An Exciting Day West of the Cuyahoga
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.)
Labels: Cleveland OH, Detroit-Shoreway, Garden Walk Cleveland, gardens, historic tour, Hough, landscapes, Tremont
Views from the Terminal Tower Observation Deck, Then & Now
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
Labels: aerial views, Cleveland history, Cleveland OH, Cleveland Union Terminal, observation deck, Terminal Tower, then and now
Balancing Developers' Plans and Downtown Preservation
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?Labels: Cleveland history, Cleveland OH, Cleveland Union Terminal, development, Higbee's, planning, preservation, skywalks
The Hat: a novel
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
Labels: Babette Hughes, Cleveland history, Cleveland OH, fiction, historical novel, Jewish Mafia
Ghost Signs on Cleveland Buildings
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.
Labels: Cleveland history, Cleveland OH, ghost signs
Able to Leap Fenn Tower in a Single Bound!
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]
Labels: Cleveland history, Cleveland OH, Fenn College, Joseph Shuster, Superman
The Annals of Cleveland are now on line!!
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.
Labels: Annals of Cleveland, Cleveland history, Cleveland OH, journalism
CTS crane in Hilton Garden Inn
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.
Labels: Carnegie Avenue, Cleveland history, Cleveland OH, Cleveland Transit System, CTS, RTA, streetcars
The Beet Lady is Grandma Rose!
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.
Labels: Cleveland history, Cleveland Memory Project, Cleveland OH, West Side Market
White Collar Hobo: the Travels of Whiting Williams
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.
Labels: business, Cleveland history, Cleveland OH, labor relations, Whiting Williams
Luftwaffe learns dive-bombing in Cleveland
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.
Labels: Cleveland history, Cleveland OH, dive bombers, Ernest Udet, Luftwaffe, National Air Races
Cleveland Disaster Expert John Stark Bellamy Returns
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.
Labels: book, Cleveland history, Cleveland OH, crime, Gray and Company Publishers, John Stark Bellamy
Boxer Johnny Kilbane
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.
Labels: boxing, Cleveland Area History, Cleveland history, Cleveland OH, Irish, Johnny Kilbane
The Problem with Preservation is Poor Planning
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.
Labels: Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland history, Cleveland OH, demolition, Doan's Corners, East 105th and Euclid, Hathaway Brown, Ohio Preservation Council
My favorite painter of Cleveland scenes dies at 94
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.
Labels: Cleveland artist, Cleveland history, Cleveland OH, Martin Linsey
Obituary for Martin Linsey, Cleveland Artist
Received tonight from his family:Obituary for Martin Louis Linsey of Los Lunas, New Mexico
Deceased on March 3, 2010Martin 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...Labels: Cleveland artist, Cleveland history, Cleveland OH, Martin Linsey, obituary
Gerald E. Brookins Collection now at CSU
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.
Labels: Cleveland history, Cleveland OH, Gerald E. Brookins, Harry Christiansen, interurbans, Lakeshore Electric, models, Morris Stone, photographs, streetcars, transit
Searching the Plain Dealer, 1845 to 1969
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!)
Labels: Cleveland history, Cleveland OH, newspapers, Plain Dealer
Christopher Busta-Peck
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.
Labels: Christine Borne, Christopher Busta-Peck, Cleveland history, Cleveland OH, Jessie Owens, Langston Hughes, preservation
A Historic Identity for Northeast Ohio
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?
Labels: Cleveland history, Cleveland OH, identity, Northeast Ohio, Ohio's Heritage NE, regionalism
