Electronic Records Archivist to
contribute to the effective administration of the museum archives and
records management process. This position is responsible for managing
the transfer of permanent and nonpermanent electronic records from
museum offices to the archives; processes and catalogs electronic
records and digital assets according to established archival standards,
records management standards and internal museum procedures; creates
finding aids, indexes or other appropriate documentation to describe
electronic records collections; encodes descriptive finding aids in
appropriate mark-up language for the museum Intranet and Internet;
collaborates in the development of policies and procedures for the
preservation of electronic records; advises departments on electronic
record keeping practices and procedures; manages archives databases;
manages the archives portion of the Ingalls Library website; assists
with surveying the records of museum offices in preparation for writing
records retention and disposition schedules focusing on electronic
records; accessions permanent and nonpermanent analog records following
established procedures and schedules for on-site and off-site storage;
arranges, preserves, and describes by means of finding aids, box lists,
or other written documents the historical records of the museum;
identifies and digitizes analog records for reference and access.

Qualifications
The qualified candidate will have a Master’s degree in Archival
Administration or an equivalent combination of education, experience and
training in Archives and Records Management. A minimum of two years of
education, training, and experience in the management of electronic
assets, database management, software and hardware management, and web
management.

http://www.clemusart.com/aboutthemuseum/currentjobs.aspx

Must-read for archivists

2009-09-16T14:31:00.005-04:00

Just in case you having come across this seminal 2005 article on project priorities for processing historic collections, I thought I'd share it. This is something everyone working in archives, special collections and historical societies should be conversant with.

Mark A. Greene and Dennis Meissner, "More Product, Less Process: Pragmatically Revamping Traditional Processing Approaches to Deal with Late Twentieth Century Collections." (2005)

Their point is that if we insist on processing 20th century corporate records with the same exacting standards as we would say Washington's correspondence with Lafayette, we'll never get the job done, even with foundation support. We must not apply item-level processing expectations to these larger collections and instead process them at least at the collection or series levels to facilitate patron access and use. But they say it better, so read the whole article.

Cuyahoga County Public Library Partners with Cleveland Memory

2009-09-11T11:45:00.004-04:00

Cleveland Memory is now sporting some great shots of the Belle-Vernon Dairy, bookmobiles, Mr. William Telling, and other images from the South Euclid Historical Society's collection. Kent State University library school intern Jennifer Pflaum digitized and cataloged the photographs as part of her practicum project, under the supervision of Joe Salamon, of the Cuyahoga County Public Library's South Euclid-Lyndhurst branch.

This new site is the first of what we hope will be many such collaborative projects between the Cleveland Memory Project and the County library system, thanks to Becky Ranallo, their Internet Services Manager.

Demolition update

2009-09-11T11:16:00.005-04:00

Destruction of the old Carnegie Medical Building, aka the Ohio College of Podiatric Medicine Building, is well underway. It's being torn down back to front, so the facade still stands relatively unimpaired on Carnegie.

Meanwhile CSU has completely removed the Corlett Building, the white terra cotta structure on Euclid just west of East 21st Street, in front of the Music and Communications Building.

I don't believe there are any exciting plans for either site at the moment.

King Bridge Co. & Brooklyn-Brighton Bridge

2009-08-27T18:08:00.009-04:00

I had a nice field trip this afternoon that centered around the old King Bridge Company of Cleveland and especially its work on the Brooklyn-Brighton Bridge in 1894. My bridge engineer and bridge history enthusiast buddy Bill V. and I drove out to Brunswick to visit someone whose grandfather was once an employee of the company and who has some surviving letters, photographs and account books pertaining to his construction projects circa 1894 to 1906. We'll be digitizing these materials and posting them to Cleveland Memory in the coming weeks.

On the way back, Bill and I swung by the Brooklyn-Brighton Bridge, where Pearl Road crosses Big Creek, to see what's left of an earlier King Bridge mentioned in some of the material. When you get underneath today's high-level bridge, you can find an interesting spot full of bridge history. At this point Big Creek flows through a wonderful stone arch bridge from 1865 that only carries a driveway into a commercial building, but once upon a time was the only way to cross Big Creek in the middle of the nineteenth century. It's perhaps the second-oldest stone arch bridge in the county, the only older one being next to the remnants of the Superior Viaduct, in the Flats.

Next to this fully-functional bridge are surviving pieces of several newer bridges that carried traffic at a higher level over Big Creek. Right next to it are some piers for a King Bridge Company steel arch bridge, which was the second high-level bridge at that crossing when constructed in 1894. Next to those piers are some larger piers from a 1916 bridge, on top of which the current Brooklyn-Brighton Bridge was built in 1986. (There were a couple others too, but no trace of them has been found)

An unexpected find concerned the railroad bridge that crosses within a few yards of all these other bridges. Bill hung over the side and discovered a bridge plate crediting this structure to the King Bridge Company as well, having been erected in 1916.

Fully in the mood to explore King Bridge Co. structures, on the way back we swung through Riverside Cemetery and examined the approaches at each end of a demolished King park bridge from the 1890s. Other than the concrete work and some ornamental iron railings and posts, there's nothing left to see, but it once connected the opposite sides of the cemetery, over what must have been a stream running through the valley.

We will gradually put up more information about these bridges in Cleveland Memory and its specialize point of access "Historic Landmarks of Northeast Ohio" (bridges). But it makes me happy when these landmarks of historical Cleveland can still be found in some form, even just piers, approaches and stone walls. Not to get off on another whole topic, I certainly hope that ODOT will preserve the remaining pieces of the old Central Viaduct, when they add a second span to the Inner Belt Bridge.

Best and Worst U.S. Mayors: Johnson and Kucinich

2009-08-04T22:35:00.004-04:00

As many Clevelanders would probably concur, a poll reported in the book America's Big City Mayors: the Experts Name the Best and the Worst has concluded that Tom L. Johnson was the second-best big-city mayor in U.S. history (1820 to 1980), while Dennis Kucinich was ranked the seventh worst. The poll considered 679 candidates.

Levi Scofield's house

2009-08-01T13:29:00.003-04:00

In her really interesting blog CityProwl's Jennifer Coleman discloses the presence of historic Cleveland architect Levi Scofield's home, overlooking the Fairmout Reservoir. Here's a Bing birdseye view of it, but Jennifer's provided some neat ground level shots in Flickr, which you can access from her blog.

The Scofield home is in pretty bad shape, but I share her sentiment that someone should save and restore it.

Tomorrow's GCHDLC Meeting

2009-07-29T16:23:00.001-04:00

The next meeting of the Greater Cleveland History Digital Library Consortium will be held tomorrow, Thursday the 30th, at Heights Library. The GCHDLC is made up of librarians, historians, and others interested in presenting local history on the Web.

The theme of this meeting is the collaborations going on up on the Heights, involving a cast of people from the various historical societies, public libraries and governmental units. Roy Larick will be giving a presentation on what he and Steve Titchenal have been doing around the topic of Bluestone Heights, tracking historic terrain and watersheds using Google Earth and historic map overlays. We will also hear about a project to add 3-D models of the North Union of Shakers community buildings to Google Earth, involving the Shaker Historical Society and the Shaker Heights Public Library in partnership with an architectural class at the University of Cincinnati. Our host is Debbie Rossman, late of the Westlake Porter Public Library and now with the Heights Library, who will tell us of their plans to work with Cleveland Hts. organizations, such as the City of Cleveland Heights, in building a wider presence in Cleveland Memory.

If you wish to join us at this great meeting, which incidentally is the 5th anniversary of the founding of the GCHDLC, please send me an email at w.barrow@csuohio.edu.

Tours of Historic Cleveland

2009-07-29T15:40:00.005-04:00

Having just returned from a week of "doing Chicago," walking, busing and boating all over the Windy City and it's fabulous architecture, I come home energized to remind myself what Cleveland has to offer. Here are several sets of tours I intend to sample with the remainder of the summer and suggest you might want to, as well.

TAKE A HIKE

Three free tours are offered on a weekly basic through September 6th.

The Historic Gateway Neighborhood tour starts at 6:00 p.m. every Thursday, from the Arcade.
The Historic Warehouse District tour starts at 10:00 a.m. every Saturday from Constantino's Market on West 9th.
And the Canal to Harbor tour also starts at 10:00 a.m. every Saturday, from the Settler's Landing RTA station.

CITY PROWL

Local architect Jennifer Coleman has put together a great series of walking tours that may be downloaded as free MP3 audio files and maps from her site. They include tours of Lower Prospect, the Warehouse District, Public Square, Cleveland's Bank Lobbies, Cleveland's Arcades, the Buckeye Neighborhood and some Mini-Tours.

LOLLY THE TROLLEY

Then, of course, there's always Lolly the Trolley, cruising around the city with a bus load of visitors to Cleveland, folks on group outings and individuals taking advantage of Lolly's programs. Their "City Sightseeing" narrated tours are ideal for individuals and come in 1 hour or 2 hour varieties daily. The shorter tour stays in the downtown area, while the longer tour goes out to University Circle as well. Prices for individuals range over $8-$17, depending upon age and tour length, and leave from the Powerhouse.

GOODTIME III

The Goodtime offers public and private tours of the lake and river throughout the summer. The narrated lake/river public tours run through Labor Day, Tuesdays through Saturdays, at Noon and 3:00 p.m., and Sundays, at 1:00 and 3:00 p.m.. All tours are approximately 2 hours long, leave from the East Ninth Street Pier and cost $9-$15, depending upon age.

These tour options are a great way to reconnect with Cleveland, especially its historic neighborhoods and architecture, so put them in your plans for the month of August.

Ohio Historical Society Reinvents Itself For Future Growth

2009-07-22T09:24:00.004-04:00

Press release received:

Ohio Historical Center To Change Focus

(Columbus, Ohio) - The Ohio Historical Society is accelerating a plan to reinvent itself as a state history organization, according to executive director and CEO Bill Laidlaw. State support was slashed from $13.5 million two years ago to $7.9 million for the 2010 fiscal year-a 42-percent cut -following years of underinvestment by the state.

As a result, the Society will make significant changes to the state history museum, the Ohio Historical Center in Columbus , as well as continue its efforts to find local groups to manage 10 of its historic sites and museums around the state. In addition, the organization will implement a number of operational changes as it continues to focus efforts on preservation of and access to collections and sites, and expanding its services statewide.

Earlier this year, a number of cost-saving measures were taken, such as a weeklong furlough, a reduction in force and seeking local groups to manage larger OHS sites in response to a 10-percent reduction for fiscal year 2009. However, further actions are needed, including eliminating more jobs across the organization, reorganizing or eliminating programs and additional furloughs.

"While we foresaw tough times ahead, we were stunned to receive this magnitude of a cut in state funding," Laidlaw said. "Once again, we were forced to make difficult decisions, but with challenges come opportunities. Our Board of Trustees has approved a bold plan that will position the organization for future growth by providing the strongest return on investment for limited state dollars as well as the greatest public value for Ohioans."

Ohio Historical Center to Emphasize Collections Learning
In direct response to what the public has said they want the Ohio Historical Society to offer, the Society will be transforming the state history museum at the Ohio Historical Center to focus on collections learning. In studies that have taken place over the past three years, the public has said they want more direct access to the collections, more opportunities for hands-on experiences and ways to explore stories of interest to them using current technology and the resources of both the museum and library.

Plans call for public labs and workspaces in which activities that are usually carried out behind the scenes will be front and center. In addition, collections that are normally stored off-site will be brought to the facility for easy viewing. A distance learning studio, spaces for new exhibitions and technology enhancements are also among the innovations under development. Staff also will be cross-trained allowing fewer employees needed for support, therefore saving on operational costs.

The collections learning center will be created in phases, beginning with the removal of current exhibits, many of which are more than 20 years old. Development and implementation of the $2-million first phase will use existing capital funds and is scheduled to begin starting January 2010.

"With almost 2 million objects in our museum and library collections, the collections-learning-center concept will help make Ohio 's story personally relevant and engaging to today's audiences," said Laidlaw. "We will be creating more exhibitions and programs for traveling to OHS sites, libraries, historical societies, community centers and other museums across the state. In this way, we are redefining the concept of 'state museum.' We will be a museum with a presence all over the state—not just in Columbus ."

Historic Sites and Museums Remain Open
According to Laidlaw, with the 2010 budget decided, there will be sufficient funds for current and future management groups to operate sites. Additionally, the 10 historic sites and museums operated by OHS employees will remain open through their established 2009 seasons while management agreements are finalized. (See below list of management status of OHS sites.)

In the Ohio Historical Society network of 58 historic sites and museums-the largest of any state historical organization in the nation-37 sites are currently operated by local management groups and the remainder are directly administered by the Ohio Historical Society. Managed sites continue to be a vital part of the OHS network of historic sites and museums. "We are more and more dependant on communities to volunteer and raise funds to help us maintain and grow access to our sites," said Laidlaw.

Society To Restructure, Reduce Staffing
As a result of the changing priorities and to make the best use of reduced state funding, the Society will take these measures:

Accommodate the development of the Collection Learning Center , by limiting hours for both the Ohio Historical Center ’s museum and the OHS Archives/Library starting Jan. 1, 2010 through March 1, 2011. The museum only will be open to the public on Saturdays from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. However, school and other groups will continue to be accommodated on weekdays during this time.

The OHS Archives-Library only will be open Thursdays from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. *
Enhance its Web presence with an Ohio history online portal to increase access to information and OHS services as well as to generate revenue.
Cease publication of TIMELINE, the quarterly history magazine published by the Ohio Historical Society, at the end of it 25th-anniversary year unless private funding can be secured for future publication. Special events will not be scheduled at the Ohio Historical Center and Ohio Village from Jan. 1 through June 30, 2010.

Mandate 10 furlough days for all employees before the end of the fiscal year.
As a part of the restructuring, 31 full and part-time positions have been eliminated. Of this total, 19 vacant positions will not be filled. In addition, 16 employees were notified of a decrease in their hours. Separately, 53 positions will be eliminated by the end of the year as OHS sites transition to the management of local groups.

Over the last decade, the Ohio Historical Society has had to retrench its operations as state funding declined from a staffing level of more than 400 full-time-equivalent staff members in the 2001 fiscal year to 184 after reductions.

Employees notified today of job losses will receive a severance package and full pay of eligible leave balances. They also are welcome to apply for the Society’s position vacancies. All employment categories were affected among the total number of positions eliminated.

Established in 1885, the Ohio Historical Society, a nonprofit organization, serves as the state’s partner in preserving and interpreting Ohio ’s history, archaeology, natural history and architecture. It provides services in nearly every community in the state. Individuals wanting to help the Society can:

Visit an OHS historic site and museum. To learn more, visit www.ohiohistory.org/places. Become a member of OHS. Go online at www.ohiohistory.org/support to join. Make a contribution. Go online at www.ohiohistory.org/support to donate. Business hours for the Ohio Historical Society and the Ohio Preservation Office, both located at the Ohio Historical Center , will remain the same: Monday–Friday, 9 a.m. –5 p.m.

Note: See below listing of OHS site network.

Ohio Historical Society Sites (58)

Ohio Historical Society-Operated Sites (21) * Denotes sites under negotiation to be managed by local managers

Society-Staffed Sites (13)
*Adena
*Armstrong
*Campus Martius
*Fort Meigs
*Harding Home and Tomb
National Afro American Museum
Ohio Historical Center
Ohio River Museum
Ohio Village
*Piqua Historical Area
*Wahkeena
*Youngstown Historical Ctr. of History & Labor
*Zoar Village

Self-Guided, Society-Operated Sites (8)
Buffington Island
Leo Petroglyph
Lockington Locks
Logan Elm
Seip Mound
Shrum Mound (Campbell Park)
Story Mound
Wapatomica

Local-Management Sites (37)
Big Bottom
Buckeye Furnace
Cedar Bog
Cooke House
Custer Monument
Davis Memorial
Dunbar
Fallen Timbers
Flint Ridge
Fort Amanda
Fort Ancient
Fort Hill
Fort Jefferson
Fort Laurens
Fort Recovery
Glacial Grooves
Grant Birthplace
Grant Boyhood Home
Grant Schoolhouse
Hanby House
Harrison Tomb
Hayes Presidential Center
Indian Mill
Inscription Rock
McCook House
Miamisburg Mound
Museum of Ceramics
National Road/Zane Grey Museum
Newark Earthworks
Our House
Quaker Meeting House
Rankin House
Schoenbrunn Village
Serpent Mound
Shaker Historical Museum
Stowe House
Tallmadge Church

Virtual Tour of East Cleveland Township Cemetery

2009-07-20T11:23:00.001-04:00

Press release received

Virtual Tour of East Cleveland Township Cemetery
Come for an intimate, virtual tour of one of Cleveland's most-interesting and best-kept secrets: The East Cleveland Township Cemetery:

THIS Wednesday, July 22, 2009
7:00 pm
Superior Schoolhouse, Euclid Heights Boulevard & Superior Road

The East Cleveland Township Cemetery consists of 12 acres of land in University Circle off East 118th Street. Largely forgotten by some Clevelanders, it has been surrounded by urban legend for decades and embroiled in litigation since its founding in 1859. The story has now been uncovered and fact has been separated from fiction.

Please join Nancy Fogel West, vice president and secretary of the East Cleveland Township Cemtery Foundation, and author of To Dwell with Fellow Clay: The Story of the East Cleveland Township Cemetery – for a look at the perpetual home of some of Cleveland's – and the Heights area's – most fascinating settlers, politicians and heroes.

Reservations are required. Call 216-291- 4878.
This event is sponsored by The Cleveland Heights Landmark Commission, the Cleveland Heights Historical Society and the East Cleveland Township Cemetery Foundation. Parking on-site for handicapped and elderly--all others park at Cumberland Park parking lot near pool.

New Book on Veterans Bridge Coming in Fall

2009-07-15T20:44:00.003-04:00

In September the Cleveland State University Library will be publishing a major book on the Veterans Memorial Bridge (aka the Detroit-Superior Bridge), by bridge engineer William E. Beyer. Over 600 pages in length and packed with hundreds of historic photos of the bridge, including dramatic construction shots, this handsome hard-cover book will commemorate the bridge's recent 90th anniversary. Only 250 copies of the book will be printed, but thanks to support from the Sloane Family Fund and CSU's Watson Endowment Fund, the book will retail in the $20-25 range. This will be a great gift for someone who loves the bridge (who doesn't?), or Cleveland landmarks history in general. Direct inquiries to me at w.barrow@csuohio.edu.

The Innerbelt Bridge is Having Twins

2009-07-15T20:00:00.003-04:00

ODOT announced that they'll be replacing the I-90/Innerbelt Bridge with two 5-lane bridges, built one after another. They won't be the "signature bridge" that many have hoped for, but an ODOT spokesperson said "What this committee will do is look at things like lighting and paint color and railings and figure out what works with the landscape of Cleveland...."

Great! We get to pick the shade of lipstick to put on our pig.

Celebrating Paper: The 25th Anniversary Ohio Preservation Council Symposium

2009-07-14T13:44:00.002-04:00

Press release received:

"Celebrating Paper: The 25th Anniversary Ohio Preservation Council Symposium." The Msgr. Joseph Jessing Conference Center , Columbus , OH. September 17, 2009, 9:00AM-4:00PM.

The Ohio Preservation Council is celebrating a quarter-century of protecting our shared heritage and you are invited to attend! Please join us for a day of informative presentations, demonstrations, and panel discussions on the history, art and preservation of books and paper. Keynote speaker Nicholas Basbanes is an internationally known author whose first book, A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes and the Eternal Passion for Books, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year that has sold more than 120,000 copies.

Online registration is available via the OPC website: http://opc.ohionet.org/symposiumregistrationinfo.html.

The complete symposium program can be found here: http://www.ica-artconservation.org/education/OPCSymposium.pdf.

A block of rooms has been reserved at the Days Inn & Suites in Worthington , OH . Additional information can be found here: http://opc.ohionet.org/symposiumregistrationinfo.html.

CSU Finances Sale of Downtown YMCA Bldg.

2009-07-13T17:12:00.006-04:00

The Cleveland State University Foundation has facilitated the purchase of the historic YMCA Building, on the southeast corner of Prospect Avenue and East 22nd Street. A Ironically, this is the location where CSU got its start, as the YMCA's education program, although the exact Fenn Building to the south was demolished recently. Y-Tech was renamed Fenn College for a major benefactor before being sold to the state in 1964 to form the core of CSU (more).

The Foundation will lend funds to the Euclid Avenue Housing Corporation to purchase the building, which will be managed by American Campus Housing the entity who runs CSU's dorms. [This is a correction to my earlier blog saying that CSU itself had purchased the building]

The Grand Plan for Freeways Across Cleveland

2009-07-13T16:08:00.003-04:00

Cleveland Memory Project has just mounted a digitized series of 17 "Route Location Studies" from the 1960s, detailing the plans for a network of freeways across the city. Included are the infamous Heights, Lee and Clark freeways through the Heights. Each of these studies were produced by the engineering firm Howard, Needles, Tammen, & Bergendoff, for either the Cuyahoga County Engineer, Albert S. Porter, or the Ohio Department of Highways and are large-format, spiral-bound booklets containing maps, aerial photos, diagrams, tables and explanatory text about each proposed freeway.

Roldo: Walking is Depressing in Downtown Cleveland

2009-07-13T14:23:00.003-04:00

Roldo Bartimole wrote a blog in May that contrasts nicely with my last entry about downtown traffic counts 90 years ago. Titled "Walking is Depressing in Downtown Cleveland," it reflects the feeling many of us who remember Cleveland's glory days when viewing Euclid Avenue, between CSU and Public Square. Let's hope the benefits of the Health Line kick in one of these days.

Historic Sidewalk Counts Downtown

2009-07-12T18:58:00.004-04:00

In discussing the value of foot traffic (especially women) to ground floor retail outlets, County Auditor John A. Zangerle furnished some sample counts in his book Principles of Real Estate Appraising, in 1924. Along the south side of Public Square, for example, he reported these counts: 25659 (1916), 24402 (1917), 20552 (1918), 24263 (1919), 28026 (1921), 30077 (1922), which were apparently from studies performed by the Cleveland Association of Building Owners. It would be interesting to look up the full set of data, determine just what these numbers mean exactly, and find out how many years were surveyed.

In 1924, when he was writing, the Cleveland Union Terminal project hadn't begun to focus more traffic on this side of Public Square, so these numbers should have greatly increased in the 1930s and '40s, depending upon the effects of the Depression and WWII.

But what I'd really be curious to know is what the same tallies for today would look like.

Terminal Tower Gets a Make-Over

2009-07-12T17:26:00.004-04:00

This morning's Plain Dealer carries a two-page spread about the recent renovations going on to the venerable Terminal Tower. The article gives us the good news that the scaffolding, which has marred the Tower for a couple of years, is gradually going away, and there's the hopeful comment that owners Forest City Enterprises would like to find a way to re-open the observation deck. With the Sears Tower opening a splashy new cantilevered glass-floored deck and the Empire State Building having a long history of their observation deck being open, I'd sure like to see ours be accessible once again.

The article mentions that the Tower was the "second tallest building in the world" for many years, to the Empire State Building. This is a confusing subject that is repeated in a number of forms and depends upon what's measured and when the clock starts running, but it's pretty clear that the Terminal Tower was the second tallest building when it was topped out in 1927, may've slipped when the complex was dedicated in June of 1930 (well before the Empire State Bldg.), but was still the tallest outside of New York until 1967. The claims often run to the whole world, not just Cleveland, but I haven't taken the time to sort out all the possibilities, which include the considerably-higher 1889 Eiffel Tower.

Thanks to William Neff for the graphics and the PD in general for the article about Cleveland's most important and revered landmark.

Mash-ups of historic and contemporary maps

2009-07-11T17:10:00.003-04:00

The Greater Cleveland History Digital Library Consortium (GCHDLC), an informal network of historians, librarians and others interested in presenting Northeast Ohio's historic resources in digital format, will be meeting July 30th to learn more about collaborative projects in the Heights which center around historic maps. The group's map committee has previously conducted workshops on how to overlay digitized historic maps onto contemporary maps and aerial photos in Google Earth and now some actual projects have come forth in Shaker Heights and Cleveland Heights that will be demonstrated. Dr. Roy Larick and Steven Titchenal will present their work on a "Bluestone Hts." use of this technology and we will also see what's been done in Shaker Heights, particularly a further development using the Sketch-up program to create 3D models of North Union Shaker settlement buildings.

For more information, contact Bill Barrow, at w.barrow@csuohio.edu.

NOCSIA Tour of W.S. Tyler Building

2009-07-11T16:42:00.003-04:00

Most east-siders have seen the huge brick complex of historic industrial buildings at Superior and the railroad overpass just west of East 40th Street and maybe a few know it as the W.S. Tyler Building.

This afternoon a small group of members of the Northern Ohio Chapter of the Society for Industrial Archeology (NOCSIA) got a tour of these buildings and learned how they are being developed into Tyler Village, a 1.2 million square foot, 10 acre space for new businesses. I have driven past this complex and particularly admired the arching brick bridges, several stories up in the air, connecting different buildings and the elaborate details of the buildings' trim, so it was good to learn more about them. In the 1870s, W.S. Tyler Co. started manufacturing wire cloth on St. Clair, at the northern end of the property and gradually enlarged to the south until the main entrance was set up along Superior and the old St. Clair headquarters building demolished. In 1962 W.S. Tyler moved to Mentor, where it remains today.

NOCSIA has tours and lectures throughout the years, so visit their website and join.

Curse of the Colavito People

2009-06-29T19:10:00.004-04:00

Maybe the biggest impediment to Cleveland's self-image are those of us old enough to remember Rocky Colavito. Once we're all gone, contemporary Cleveland won't be constantly measured against memories of the time when it had 900,000 people, Fortune 500 headquarters companies, championship sports teams, a vibrant downtown, industrial vitality and a lot of local cultural icons. With us gone, the Cleveland of tomorrow only has to beat the present and recent past, which maybe would be an achievable goal.

The Albert S. Porter Civic Wrong-Headedness Award

2009-06-29T17:55:00.014-04:00

There ought to be an award for civic wrong-headedness and it should be named for Albert S. Porter, the powerful, long-term Cuyahoga County Engineer. He's justly infamous for trying to inflict a system of freeways across the Heights, but I read today that he also once proposed demolishing the magnificent Guardians of Transportation statues on the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge, so there would be more room for traffic lanes. "Those columns are monstrosities and should be torn down and forgotten," the Cleveland Press quoted Bert Porter as saying in 1976. "There is nothing particularly historic about any one of them. We're not running a May Show here."

Porter objected on the grounds that designating the statues historic would compound and delay the bridge widening project, but other studies demonstrated that extra lanes were not necessary. The Cleveland Press editorialized in their favor, and eventually the Ohio Historic Sites Advisory Board unanimously recommended the Western Reserve Historical Society's nomination of the bridge to the National Register of Historic Places. Porter then had to grudgingly go along and keep the Guardians.

And therefore we still have these terrific icons as part of our thin and ever-threatened Art Deco heritage. Perhaps a model of one of them would be a fitting statuette for the Albert S. Porter Civic Wrong-Headedness Award. (Any candidate you'd like to nominate to receive it today?)

Lincoln Steffens' quote about Tom L. Johnson

2009-06-29T17:46:00.002-04:00

The oft-quoted comment by Lincoln Steffens - "It seems to me that Tom Johnson is the best Mayor of the best-governed city in the United States." -- is found in his book, The Struggle for Self-Government. (New York: McClure Phillips & Co.). 1906. p.183. I see this quoted a lot, but not always accurately and not usually cited.

The more things seem to change...

2009-06-29T16:25:00.006-04:00

Seems familiar somehow:

"The System in Cleveland at that time [1880s] was simple and imperfect. Business men supported it. There was no boss, and such leading politicians as the city boasted were nothing but business men's political agents. They depended largely upon the campaign funds contributed by the business men. In return the business men could get what they wanted out of the city, and they let the politicians do about as they pleased with the rest."

"They didn't always use cash bribery. Mulhern, who picked the the president and organized councils, came to control more and more departments, and he had the patronage of these to dispense to the friends and followers of pliable councilmen. But this was making the city pay for its own corruption..."

-- from "OHIO: A Tale of Two Cities," [Cincinnati and Cleveland] The Struggle for Self-Government, Lincoln Steffens. 1906.

I love that phrase about "... making the city pay for its own corruption...."

Clinton Square

2009-06-18T20:55:00.016-04:00

One little story that is told by the maps of Cleveland is Clinton Square. I mentioned it in my essay on Real Estate for the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, years ago, but still get a kick out of thinking about it from time to time.

Clinton Square caught my attention when I noticed it on Ahaz Merchant's great map of Cleveland in 1835. Situated out at what was then the edge of the village, it was intended to be a small park surrounded by upscale homes, on the model of some of the mansions built around parks in London centuries ago.

But the plan was stymied by the arrival of the Cleveland and Pittsburg Railroad, later the Pennsylvania RR, which angled its way north across Euclid Avenue at East 55th Street, past Clifton Square, then down to the lakefront. The presence of noisy, dirty locomotives destroyed the ambiance the developers were looking for and the project failed. (map shown a detail from 1852 Knight & Parsons map)

For decades afterward, though, the greenspace in the center survived as a small city park. Cleveland never outdid itself establishing parks in the nineteenth century, and Clinton Park, and its larger neighbor Lake View Park by the City Hall, were about it before the Emerald Necklace of Gordon, Rockefeller, Wade, Ambler and Shaker Lakes parks came into being in the 1890s.

Today, as with Lake View Park, there's no trace of Clinton Park. The surrounding streets -- Lakeview, Wilson/Davenport, E.16th & E.18th -- still exist to frame the location, but the block is totally occupied by an undistinguished brick building housing the Regional Income Tax Authority, next door to the new FBI headquarters.

But one of the enjoyments of being an avid reader of maps is tracing the stories of Cleveland played out in cartographic form and, in this instance, imagining a fancy London residential square on Cleveland's Davenport Bluff.

Ohio Architects, Engineers and Builders magazine

2009-06-18T20:42:00.005-04:00

Within the space of ten minutes yesterday, two completely different people told me about the Ohio Architects, Engineers and Builders magazine. I'd never heard of it before then, but received an email announcing someone's pleasure at stumbling across it. I then walked out to the reading room in Special Collections and someone else started telling me about it again. No relation between them, either.

Although I haven't looked into it myself yet, OAEB reportedly published at least in the period 1905 to 1917. It announced new building projects around the metropolitan region and showed photos of many properties, which in particular was what got my informants excited. The publication started out without "Engineers" in the title, but apparently added it later. From what little I saw, it looks to be more about building than anything else, but since builders are socially below architects, perhaps adding architects to the title (and engineers) elevated the status of the publication. Maybe someone else can give a better assessment of it. I understand that it's found at Cleveland Public Library.

Roy Larick's talk on "Bluestone Heights"

2009-06-18T20:38:00.003-04:00

Publicity release received:

Euclid bluestone's years gone by:

360 m White sea sand makes blue sandstone;
sea bottom lifts to Bluestone Heights
1.2 m Glaciers melt/clouds burst; scratches to
gullies/ravines to gorges
10 k Forest paths lead Natives along escarpments/across brooks
150 Yankees turn paths to roads/brooks to sewers
90 Suburbanites swarm the Heights
5 Legacy Village

Dr. Roy Larick climbs the Bluestone Heights
2:00 PM, Wednesday, June 24, 2009
UH Public Library, 13866 Cedar Rd
Sponsored by UH Seniors

Part of the Euclid Township Bicentennial Celebration, 1809-2009

FROM THE BACK OF THE HOUSE: Memories of a Steak House Clan

2009-06-13T11:12:00.006-04:00

Press release received:

June 2009 – Broadview Heights’ author G. L. Rockey lets it all hang out in a compelling first person account of Cleveland’s landmark restaurant JIM’S STEAK HOUSE.

Located in the celebrated Cleveland Flats, Jim’s Steak House was the place to go for people from Cleveland to London and beyond. Thousands of patrons from boat captains to movers and shakers celebrated anniversaries, weddings, birthdays, graduations, special memories, and more at JIM'S. While dining on their favorite choice cuts of beef and famous hash browns, they ogled the fabled Cuyahoga River, the Terminal Tower, and giant oar boats easing round Collision Bend.

Adopted into the JIM’S family at an early age, G.L. grew up living in the apartment above JIM’S and witnessed, from the back, top, and front, what some call the “hospitality business.” This is his – often humorous, sometimes poignant, always revealing – story of the clan that was part of Cleveland’s restaurant scene for some sixty years. Beginning with the restaurant’s founding in 1930 by Greek emigrant, James Kerkles; his marriage to much younger Hilda (later to be known as The Queen of the Flats), the story recounts Hilda’s years of nurturing (after James untimely death) a restaurant and her deceased sister’s son, Raymond Rockey. Raymond (Hilda called him “my boy”) was named manager of JIM’S at the age of twenty-three. Thrust onto a restaurant stage, tending his "baby that never grows up,” he, in more ways than one, indulged in the glow of a famous restaurant’s “big time strut and glow.” Amid the JIM’S family ups and downs, the backdrop for the story is the JIM’S building–moved, remodeled, finally located at 1800 Scranton Road in Cleveland’s Flats–it housed both business and family with the clan living upstairs and the business flourishing downstairs. After Hilda death, Ray dumped into a sea of money and booze, some twenty years later, the empire depleted, Ray died. A failed stab at keeping the neglected restaurant open, less than two years later Jim’s Steak House closed its doors forever.

Inserted throughout the narrative are photographs, newspaper articles, and illustrations that verify and chronicle a colorful chunk of Cleveland’s local history and culture. No small potatoes, Cleveland author Les Roberts' detective Milan Jacovich has a fictional office next to JIM’S. In real life, Roberts hung out at JIM’S and has written an introduction to this story.

G. L. is the author of three novels: The Journalist, Time&Chance, and Truths of the Heart. Also an anthology, Bats in the Belfry, Bells in the Attic - www.glrockey.com From the Back of the House published by Heritage Books 1-800-876-6103 - www.HeritageBooks.com - Info@HeritageBooks.com

[BILL: This was my parents' favorite restaurant and they celebrated all their anniversaries there.]

Reforming Cleveland's tax assessments after 1910

2009-06-10T21:05:00.003-04:00

I'm researching an aspect of Mayor Tom L. Johnson's Progressive reforms -- land valuation -- that doesn't get as much notice as other aspects, but I lack an understanding of the wider context against which these reforms can be understood.

One of Johnson's lieutenants, Frederic C. Howe, was instrumental in bringing William A. Somers to Cleveland from his position in the New York City office of Taxation, where he'd developed an equitable method of determining the fair assessment values of land, which was called the Somers Unit System. The idea was to reform the practice of assessing land values by instituting an open, "scientific" process of community participation to arrive at the unit value of land on each and every block in the city. The unit was a standard parcel, one hundred feet deep and one foot wide, from the value of which all actual parcels could be calculated.

He teamed up with John A. Zangerle and others and in 1910 issued the results of their labors, the First Quadrennial Assessment of Real Property in the City of Cleveland, which explained the system and displayed all the arrived-at valuations in a series of City maps. Thereafter Zangerle was elected Cuyahoga County Auditor and spent several decades applying the Somers/Zangerle system to the County's Assessment, producing similar atlases of land valuation maps in 1931, 1937 and 1946, under the title The Princples of Land and Building Appraisals as Scientifically Applied in Cuyahoga County.

While the details of this system are well-chronicled in these four atlases and various other publications of the time, I'm not clear about what system preceded it that needed to be reformed. I gather than it was an informal series of estimates by ward representatives that was compiled into the overall assessment for the period, but I haven't seen that documented. Nor have I really grasped the influence of their system in later years, as the process of assessing land for taxation become more codified and applied statewide.

Anniversary celebration at Pilgrim Church

2009-06-07T16:46:00.005-04:00

Notice received:

On July 11, 2009, at 10:30 a.m., Pilgrim Church will be celebrating its 150th year Celebration with a special presentation at this important Tremont church that is free and open to the public. Church member, Dale H. Smith, a Restorationist, Designer and Victorian era specialist will be presenting " A Gem in the City: Architecture and Design at Pilgrim Church". For more information, contact Kathy DeJohn, 150th Birthday Celebration Committee, Pilgrim Congregational United Church of Christ, at kathy4dj@yahoo.com, or 440-725-2700.

Later, more information provided:
"A Gem In The City: Architecture of Pilgrim Church" Saturday morning, July 11 at 10:30 am. Did you know Pilgrim Church was featured in the Paris Exposition of 1895? Did you know it won a prize for innovative ecclesiastical architecture? The award recognized the building’s combination of religious use and community service in highly flexible use of space. Experience a slide illustrated talk by noted Victorian era specialist and interior designer Dale Smith. Explore early 19th century influences on the architecture and design of Pilgrim’s original and current buildings. Smith will focus on the Romanesque Revival style of the 1894 building and discuss examples of other Cleveland structures in this style, well represented in the church's Tremont (west/ central city of Cleveland) neighborhood. Learn about the work of the architect, Sidney R. Badgley, and other Cleveland buildings he designed. The church reflects the late Victorian affection for combining the styles of the world in its buildings. Look for possible early Christian, Moorish & Islamic influences, and see innovative uses of the English & American Arts Crafts style. The lecture will be held in the church's dramatic sanctuary where you will see first hand many of the decorative elements discussed.

Henry George and Tom L. Johnson this summer

2009-06-05T20:44:00.004-04:00

Early this August, the Council of Georgist Organizations will be convening in Cleveland to continue studying the life and philosophy of nineteenth century reformer, Henry George and to see Cleveland, the hometown of George's most effective political disciple, Mayor Tom L. Johnson. I knew that Johnson was suddenly converted to George's single tax theories, strove to implement them in Cleveland and is buried near George in Brooklyn, NY, but I didn't know that our statue of TLJ, on Public Square, portrays him holding a copy of George's book, Progress and Poverty. [Disclosure: I'm presenting at that conference]

Carnegie Medical Building in 1937

2009-05-26T16:47:00.004-04:00

I just came across this reference to the Carnegie Medical Building in a 1937 appraisal manual. We know it now as the Ohio College of Podiatric Medicine Building, and the Cleveland Clinic is planning to demolish it eventually. Here's a more recent photo from the Cleveland Memory Project.

Review: Historic Photos of Clevland

2009-05-20T13:54:00.009-04:00

Books of historic photographs have become popular in recent years, taking advantage of digital production techniques that have made it possible for individuals and small publishers to issue books of images on different cities and specialized topics. Arcadia Press has worked their own formula of slim paperback collection of pictures selected and captioned by local authors and now has hundreds of titles in its Images of America series, including dozens on greater Cleveland topics. Local resident George Cormack has brought forth three volumes in his excellent Memories of a Lifetime series, as well as one on Municipal Stadium and a number of calendars over the years, all based primarily on our Cleveland Press Collection holdings at Cleveland State. And from San Diego, Thunder Bay Press has been issuing a line of books comparing historic images of different cities with current views of the same area. Here John J. Grabowski and Diane Ewart Grabowski produced their attractive book in this series, Cleveland Then and Now (2002).

Another press, Turner Publishing Company of Nashville Tennessee, has sent me a copy of their 2007 addition to a line of urban photography books they’ve been issuing nationally, in exchange for a review here in my Cleveland History Blog. Titled Historic Photos of Cleveland, it was compiled and captioned by Ronald L. Burdick and Margaret L. Baughman, from the substantial collections they oversee at the Cleveland Public Library’s main branch downtown, plus a few from the Library of Congress.

Historic Photos of Cleveland is a handsome hard-cover work of 190 black and white photos over 204 pages with a dust jacket. It is organized into four main chapters, each representing a different period in the city’s history. Each chapter has a page of introductory text, followed by a collection of images from that era with a couple of sentences of captioning. In lieu of an index, the book finishes with a listing of all the photos by title, source and page number.

The chapters cover “Village to City (1850-1869),” “Cleveland’s ‘Golden Era’ (1870-1929),” “Economic Growth, the Great Depression, and World War II (1930-1949),” and “The City Deals with Adversity (1950-1979).” I like the divisions of Cleveland’s history they use for the table of contents as they seem logical, although the “Golden Era” chapter was several times the length of the others and might have been further divided.

The authors didn’t explain why this chapter was so long, but then they didn’t explain the reasons for a number of things about their work, especially including what their selection criteria was overall and why they only used photo from their own holdings, augmented by the Library of Congress, which limitations weren’t hinted at in the introduction. They also failed to identify the photographers, where known, which disappointed me. There were also a number of apparent issues with some of the photos – details taken from panoramas, or shots that were touched up, or images that were originally one of a stereoview pair – that I expected to be pointed out, but weren’t. Perhaps they were restrained by the publisher from going into some of these details, but it was a detraction to note them and not have them explained.

Those academic quibbles aside, there’s a lot to like in this book. It started right out with a timely shot of the Ameritrust Bank’s tower by Marcel Breuer, which continues to be in the news as the County fumbles with owning it. Their shots often show how polluted the city was in its heyday, something we tend to forget as we pine for our industrial greatness, and they portrayed the forgotten but significant edge city that once existed at East 105th and Euclid Avenue. There is a nice shot of Cleveland’s famous photographer, Margaret Bourke-White. A couple of fires got interesting treatment, including a Canadian forest fire that darkened Cleveland that I’d never heard about and an unfamiliar view of one of the Cuyahoga’s many fires.

I have seen many thousands of photographs of Cleveland in my 16 years’ association with the Cleveland Press Collection, but was nevertheless surprised and impressed by what I found here. Historic Photos of Cleveland is a valuable addition to the collections of Cleveland photography and I recommend it highly as perhaps the best of the genre.

It is available through local bookstores and Amazon.com.

For other reviews, see the Cool History of Cleveland Blog, and Sandy's Cleveland Blog,

Earl Gurney Mead, Cleveland map maker

2009-04-29T16:20:00.008-04:00

A dozen years ago, while working on a historic Cleveland maps project at the Western Reserve Historical Society Library, I encountered the name Earl Gurney Mead on a series of interesting, large blueprint maps from the early 1960s. These maps showed the Western Reserve region at four different periods: 1) "The Ohio Western Reserve, 1800-1850, in the Log Cabin and Canal Days," 2) "The Ohio Western Reserve, 1800-1850, in the Railroad and Horse-and-Buggy Days," 3) "The Ohio Western Reserve, 1900-1850, in the Interurban, Movie, Radio and Auto Times, and 4) "The Ohio Western Reserve, 1950-2000, in the TV, Nuclear, Jet and Space Age." They varied slightly in size around 36 inches by 50 inches and were drawn to a scale of 1 inch equaling 2-1/2 miles. Besides being created by a blueprint process, what is notable about these maps is how Mr. Mead characterized the Western Reserve in each of his half-century eras and how he covered large portions of the faces of the maps with blocks of text interpreting and explaining his views. The whole effect was rather quaint and the maps may have had more appeal as decorating curiosities than traditional maps, although he went to some trouble to portray what he did provide accurately. In addition to these four titles, he also created similar maps about Ohio, the U.S. and two areas in eastern Cleveland.

This morning I attended a meeting at the Shaker Historical Society and discovered that they have quite a bit of information about Mr. Mead. In addition to having many of his maps, they also have his papers, including a bound set of his handwritten letters. I have not yet read these letters, but just examining the bundle makes me eager to look more carefully, as he was on the drafting staff of the Van Sweringen companies and was actively associated with some real estate and railroad projects I care very much about. He was a young man during the early days of Shaker Heights and, according to the Cleveland Necrology File, died in 1970, but until today I've known very little about this memorable cartographer and his unusual maps. Here is a list of ten maps by him.

Public art to identify Cleveland's past and neighborhoods

2009-04-18T09:30:00.003-04:00

Last summer I went to New York on business and while touring Manhattan, I noticed that several districts had iconic art pieces, representing their function and/or their history. The large black bull of Wall Street is the best known example, but I also saw a oversized spool of thread and needle sculpture in the garment district and several other neighborhoods had site-specific art. I say this because recently I was looking at photographs of Playhouse Square and despite the prominence of the theater marquees, historic black-and-white shots of the whole block don't really dramatically capture the idea of what is going on there (though maybe modern color ones do better). The marquees are surprisingly hard to detect against the background of the large buildings. Consequently, I'm imagining some sort of public art (Janus masks?) hanging suspended over Euclid Avenue at East 14th, as a means of announcing the location of the theaters from many blocks either way up Euclid.

That Manhattan trip was to talk to a library group out on Long Island and I started off telling them I was there to rescue some native Clevelanders who'd been captured by New York and take them home. One was John D. Rockefeller, another was Superman, and the third was Hart Crane, who while probably not a native, nevertheless probably started writing "The Bridge" while looking at the Detroit-Superior Bridge, not the Brooklyn Bridge as it became later. Then last week, looking at the opening credits of the movie "Trading Places" I saw a montage of shots of Philadelphia neighborhoods and sculptures. A big one of Ben Franklin operating his printing press, the Rocky Balboa statue on the steps of the art museum, etc. All this tells me that we need to do more about our favorite sons and daughters than putting them in chairs in parks (Hanna and Johnson). I'd love to see a dynamic Superman statue somewhere* (I realize that this has been proposed before) and one of crafty JDR, probably down by the river where the oil business started, although several other places around town are associated with him. Margaret Bourke-White and Garrett Morgan are a couple other names that come to readily to mind. Perhaps outdoor sculptures of people is passé, artistically-speaking, but the city needs something besides some of the abstract sculptures I see around that could be explaining more about Cleveland's history and operations.

* (Perhaps a spot along Euclid Avenue on the CSU campus would be a better spot for Superman than Playhouse Square, as it would be a better fit with the student population and would symbolize success though personal effort.)

Tour the St. Colman & St. Stephen Churches

2009-04-09T16:31:00.003-04:00

In light of the pending closure of many of the region's Roman Catholic churches, tours of several of the most significant ones are being organized by the Ohio and Erie Chapter of the Institute of Classical Architecture & Classical America.

On April 18, meet us for the first tour at St. Colman Church at 10 a.m.; the second tour begins at 11:30 a.m. at St. Stephen Church. You are welcome to one or both. RSVP appreciated at ohio@classicist.org or by calling 216 631 0557. The event flyer is HERE.

Architectural historian Tim Barrett, who described St. Colman and St. Stephen as “the two most important church interiors in Cleveland”, will lead the tours. These two churches went through the diocese-wide reorganization process as part of the same cluster. St. Stephen is to stay open and St. Colman is to be closed. The tours promise to be an enriching experience to all interested in architecture, historic preservation and local history.

The Sacred Architecture Tours will continue over the next few months to view and record architecturally significant interiors of Cleveland's Catholic Churches before they are permanently closed and dismantled. Look for the next tour announcement in your email soon.

The tours are free of charge. Architects can earn Continuing Education Credits (1 HSW unit per church). Please see attached flyer for details.

The Institute of Classical Architecture & Classical America, Inc. is a non-profit organization dedicated to Classical Architecture and the allied arts. It provides a broad array of educational opportunities to students, patrons, architects and artists. The Ohio and Erie Chapter of the ICA& CA organizes these tours. It has its headquarters in Cleveland and includes all of Ohio, and the cities of Buffalo, Pittsburg, and Detroit. You can find out more at www.classicist.org.

John Brown symposium in Hudson

2009-04-06T14:39:00.000-04:00

The Hudson Library and Historical Society will host a symposium on the life of noted American abolitionist John Brown on May 2nd, 2009 at 1:00 pm. This program marks the 150th anniversary of Brown’s unsuccessful raid on the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. John Brown, who grew up in Hudson, was one of the most controversial figures of the 19th century. His advocacy and active participation in extreme abolitionist activities in Kansas and later at Harper’s Ferry earned him a pivotal place in American history. Many historians believe the Harper’s Ferry incident escalated tensions between the North and South, ultimately leading to the American Civil War.

The symposium will feature presentations by Brown scholars as well as a question and answer session for the public. Moderating the panel is Dr. Kenneth E. Davison, Emeritus Professor of History and American Studies at Heidelberg University and author of the prize-winning biography, The Presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes.

Panelists include Professors Paul Finkelman, David S. Reynolds and Louis A. DeCaro. Professor Finkelman is the President William McKinley Distinguished Professor of Law and Public Policy at the Government Law Center at Albany Law School in Albany, New York. He is the co-editor of Terrible Swift Sword : The Legacy of John Brown. Professor Finkelman has published widely a number of scholarly journals and his essays have appeared in publications including the New York Times and USA Today.

David S. Reynolds in Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His books include: John Brown, Abolitionist, winner of the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award; Walt Whitman’s America, winner of the Bancroft Prize; the Ambassador Book Prize and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Beneath the American Renaissance, winner of the Christian Gauss Award from the Phi Beta Kappa Society.

Louis A. DeCaro, Jr. is Assistant Professor of History and Theology at Alliance Theological Seminary in New York City. DeCaro’s works on Brown include: John Brown – the Cost of Freedom; and ‘Fire from the Midst of You’: A Religious Life of John Brown. He also contributed to The Afterlife of John Brown, edited by Eldrid Herrington and Andrew Taylor.

Library Director and Curator E. Leslie Polott is “delighted to bring these noted Brown scholars to Hudson to commemorate this important period in American History. The Hudson Library and Historical Society is especially pleased to do this since its Archives contain one of the most significant Brown research collections in the nation.”
Following the panel discussion the Library will host a book signing and dessert reception. This program is free to the public but registration is required. Please contact the Reference Department at 330.653.6658 extension 1010 or askus@hudson.lib.oh.us. For more information visit our website at www.hudsonlibrary.org.

William James Barrow, paper preservation pioneer

2009-04-04T20:40:00.005-04:00

I was just asked if I'm related to William James Barrow, a pioneer in research into paper preservation, and that reminds me of a story. Back in the Sixties I was attending Bowling Green State University and wondering about family genealogy. I went to the public library and checked some of their resources, finding a William James Barrow listed. I got really excited, as that was my father' name, until I saw that it was some fellow in Virginia who studied paper acidification. Boooring, I decided. This was the Sixties, remember, and everything had to be relevant to Saving the World, not old paper, so I rejected that as something I'd ever care about. Now, of course, I'm Special Collections Librarian at the Cleveland State University Library, and very much concerned with old paper preservation. This is one of all too many examples of how I should have kept my mouth shut in my youth, as I'm eating those words today.

Did Cleveland have a Fleet Street?

2009-03-31T16:21:00.001-04:00

By which I mean, were there places in Cleveland that designated where a particular industry was situated, or a historic function took place, or are just intriguing? In this case, the city's newspaper row was more on Rockwell, but we never called it so.

Looking more generally, there have been places that have funky names that weren't the formal designation, but perhaps became so when the city later created planning districts and development zones. The Flats comes immediately to mind, but there's also ethnic neighborhood names like Little Italy, ritzy place-names like Millionaire's Row, and modified street names like Short Vincent.

Cleveland isn't old enough to have mysterious designations from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, like Boston or New York (much less even earlier ones in London), but am I missing any historic place-names that aren't already hard-wired into the fabric and consciousness of the city, like Ohio City, but still have some ancient resonances?

Anything come to mind? I'd like Cleveland Memory to have something useful on each of these historic place-names we identify.

The Hidden City Revealed: A Walking Tour (1988)

2009-03-20T14:57:00.008-04:00

When I first returned to Cleveland, in 1989, I became aware of a recent project called "The Hidden City Revealed," which seemed to be an archeological study of the Downtown and Flats districts of Cleveland. I just came across the map/brochure for it and see that it was more of a walking tour of early sites in Cleveland, created in 1988 by the Committee for Public Art, with the participation of David S. Brose, Robert A. Wheeler and a host of co-sponsors. Here's how the brochure described the project:

"The Hidden City Revealed is a unique walking tour which directs you to artifacts and historic sites that were an important part of the growth of Cleveland's first neighborhoods. This walking tour is not one of signs and words, names, dates and places, nor does it identify empty space where something once existed. Instead you will encounter actual physical evidence of the past and be able to see how history relates to the present day life of the city.

The twenty sites on this tour span a time period from Moses Cleaveland's first survey of what was to become the City of Cleveland, to the radical changes imposed upon the cityscape by the dominance of the automobile. Identification and selection of the Hidden City Revealed sites was made by a team of collaborators that included historians, archeologists and designers. Criteria for selection sites included their relative historical and archeological importance , and the visual and/or structural characteristics which give them special interest.

These sites are identified by temporary markers. Over the next two years, teams of artists and designers will be commissioned to design, construct and install permanent markers intended to me more than information plaques. They will also be public works of art. Some of the larger sties will be developed as public open spaces; smaller sites will receive a graphic marker.

If you follow the sites in the order in which they are listed you will traverse the entire district. It is not, however, necessary to follow the sites in sequential order, you may simply encounter them as part of any walk through the District. This list of twenty sites is not meant to be inclusive, but it is hoped that those which have been listed will make you more award of the historic nature of the neighborhood and its many other artifacts of interest."

Like many such historical research projects and exhibits, once it was over it vanished. I don't know if the promised public markers ever materialized, nor whether any still exist, but I'm checking. This tour literature could be recycled and made into a nice web site.

Cleveland's 25 Biggest Moments: 1972-1997

2009-03-20T11:47:00.004-04:00

On the occasion of it's 25th anniversary, the December, 1997, issue of Cleveland Magazine featured an article titled "The 25 Biggest Moments of the Last 25 Years." Here they are, 12 years later. How do they stand up?
1. "The Death of a Great Lake: Too Much Life 'Kills' Lake Erie." (Joe Mackall, 1972)
2. "Playhouse Square Dodges the Wrecking Ball." (William Troy, Spring, 1972)
3. "Mrs. Perk's Bowling Night." (Julie A. Evans, December 13, 1972)
4. "The Mob's Last Stand." (Ned Whelan, October, 1977)
5. "The Blizzard of '78. "(Richard J. Osborn, January 26, 1978)
6. "Busing: Battisti's Disasterous Legacy." (Michael D. Roberts, September, 1978)
7. "A Midnight Duel: Cleveland Defaults." (William Troy, December 15, 1978)
8. "The Shah of Iran Visits the Cleveland Clinic: The City's Greatest Myth." (James M. Wood, October 1979)
9. "Voinovich's Hard Hat Era Begins." (Mary Ann Sharkey, November 12, 1979)
10. "Jackie Presser, Changing of the Guard." (James Neff, July 21, 1981)
11. "The Halle's Tradition Ends." (Lynn Thompson, January 29, 1982)
12. "Stop the Presses (For the Very Last Time)." (Dick Feagler, June 17, 1982)
13. "The Sohio Building Rises, and Becomes the Promise at Public Square." (Shari M. Sweeney, December, 1982)
14. "Dorothy Fuldheim's Final Interview." (Patricia Mote, July 27, 1984)
15. "The Jacobs Brothers Save the Tribe." (Edward J. Walsh, July 2, 1986)
16. "The Drive and The Fumble." (Doug Clarke, January 11, 1987 and January 17, 1988)
17. "George Forbes Lashes Out." (Michael D. Roberts, December 1987)
18. "One Man, One Building: Changing the Flats Forever." [The Powerhouse] (Jeff Hagan, May 23, 1988)
19. "Tower City Center: From Civic Symbol to Glittering Mall." (March 29, 1990)
20. "Time Magazine States the Obvious." [Cleveland Orchestra] (Frank Bentayou, January 10, 1994)
21. "A Gift for Generations: Game Five of the 1995 World Series." (Michael Grant Jaffe, October 26, 1995
22. "Cleveland Rocks - Finally." [Rock Hall] (Lynne Thompson, September 1, 1995)
23. "Model Kidnaps the Browns." (Richard J. Osborne, November 6, 1995)
24. "Cleveland Says Goodbye to Carl Stokes." (Mary Ann Sharkey, April 8, 1996)
25. "Cleveland Stadium's Final Days." (Mark Winegardner, November 25, 1996)

I have my doubts about the importance of the Powerhouse, looking back, but what do you think of this list?

News articles on the Cleveland Union Terminal

2008-05-09T14:55:00.000-04:00

The 80th anniversary of a 16mm film shot by one of the sub-contractors working on the Cleveland Union Terminal project, on May 9, 1928, has occasioned two media stories. This morning the Plain Dealer ran a nice big article on how the film came to be in our hands and then Fox8 News came and recorded a story for the news at 6:00 tonight.

The story is a about how Peggy Tavares came across this rusty old film canister at a swap meet a couple of decades ago and thought it should be preserved someplace. The Internet not being available in those days, it languished in a box at here house until 2004, when she came across it and decided to do some Web research. Finding our big CUT site, she called and offered it to us as a donation. We accepted happily and had the film treated and digitized, where it now can be seen at www.ClevelandMemory.org/film/. That's the gist of the story, but there's an equally interesting backstory about how we received the main CUT Collection from Gerry Adams and Bob Linsey by a similar process.

Where is the Bates mural?

2008-03-23T12:08:00.000-04:00

The Tech Czar reports that he cannot locate the beautiful old mural by Kenneth Bates that formerly graced the walls of the Campus Sweater Company, 3955 Euclid Avenue ("Sixty Good Years and One Damn Beautiful Mural")

Generational Divide?

2008-01-14T17:55:00.000-05:00

During the 2006 Cuyahoga County Fair, we mounted a large exhibit of poster-size images of landmarks in Cleveland's 20th century history. Sort of a greatest hits of Cleveland history for the fairgoers to wander through and enjoy. While manning the exhibit, I got reflecting on these landmarks and wondered whether we aren't witnessing a fundamental difference in the way that generations relate to Cleveland. When I was growing up in Lake County, Cleveland was still the center of my universe. My parents both commuted to work downtown, we did all our early (1950s) shopping in the department stores and as late as the 1960s I was still taking dates to the movie theaters on Euclid Avenue and to Euclid Beach. We watched many locally-produced TV shows and listened to music from local DJs. It didn't matter what part of town my contemporaries and their parents lived in, we all shared those experiences in common. But what I realized at the Fair was that the generations coming of age after 1964 or so were increasingly less likely to share that type of memory and didn't associate with downtown Cleveland as I had. Sure, we all still have the Browns, Indians and Cavs and all still watch locally-produced news shows, but that's about it. Younger generations of suburbanites grew up with the local malls being the focal point of their lives, not downtown. They don't -- I think -- all share the same degree of identification with the core city that those do who grew up in the Fifties or earlier and being from Cleveland is much more a geographical abstraction than it was for us. This has to have ramifications when talking about regionalism and the problems of the central city.

Dedication set for Historical Marker honoring Hudsonite Gustave Henry Grimm

2007-10-02T19:58:00.000-04:00

On October 23rd at 9:30 a.m. the Hudson Library & Historical Society will dedicate an Ohio historical marker commemorating Hudsonite Gustave Henry Grimm. The ceremony will take place at 46 Ravenna Street, Hudson Ohio. The marker will be located on the site where the Evaporator works once stood. Many international maple syrup producers will be in attendance as Mayor William Currin unveils the marker honoring this maple syrup equipment manufacturer. The public is welcomed and encouraged to attend this dedication.

Grimm patented the dropped flue evaporator in 1882 which allowed for faster evaporation of sap into maple syrup. His Champion evaporator was marketed worldwide and propelled his business into becoming the leading manufacturer of maple equipment for well over 100 years. This historic marker honors Grimm’s early involvement and advocacy of the maple industry. “He paved the way for the technology used today to produce maple syrup,” according to Randall Heligmann, a professor of forestry at Ohio State University who works with maple syrup producers.

Administered by the Ohio Historical Society, the historical markers program enables Ohioans to commemorate and celebrate local history and to learn more about the history of our state. Designed to be permanent and highly visible, the historical markers are large cast aluminum signs that tell stories about aspects of Ohio’s history.

Local support for this marker was provided by the Hudson Community Foundation, the North East Ohio Maple Producers, the Hudson Library & Historical Society and the Ohio Historical Society. Research for the marker was done by Gwendolyn Mayer, archivist at the Hudson Library & Historical Society. For more information concerning this event, contact Mayer at 330-653-3358 extension 1017.

Creating Access, Use and Relationships

2007-08-16T22:29:00.000-04:00

Cleveland Memory is at the center of a broad, participatory process locally, making information about the history of Northeastern Ohio available on the Web. There are three general levels to this process: Building, Sharing and Using.

Building is the level where materials are identified, captured and described in Cleveland Memory. It is participatory in the sense that a cross-section of the library staff is working on it, that practicum students from Kent’s library school and volunteers are coming here to learn how to help, that some other institutions in the Greater Cleveland History Digital Library Consortium are learning how to add content remotely to Cleveland Memory and that we aim to extend this method of building Cleveland Memory beyond institutions partners to include individuals who have content or subject expertise to contribute.

Sharing is the level where Cleveland Memory’s siblings at other institutions in the region are working together to provide optimal access to their join holdings through the Ohio’s Heritage Northeast collaboration and other similar projects (perhaps Ohio Memory and/or RailroadHeritage.org). Currently we are only sharing across implementations of CONTENTdm, using Multi-Site Server, but a true Open Archives Initiative implementation would allow us to include partners employing other databases.

Using is the level where we develop the tools to facilitate the access and use of our materials by educators, students, historians, genealogists, the media and the general public. The search and browse functions in CONTENTdm and the various collection home pages we have developed are a beginning, but we should greatly expand this to include more visual, more intuitive and ultimately more interactive interfaces, so that the process of using our information is facilitated and – closing the circle – made the basis for also building our holdings.

While the goal of all this is providing access, – after all, the CSU Library’s mission is “To Connect People and Information” – the key to accomplishing this is the creation of relationships among the residents of the regional community who have a stake in Cleveland Memory, or Ohio’s Heritage Northeast. We don’t only use collaborations to build Cleveland Memory, but also use Cleveland Memory as an excuse to build collaborative relationships. It is the relationships that are ultimately most important to Cleveland State, our partners and the entire NEO region.

At each level there are appropriate technological means to facilitate relationships and participation with the wider community. CONTENTdm’s remote acquisition program and Multi-Site Server are the means for fostering relationships at the Building and Sharing levels, but we very much need to focus on developing similar tools for the Using level. Fortunately they are right at hand in the explosion of new Web2.0 tools, which incorporate ways to empower the user access and use of the materials and turn users into builders. While continuing our current means of growing Cleveland Memory and Ohio’s Heritage Northeast, we must immediately evaluate and incorporate select Web2.0 features like commenting, rating and tagging into our operations. This will facilitate access, use and relationship-building and will insure the success of what we are attempting to accomplish.

"Virtual Cleveland"

2007-03-21T20:11:00.002-04:00

In 1996 I attended a conference in Washington D.C. about providing governmental information over the Internet (using a technology other than the then-new World Wide Web!). When I returned to Cleveland, I began looking up people who'd I'd been told were up on this technology and that led me to a civil engineer in Bay Village, Soren Hansen. We struck up an email correspondence that resulted in over a hundred messages each way before we ever met.

What got us so prolific in our correspondence was the idea we hatched about using the Web to provide access to information about the history of Cleveland and where this could conceivably wind up going someday. We were both enthusiasts of a technology called Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and our vision centered on an on-line, 3D version of a GIS we called "Virtual Cleveland." Virtual Cleveland would allow people to view the city at any point in its history, touring the streets and buildings to see what the city looked like in those days. Each such street and building would be rendered in 3D as a CADD (Computer Assisted Design and Drawing) drawing, built up from a GIS foundation. A GIS is an analytical tool for locating objects in precise locations and performing sophisticated research. This would mean that each object in the virtual model of the city would be scaled accurately and fully connected to all the data about it. Not only could you amuse yourself, touring this virtual environment and examining the city from every angle, but you could also analyze facts about the city, comparing population migrations against housing construction in 1967, for example, or the spread of the streetcar tracks during the nineteenth century. All manner of users could be accommodated, from the academic to the recreational. Historic preservationists could view an earlier representation of a building they were restoring, to see what the features were in those days, while a teenager could drive a virtual tank down Superior Avenue and blow holes in the Old Arcade.

We envisioned the information being inputted by a host of people, connected over the Web and governed by common protocols and standards. It would be a highly-distributed product, existing on no single server. Indeed, the core of Virtual Cleveland would be a network of servers, most of which would be furnishing real-time data from the operations of the government agencies, private corporations and others who, for various reasons, wanted to share some degree of information to achieve their objects or satisfy Public Access laws. People could explore today's Cleveland from afar, checking out potential land purchases, building rentals, convention facilities, sports arenas, and other economic facts. The water, sewer, police, zoning, and other governmental departments would provide basic levels of information (consistent with needs for security), so that a developer could determine what infrastructure was available to sites under consideration. The GCRTA would manage their rapid transit trains in this environment and, in short, the daily operations of the city would be inter-connected in ways that are bound to create synergies unimagined today. It certainly would put Cleveland "on the map" insofar as innovative uses of technology are concerned and would undoubtedly result in economic benefits in both operational savings and new jobs and industries attracted to his platform.

Moses Cleaveland died 200 years ago today

2006-11-16T10:19:00.000-05:00

General Moses Cleaveland, founder of the City of Cleveland, died 200 years ago today, November 16th.

Dr. Walter C. Leedy, Jr., CSU Architectural Historian, dies

2006-11-08T13:09:00.000-05:00

We were all shocked and deeply saddened to learn of the death of Walter Leedy, long-time Professor of Art at Cleveland State and authority on the history and architecture of greater Cleveland. Walter died Tuesday morning, November 8th, after a stroke suffered over the weekend. He was my thesis advisor, a great supporter of Special Collections at CSU, a member of the Schweinfurth Trust at the Cleveland Public Library and a personal friend whose passing we all will lament.

Our condolences go out to his family.

He's well known for his huge postcard collection, which he has generously allowed us to digitize for the Cleveland Memory Project and was the midwife of many collections coming to CSU, including the Wilbur J. & Sarah Ruth Watson Bridge Book Collection and the Cleveland Union Terminal Collection. He recently established a local history endowment fund to benefit Special Collections, which he designed especially to allow contributions from people who didn't have the funds to reach the minimum amounts for such funds.

NEW: Arrangements for Walter Leedy’s funeral and memorial service have been announced. (plus CSU's announcement...) (Plain Dealer obituary...)

Viewing will be Saturday, November 11th, 3:00 to 9:00, and Sunday, November 12th, 2:00 to 8:00 at the Santeiu & Sons Funeral Home, 1139 Inkster Road, Garden City , MI 48135. (734-247-3800). His funeral mass will be at 9:30 a.m. Monday, November 13th (viewing at 9:00), at the Divine Child Church, 25001 Herbert Weier Drive, Dearborn, MI, 48128.

The Cleveland State University memorial will be: Friday, November 17th, starting at 3:30 p.m. with a display of some exhibits, followed by brief remarks by President Schwartz, Steven Litt and a few others from 4:00 to 5:00, in the Fenn Tower Panel Room. Parking will be available in the new Recreation Center garage, off Chester Avenue (eastbound entrance only).

Contributions should go to the “Cleveland Historical Materials Library Endowment” he set up, at the CSU Development Office, 2121 Euclid, MM 209, Cleveland, OH, 44115. There is also a memorial fund at the Cleveland Clinic in his name.