Category: 1930’s

The Great Lakes Exposition. Boxing Cats, Aquadudes and a 90-Pound Sturgeon

Plain Dealer article written by Debbie Snook and run on June 2, 1991

 

THE GREAT LAKES EXPOSITION. BOXING CATS, AQUADUDES AND A 90-POUND STURGEON.

Plain Dealer, The (Cleveland, OH) – Sunday, June 2, 1991

Author: Debbi Snook Plain Dealer Writer: THE PLAIN DEALER


Cleveland: Party town. Tourist mecca. Convention center. The Best Location in the Nation.

 

No kidding, that’s the way it was in 1936 and 1937, when the city played host to the Great Lakes Exposition, a festival to beat all Cleveland festivals. We’re talking World’s Fair caliber here, but with a uniquely Midwestern blend of industrial might, ethnic pride and carnival hootchy-kootchy.

 

For two glorious summers, more than 7 million people passed through turnstiles to the city’s 135-acre lakeside playland. Four million of them came from out of town, many magnetized by Kiwanis-styled conventions and factory-wide excursions. Those from the eight lakes states, producers of 60% of the world’s machine tools, were drawn by ambassadorial fervor.

 

They came by car, bus, trolley, plane, boat – even blimp. They filled hotels to bulging, spilling out into the 25,000 city-inspected rooms in private homes. They spent $70 million and created more than 11,000 jobs. And they went home, city officials hoped, absolutely burping with satisfaction over Cleveland’s biggest party.

 

The success of Chicago’s Century of Progress only a few years earlier had not gone unnoticed. Cleveland, like other cities, was aching from the effects of the Great Depression, perhaps doubly humiliated remembering the manufacturing muscle it once had.

 

So many jobs had been lost here, and the tax base so shriveled, that the city budget had been trimmed to the bone. After one year on the job, Public Safety Director Eliot Ness was still knee-deep in racketeers and police corruption. Some centennial.

 

Clevelanders needed to look up again. An expo plan was hatched, and the city’s business leaders came up with more than $1 million to make it happen. Municipal Stadium was already in place, built only four years earlier, and the federally funded Works Progress Administration would provide the $178,000 and 100 men necessary to create a 3-acre lakeside garden and reflecting pool.

 

After 80 days of additional construction, the exposition sprawled from St. Clair at Cleveland Public Hall, down a half-mile to the Stadium, then east along Lake Erie all the way to East 22nd Street.

 

Out of the rubble of a former dump rose a small city of 201 glowing, curving Art Deco-styled buildings. One writer called it “a city of ivory, a new Baghdad risen in the desert,” when Baghdad still was considered desirably exotic.

 

Visually, the expo was at once soothing and stimulating, a blossoming of curvilinear architecture, Bauhaus towers and geometric lettering. The Sherwin-Williams band shell was a bubble of white, concentric circles; the roof line of the Horticultural Building was stacked like the top three tiers of an ocean liner, and the Court of the Presidents sported a dozen erect silver eagles, each 16 feet high.

 

General Electric sent its Nela Park team, pioneers in fluorescence, to light the expo. They beamed moonlight blue from 70-foot pylons, bathed the band shell in a rainbow, and backlit the Marine Theater with a fan-shaped “aurora borealis” of eight peach-colored searchlights. A 50,000-watt light bulb made its debut after three other cities failed to come up with enough juice to turn it on. Daily, the expo used as much power as the city of Lakewood.

 

An Epcot Center of its time, the expo dazzled with technology, giving Clevelanders their first glimpse of television, a chance to hear their own tape-recorded voices, views of a 125-ton ladle for molten steel and a solar-powered light bulb. Waiting lines snaked out the door.

 

Manufacturers were not shy. Their exhibits ranged in size from Firestone, which sponsored an entire building, to a small booth showing off the latest in electric, pants-pressing gadgetry.

 

The state of Florida erected a small plantation, complete with white mansion and a transplanted grove of fruit-bearing orange trees. Inside were tropical birds, fish and bimonthly shipments of grapefruit and kumquats. Just in case a visitor had a hard time getting in the mood, atomizers regularly spritzed the interior with essence of orange blossom.

 

The popular entertainment of the mid-1930s was big-band jazz and exotic musicals. Shirley Temple and Fred Astaire were box-office royalty, and Americans spent 4 hours a day listening to the radio. Manufacturers introduced nylon stockings, falsies and Spam.

 

Expo entertainment was a microcosm of the times, highbrow and lowbrow.

 

Eighty members of the Cleveland Orchestra moonlighted to form the Great Lakes Orchestra. The Cleveland Museum of Art set aside its second floor for massive exhibits of European and American masterpieces. And rose growers galore amassed 10,000 blooms for a two-week display at the expo gardens.

 

The biggest draw was Billy Rose’s Aquacade, a 160-foot stage that floated out from the lakeshore and featured 200 singers, dancers and swimmers, dubbed Aquagals and Aquadudes. Many were local high school students hired to create an elaborately dressed chorus for daily performances by Johnny (Tarzan) Weissmuller, former Olympian Eleanor Holm and an occasional gunboat.

 

The Aquacade’s 5,000 seats were often filled, half with stageside diners. More than 30 out-of-town theater critics showed up to review the watery musical, and Paramount Pictures adopted a similar staging for its 1938 Jack Benny film, “Artists and Models Abroad.” Rose sued, charging plagiarism.

 

Cleveland’s 25% foreign-born population flourished in the “Streets of the World” exhibit, setting up cafes and gift shops in 40 replicas of ethnic homes. The Cleveland News ran a “big family” contest for each nationality, and invited winners to chow down at the cafe of their choice.

 

Public Hall became, temporarily, the largest radio studio in the world, with 13,000 seats for several live national broadcasts.

 

The rest ranged somewhere between the everyday and the fantastical, between Victorian innocence and dance hall sleaze. Expo-goers saw snake shows, a submarine, preserved human embryos, car-driving monkeys and boxing cats – complete with satin jackets, mini boxing gloves and a third-round knockdown.

 

There were 42-minute Shakespearean plays, a midget circus, singing cotton pickers, a working blast furnace, a 4,000-pound aerial bomb and a working farm. Also, Chinese walking fish, a Matterhorn replica, sneezing comic Hildegarde Halliday, a working oil refinery, Lincoln’s deathbed, eight 260-pound ballerinas and Sammy, the 90-pound sturgeon.

 

Lives were changed by the expo. Rose married Holm after his divorce from Fanny Brice. Eight-foot, four-inch Alfred Tomaine, “The Tallest Man in the World,” married Jeanie Weeks, “The Legless Girl.” Florida exhibit worker “Whistling” Willie Williams went on “Major Bowes’ Amateur Hour” and wished for a tub and a set of spats. He got laughs, four tubs and “more spats than he could ever use.”

 

Not all expo times were good. Glenn and Karlena Stewart of East 79th Street charged the owners of the dinner ship SS Moses Cleaveland with racial discrimination, claiming they were refused service. A group of upstate New York Indians sought help from the U.S. attorney when they were refused their final week’s pay.

 

Twenty-one-inch tall Inez Del Rio, 17, tripped and fell off the stage during a dance number and cracked her head on the pavement. Fire swallower Dan Nagyfy was admitted to St. Luke’s Hospital, suffering from chemical poisoning.

 

Last but not least, redheaded fan dancer Toto Leverne threw herself off the East 9th Street Pier, despondent over accusations that she was amoral. The event happened on the same day the French Casino’s press agent failed to persuade Cleveland police to raid the joint. News cameramen just happened to be there when Leverne, dripping wet and half-clad, was fished out of Lake Erie and shipped off for a brief stay at the hospital.

 

Some expo visitors arrived famous. Singer Rudy Vallee noshed on chicken livers and flirted with Belgian dancers. President Franklin D. Roosevelt visited twice, his wife, Eleanor, making a beeline for the gardens. Photographer Margaret Bourke-White returned home to capture the expo on film.

 

Others on the celebrity list included industrialists Harvey Firestone and Henry Ford (arriving on his own train), painter Maxfield Parrish and entertainers Eddie Cantor, Ed Wynn, Kate Smith, Wallace Beery and Irene Rich.

 

No wonder the expo’s final night, September 26, 1937, drew thousands to hold hands, sing “Auld Lang Syne” and shed a few tears. Although private investors didn’t get all their money back, the expo was roundly declared a success.

 

Some wanted it to continue, but most of the buildings were not built to last, and the city, still hard pressed to feed the poor and keep its hospital in operation, had most of them demolished.

 

The last structure, the Horticultural Building, burned in 1941. Only the gardens remain, renamed for landscape architect Donald Gray. Some memorabilia exists at the Western Reserve Historical Society and in the hands of a few collectors.

 

The Great Lakes Exposition occurred nearly 55 years ago, and the percentage of Clevelanders who remember it grows smaller. But its impact back then was potent.

 

“Cleveland finally gave ’em something to talk about besides municipal woe,” wrote newspaperman Roelif Loveland.

 

The city hasn’t partied as hard since.

Depression Derailed Van Sweringen Express

Plain Dealer article published on June 2, 1996

DEPRESSION DERAILED VAN SWERINGEN EXPRESS

Those two masters of the game of real estate, the Van Sweringen brothers of Cleveland, had just made their greatest coup, winning a referendum in 1919 that gave them development rights for their Union Terminal complex on the southwest corner of Public Square. 

Against all odds and seeming common sense, they had first overpaid for the old Shaker North Union Colony acreage; then, in order to make the area accessible to future home buyers, acquired the Nickle Plate Railroad, 539 miles long, to get a vital two miles for their own transit line over its right-of-way from their Shaker Village development to downtown Cleveland. Now, the final piece in the jigsaw puzzle was in place, and the work started, work that would take 11 years and $200 million. 

By 1920, 35 acres of historic old Cleveland were being cleared west from Public Square down the hill to the river. Something was gained and something was lost. Squalid, disease-ridden hovels fell to the wrecker’s ball; so did some landmark old inns and restaurants. Fifteen thousand people were displaced from their homes – as rundown and riddled with crime as the area was, it was home to them. 

The crowning jewel of the complex was the 52-story Terminal Tower; next to it was Higbee’s Department Store; behind it was a brand-new street with two more high-rise office buildings. But underneath the tower was what it was all about, because here all the major railroads, except the Pennsylvania converged. This was a time when railroads seemed all-powerful, the industry that legendary robber barons like Jay Gould, Commodore Vanderbilt, and Leland Stanford had made part of the American industrial fabric. Nobody could have foreseen the end of their dominance of passenger travel within a relatively few years. 

As for Shaker Village, that exclusive community had succeeded beyond even the Van Sweringen brothers’ wildest dreams! They had added an average of 300 new, expensive homes each year from 1919 to 1929, and the population had gone from 1,700 to 15,500 in the same time. In 1931, it became a city and changed its name to Shaker Heights. 

And those 1,366 acres of Shaker land that the Van Sweringens had bought from a Buffalo syndicate for $1 million was now valued at $80 million. 

Shaker Village seems to have been among the first planned suburban communities in the country. And its very restrictions were what made it so attractive to so many affluent buyers. In the ’20s and ’30s, you weren’t permitted to buy or resell a house until you got permission from all the neighbors, plus that of the Van Sweringen Co. The latter had to approve the architect, the paint colors, even the realtors! 

There were 99-year deed restrictions that effectively kept out Jews, Catholics and blacks until after World War II. The Van Sweringens persuaded Cleveland’s University School to relocate in Shaker, and they were soon followed by Hathaway Brown and Laurel School. It was typical of Oris O. and Mantis J. Van Sweringen that after acquiring the whole Nickle Plate Railroad, almost as an afterthought, they set about buying 24 more railroads to the tune of 27,000 miles of trackage, and that led to being involved with more than 200 other companies including real estate, traction and coal interests that may have had some $4 billion dollars of assets, according to historian George Condon . 

Had success gone to the heads of the two shy, reclusive bachelors? 

Hardly! On June 28, 1930, Terminal Tower and the Union Terminal were to be dedicated with an immense party of prominent Clevelanders and guests from all over the country. After all, it was the greatest city center complex that had ever been built up to that point. (Rockefeller Center was several years away.) But O.P. and M.J. Van Sweringen weren’t there – they stayed home and listened to the celebration on the radio. 

But not even the Van Sweringens could have foreseen the disaster that the Great Depression would create. Railroad revenues plunged, Shaker real estate was going for a song – if it went at all. And the Van Sweringens were into two local banks for a lot of loans, loans that were called and the collateral lost. Even a huge loan from the J.P. Morgan bank wasn’t enough to bail them out, and at the end of September 1935, at an auction of their assets, several entrepreneurs picked up some $3 billion of assets for a little over $3 million. 

The two local banks who had loaned the Van Sweringens all that money never re-opened their doors, and there are Clevelanders to this day who feel that their collapse, caused by the Van Sweringens’ defaulted loans, was such a devastating financial and psychological blow to this area that only now it has really begun to recover. 

From the Roaring ’20s to the Great Depression, the Van Sweringens led the rise and fall of a great city.

Time and Again from Cleveland Magazine July 2009

Cleveland Magazine article by Michael Roberts
The link is here

Issue Date: July 2009

Time & Again

Our writer travels back to his childhood in Cleveland’s Cedar-Central Apartments, one of America’s first public housing projects.
Michael D. Roberts

My first memory of the city is like old film: faint and grainy. It is hot, that summer of 1942, and I am talking with two black men who are sitting on orange crates on Cedar Avenue. Their smiles are luminous, and the air is pungent with tobacco.

The men comment on my sailor suit and ask if I am going to the lake. I don’t know what a lake is.

My mother, who is holding my hand, explains it to me. We walk to East 30th Street, and she points north to a sky with no horizon. She says the lake is out there. Until I actually saw Lake Erie, I thought lakes existed somewhere in the sky.

I was wearing the sailor suit because we were at war. Everyone in the Cedar-Central Apartments was cloaked in patriotism.

Cedar-Central, which opened in 1937, was one of the first planned public housing projects in the country. We lived at 2830 Cedar Ave., No. 532, for $20 a month. My father was a cook. By government standards, we were considered needy.

The 650 apartments, on 18 acres, were advertised as having airy rooms, tile baths and cross-ventilation. Few domiciles in Cleveland could boast those amenities then, nor the slides, swings and sandboxes that drew us kids away from the heavy traffic on Cedar and Central avenues.

Then-city councilman Ernest J. Bohn, who became a nationally acclaimed public housing expert, conceived of Cedar-Central. Even then, public housing was fraught with debate. One letter to the editor complained of “the folly of conveniences such as iceless refrigerators, hardwood floors and tile and chrome bathroom fixtures for the type of people who will live there.” The comment spoke to the wound the Depression had driven into society, for the people who would live there were mostly middle class.

The project was built on a former slum. Some 200 buildings were razed to make way for it. City councilmen representing black wards had argued in 1935 that the black people displaced for the project would not be allowed to live in the apartments. They demanded an agreement with the federal government to ban segregation in the complex. They lost the vote. When families moved in on Aug. 10, 1937, they were all white.

Preserved in the Ernest J. Bohn collection at Case Western Reserve University are the residents’ monthly newsletters, The Cedar-Centralite. The newsletter was mimeographed, several pages long, with a circulation of 650 and a readership of 2,000. It carried birth and marriage notices, lists of new residents, for-sale ads, recipes, regulations, announcements and admonishments. It urged residents to take turns cleaning the hallways and warned them that shaking mops from the porches only dumped dust on those below.

Indians night baseball, introduced in 1939, caused a disturbance in the apartments. The open windows carried the sound of the game broadcast,
waking those who had to rise early for work.

Surprisingly, most of the newsletter was devoted to fiction, criticism, movie reviews, theater announcements, essays and tips on child behavior. Its writers clearly had taste and education but were jobless or underemployed. One lengthy movie review raved overCitizen Kane and the performance of Orson Welles.

My memories of public housing are full of brightness and fresh smells: the playground, a nearby swimming pool and a library my mother often visited. Everything seemed clean and freshly painted.

I remember the admonishment not to walk on the grass. The complex had been landscaped by Donald Gray, the famous garden designer who had planned many East Side mansion grounds. With so many children living at Cedar-Central and taking short cuts across Gray’s carefully designed lawns, the residents formed a grass committee and sent out patrols of adults skilled in shrill scolding. One misstep and you were reported to your mother, which brought severe condemnation. Your odds were better in a mine field.

Not far off was downtown Cleveland, kinetic with motion and sound, its sidewalks a strolling milieu, buff-colored streetcars clanging at stops. Its odors were savory, metallic, human and heavy.

We moved in sometime in early 1940, when I wasnot yet a year old.My father and mother had met in Cleveland at the Southern Tavern, a nightclub at Carnegie and East 105th Street where he was a cook and she a coat-checker. My father’s low income from his job in the kitchen qualified us for residence at Cedar-Central.

Apartments ranged from two to five rooms and rented for $20.40 to $30.45 a month. In those days, three cans of Campbell’s Soup sold for 25 cents, sirloin steak went for 32 cents a pound and a new car could be had for $500.

The war is my most vivid memory of those years. Women made bandages for the Red Cross, people saved tin cans, and rationing became a part of life. Even children like myself had a book of stamps for food items. I noticed uniformed men and women on Cleveland’s streets, always going somewhere in haste. Teenagers
built model airplanes for the services to use to identify aircraft.

I recall a sense of alarm around the spring of 1942. The newsletters reinforce my memory of my neighbors’ obsessive fear of air raids. Though the Luftwaffe presented little threat to Cedar-Central, civil defense was organized quickly. The wardens, with white helmets and flashlights, patrolled the complex on blackout nights. They expected the apartments to be 99 percent dark within two minutes. In June 1942, the Cedar-Central newsletter proudly announced an almost perfect blackout in the complex.

I remember the blackouts, the wardens’ visits and my heightened awareness of aircraft passing above. My brother, Richard, threw a rubber duck out a window during an air raid drill, causing a warden’s rebuke. I vaguely recall seeing aircraft drop shiny scraps of paper above Cleveland to simulate an attack.

Sometime that year, for reasons long forgotten, a little girl named Shelia hit me in the face with a milk bottle. I still have the scar — my only wound in the war.

Mother used her savings to send Dad to welding school. His new skill made him a valuable worker in the growing defense industry, and his factory job meant our days in Cedar-Central were numbered.

Once residents found work at a decent wage, they had to seek housing on the private market. Commenting on the passing crowd, the newsletter quoted a motto found on an old Euclid Avenue house: “Welcome ever smile[s], and farewell goes out sighing.” I remember my regret when we moved from my first real home sometime in 1943.

Over the years, I have driven past the complex, slowing to identify our building, feeling a flood of melancholy and noting how time has bestowed no favor on its visage. I recall visiting the complex once as a reporter to cover some long-forgotten crime.

I wanted to see the apartment one last time. I called the housing authority and was told the current residents would have to approve the visit. Several weeks later, my request was denied. The occupants preferred their privacy, and I understood. Today, a stranger seeking admission to one’s home can raise suspicion.

Looking back, I benefited greatly from Cedar-Central. Living there gave me a curiosity about the city that probably shaped my vocation as a journalist. For me, the complex had a richness that far exceeded the reason it was built.

Few things are left from the world in which I grew up. People are still in need of Cedar-Central’s shelter. But in other ways, this is a different America: Less neighborly, the solidarity of community fractured by technology. Excess has made us a more remote and indifferent society.

Maybe today, nobody can really go home again.

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