Category: City Managers Political Bosses 1920’s

Cleveland Clinic co-founder George Crile helped meet medical challenge of World War I Plain Dealer 4/4/2017

Cleveland Clinic co-founder George Crile helped meet medical challenge of World War I
Plain Dealer 4/4/2017

The link is here

By Brian Albrecht, The Plain Dealer
Email the author | Follow on Twitter
on April 04, 2017 at 6:51 AM, updated April 04, 2017 at 7:04 AM

CLEVELAND, Ohio – Poison gas, machine guns, flame-throwers and rapid-firing artillery were among the new battlefield horrors of World War I, capable of killing and maiming hundreds of thousands of soldiers in a single battle.

Transporting and treating the flood of survivors from this carnage was a nightmare for medical personnel, most of whom who had never handled the type or number of these wounds before.

Cleveland provided a modest but important contribution to confronting this challenge in the form of Dr. George Crile and the Lakeside Unit.

Cleveland’s Dr. George Crile and Lakeside Unit helped treat World War I wounded

Crile, who would later co-found the Cleveland Clinic, was a surgeon at Lakeside Hospital (now University Hospitals) with a keen sense of scientific curiosity and the ability to tackle medical mysteries.

The Lakeside Unit was formed when Myron Herrick, a Clevelander and ambassador to France when World War I broke out, asked Crile to organize a surgical team to come to France to study medical conditions. A team of volunteer surgeons and nurses was recruited from Lakeside Hospital and spent three months in Paris in 1915, treating more than 1,200 war-wounded patients.

Crile, who served in the U.S. Army Medical Corps during the Spanish-American War, anticipated that America might be drawn into World War I, and devised a plan for mobilization of civilian hospitals for overseas military service.

“His theory was that a unit of medical men should be a group that has worked with each other in the civilian world so that they are a package, a unit that can be picked up in the U.S. and moved overseas . . . hit the ground running and not have any training to worry about once they get there,” said Jennifer Nieves, registrar/archivist at the Dittrick Medical History Center at Case Western Reserve University.

More World War I coverage:

Crile worked with American Red Cross officials on a plan creating 25 units at hospitals across the country that would be able to respond and serve overseas under Army supervision if the U.S. went to war.

Nieves, a contributor to the new book “Glimpsing Modernity — Military Medicine in World War I,” said Crile also prompted a review and upgrade of U.S. Army medical equipment.

“They found out that it was so outdated that some of the things were wrapped in newspaper from the Spanish-American War,” she said. “They were still using things as far back as the Civil War.”

Less than a month after America declared war on Germany in April of 2017, the Lakeside Unit — including 27 medical officers, 64 nurses, and 155 enlisted men — was headed back to France. The unit was designated as Base Hospital No. 4 and took over a former British military hospital (No. 9) in Rouen.

The unit would stay nearly two years, its ranks swelling to 42 physicians, 124 nurses and 356 Army enlisted men, treating more than 83,000 patients from both sides of the war in two hospitals.

Crile finds ‘living lab’ overseas

Nieves, curator of a Dittrick exhibit (running May through September) about the 1917 experience of the Lakeside Unit, said Crile was “the perfect person to go over there” with the Lakeside Unit.

“He saw it as a living lab,” and an opportunity to further his research in how shock and traumatic injury affects the entire body, she added.

Crile also brought along a few innovations that he helped develop.

He was among the first to use blood transfusions on patients, and taught the French how to use nitrous oxide as an anesthetic that did not leave patients violently ill (like chloroform and ether) when they regained consciousness after surgery.

Crile designed some of his own surgical clamps and forceps, and while overseas discovered that sea water could be used when saline was in short supply to stabilize patients.

His surgical techniques . . . become critical in treating massive numbers of wounded.

Even before the war, “what makes him so fascinating is because he is unconsciously anticipating a modern application of all his surgical techniques that will become critical in treating massive numbers of wounded, particularly wounds coming out of World War I that had never been seen before,” said James Banks, director of the Crile Archive Center for History Education.

The center is a repository of materials about the famous Cleveland surgeon and World War I, located on the west campus of Cuyahoga Community College in Parma (formerly the site of an Army hospital named for Crile during World War II).

Banks said that in touring battlefront aid stations during the war, he was amazed at the number of soldiers who had died without a mark on them. Suspecting that the blast of exploding artillery shells might have been involved, Crile conducted experiments using stray animals.

Part of Dr. George Crile’s work during World War I involved studying the concussive effect of artillery. (AP photo)”Sure enough, if they were in the direct line of a concussive blast, they were killed,” Banks said.

WWI BRITISH SOLDIERPart of George Crile’s research overseas during World War I was the effects of concussive blasts from artillery shells. (AP photo)

Crile wrote that the “concussive effect of exploding shells . . . shocks the ear, shakes the body and often produces a molecular change in nervous tissue . . . rupturing blood vessels in the central nervous system causing sudden death.”

“The essence of George Crile was his insatiable curiosity,” Banks said. Because of it, “he was able to do a number of remarkable things.”

Banks believes that Crile was in his natural element during the war. “It’s the excitement, it’s the fact that this is a whole laboratory of testing the human spirit, its physiological capabilities,” he said.

In Crile’s study of how shock resulting from traumatic injury could cause death, he developed a rubber suit fitted to patients that could be constricted with a bicycle pump to prevent loss of blood pressure, according to Banks.

“He was the first one to recognize the correlation between shock and the lowering of blood pressure,” Banks said.

Crile recognized the importance of transporting wounded soldiers as quickly as possible to medical treatment to gain the upper hand against infection, a scourge of the front. “What he’s really talking about is the ‘golden hour’ (for treatment) now known in emergency medicine,” Banks said.

WWI ALLIESDr. George Crile recognized the importance of transporting wounded from the front to aid stations or hospitals as quickly as possible to fight infection. (AP Photo)

When a solider got hit, “he’s lying in filth, perhaps for six or seven hours, in the vermin-infested, bacterial-laden soil of a trench or No Man’s Land, so he’s being jostled every time he’s moved, and who knows what’s happening inside his body?” Banks said.Combat stress affected everyone

Crile also studied the effects of stress on the body, resulting from prolonged exposure to combat. The surgeon once wrote: “I have observed soldiers in the trenches show unusual lines of strain upon their faces, giving them the appearance of being from five to ten years older than their actual ages.”

“Crile saw that in any kind of sustained warfare, the body is put through a tremendous amount of physical stress. Which he believed was linked to neurological stress,” Banks said. “What Crile is really, in a sense, stumbling on is the precursor to PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder).”

But Crile and members of the Lakeside Unit weren’t immune to the psychological impact of war.

One unit member, Sgt. Robert Shrimplin, of Cleveland, wrote home: “It surely is pathetic to see these fellows when they come in, covered with mud and blood, and yet with few whimpers or apparent pain.”

Nieves noted that among the unit personnel, “sometimes they found it very difficult because, of course, they saw a lot of young men being severely injured, and there were injuries we had never seen before.”

Nurses were advised “not to become too attached to some of these young men because chances are they’re not going to survive,” Nieves said.

Even Crile “did get emotional when he came back to Cleveland in 1915,” she added. “He did comment in his diary pretty much what you hear soldiers say today – You’re coming back to something to something that’s now foreign to you because you are not ducking and worrying about the next bomb exploding over your head.

“He definitely did feel there was a huge difference between what he had experience and what he was coming home to,” she said.

But, “I think he felt it was sort-of his duty,” she added.  For Crile and the Lakeside Unit, “it was a huge patriotic endeavor.”

Elegant Cleveland: Society magazines offer a look back at the well-to-do in the Roaring ’20s

Elegant Cleveland: Society magazines offer a look back at the well-to-do in the Roaring ’20s

elegant12a.jpg
Clevelanders could get a visual sense of their town’s stylish high life in the 1920s, as in this jazzy ad for a hotel, through the glossy society magazines published in the city. Publications are courtesy of the Western Reserve Historical Society. Lisa DeJong, The Plain Dealer

ELEGANT CLEVELAND / A look back at the finest elements of Cleveland’s stylish history, as shown by its people, architecture, fashion and other cultural touchstones. Go to tinyurl.com /elegantcleve to read other entries.

In the early 20th century, magazines showed Americans who they were. Not just in words, but through new technology that allowed photographs to be crisply reproduced, far more so than newspaper printing allowed.

Time magazine — which was headquartered and published in Cleveland from 1925 to 1927 — was one such periodical, and during that period acquired its iconic red border.

Although Time’s stay in Cleveland was relatively short, the city had been a longtime center for printing, publishing and lithography. And while a number of national magazines were thriving in the 1920s, including such titles as Vanity Fair and Vogue, many Clevelanders could avail themselves of a close-up of this city’s own cafe society.

Of the 80 Northeast Ohio publications in print in the first third of the 20th century, several were devoted purely to Cleveland’s bluebloods, their homes and travels, with photo features of them playing golf or polo at local country clubs or posing in an engagement or bridal portrait.

Among the most successful of such magazines was Cleveland Town Topics, which had gotten its start in 1887 — the same decade in which Cleveland’s social register, the Blue Book, began to be published. Another was the Bystander, which had been named Town and Country Club News in a previous iteration.

Eventually, the Blue Book’s publisher and arbiter of admission, Helen DeKay Townsend, became the society columnist for Town Topics.

Cleveland Town Topics billed itself as “A Weekly Review of Society, Art, and Literature.” At its start, it was edited by a Vienna-born fellow named Felix Rosenberg, who once served in the Confederate army but eventually made his way north to Cleveland.

The publication was first housed in The Arcade but moved later, as many other publications did, to the Caxton Building. The Caxton had specially built floors that were able to support the weight of printing presses.

Charles S. Britton became its longest publisher — for 25 years — until it folded.

The Bystander began as the Town and Country Club News in January 1921. At first, as you might expect, it was very social in its themes and was run largely by a group of female volunteers, among them the eventual historian and author Grace Goulder-Izant. Many of these women were college-educated, often at one of the Seven Sisters colleges, and they undoubtedly welcomed the chance to use their intelligence in a magazine endeavor.

By the late 1920s, though, the publication was nearly as thorough in its variety of coverage as Town Topics. In 1928, the magazine was now officially called the Bystander, and it reinvented itself as “Cleveland’s Pictorial Magazine.”

No one is sure what happened to either Town Topics’ or the Bystander’s business records or subscription lists. You could subscribe to the Bystander for about $3.50 a year or buy a copy at “better newsstands” or at the city’s “finer hotels,” according to information on its masthead — and it was even available at some hotels in New York that Clevelanders favored.

“Hand in hand, these publications speak to the arrival of an upper class in Cleveland,” says historian John Grabowski, who is senior vice president for research and publications at the Western Reserve Historical Society. “And it happened just as photo sepia turned into rotogravure, so suddenly, people are getting images.”

In the city’s newspapers, too, drawings and sketches were giving way to photos, but it was on the coated semigloss paper of the magazines that photographs really popped.

elegant12b.jpgIssues of Cleveland Town Topics and the Bystander: “Hand in hand, these publications speak to the arrival of an upper class in Cleveland,” says historian John Grabowski of the Western Reserve Historical Society. Lisa DeJong, The Plain Dealer  

It all added up to popularity among those in the “right circles,” but no doubt also for those who aspired to such circles.

After all, the 1920s were about nothing so much as reinvention.

As Grabowski says, Town Topics and the Bystander may have been a version of People magazine for the Jazz Age. After all, if housewives in Iowa could read Lucius Beebe’s syndicated column out of New York about the doings at the Stork Club, why wouldn’t Cleveland housewives want to know about the doings at Shaker Heights’ country clubs?

Today, those magazines — which at their peak were said to have had a combined subscription of 10,000 or so — offer a rich vein for historians. The Western Reserve Historical Society has a nearly complete collection of the periodicals, from the 1880s to the early 1930s, and they are relied on by people doing research on family members, interior design or fashions of the time.

“These publications are such a great chronicle of the way that we lived,” says Ann Sindelar, research historian for the historical society’s library. “They offer the type of material you wouldn’t necessarily get from the daily newspapers.”

The dailies, for example, wouldn’t have had the space to report the minutiae of country club golf and tennis matches, played by men and women on separate occasions, or horseback riding, the hunts or yacht club races.

Nor would they have reported in as great a detail on who was departing on the ocean liner Ile de France on her way to Algiers, or that “Mrs. Charles Reed was entertaining her current events club at a luncheon at her home in Clifton Park.”

“These stories tell who you were visiting, who you were entertaining,” says Sindelar. “It’s kind of gossipy and interesting on one level, and almost intrusive on another.”

Yet details like these enrich our knowledge of an era in a way that likely will never be replicated.

The lives of elegant Clevelanders

Browsing through Town Topics and Bystander issues from the 1920s and early ’30s offers some snapshots — gleaned from stories, columns and advertisements — of life in a once-elegant Cleveland.

We can see that some things are not as new as we think they are — getting a colonic is something the occasional Town Topics classified urged — though some options sound a little dangerous.

To wit, the “electric bath” offered at the Hotel Allerton Health Club. (The Allerton still stands, now an apartment building, at East 13th Street and Chester Avenue.) Other services offered there included a “salt glow and sunlight rays” and a “long body massage.”

For a time, the Allerton was trying to draw bachelor businessmen as long-term residents. An illustration of two men in bathrobes, standing in front of a bathroom sink, has one telling the other how a friend brags of living near “everything.” “He must live at The Allerton,” one of the men remarks.

Losing weight, it turns out, was an issue even eight decades ago. An ad for Basy Bread, sold at the Chandler & Rudd Co., states, “Three slices of Basy Bread a day helps reduce your weight nature’s way.”

(Dr. Atkins would have disapproved.)

A circa-1928 ad for the Ohio Bell Telephone Co. features a sketch of a little girl holding a toy, to pitch the idea of placing several phone outlets throughout the house. “When minutes are precious, would you enjoy the convenience of having the telephone brought to you quickly?”

Some of the ads show the dark side of a “glamorous” era. The Neal Institute, at East 82nd Street and Euclid Avenue, was “devoted exclusively to the treatment of alcoholism” but promised “all the refinements of a first class club” and “meals served in rooms on individual trays.”

The Gardner Sanitarium — a photo shows a Victorian house, complete with turret — offered help for “invalids, mild mental, nervous and alcoholic patients” in private, homelike surroundings.

And a company called Corozone, housed in the Hanna Building, was pitching a mechanical method of “revitalizing dead air,” though the ad was hazy on how it created “a most delightful, odorless indoor air.”

Documents of history

When what we now know as the Depression got under way, Town Topics took the position in December 1929 that there was no reason to panic. The magazine’s editors decried those business leaders who, it said, “were losing their heads over . . . imaginary terrible conditions that don’t yet exist.”

The periodical continued its focus on a world where all was well, as may have been the case for many of its readers — for a while.

elegant12c.jpgFor many readers, style was everything, whether one could afford a new Easter hat or merely aspired to that life. Lisa DeJong, The Plain Dealer

Women got plenty of ink, whether for their social and sporting activities or professional work. Town Topics had stories and photos of female judges, such as Lillian Westropp and Mary Grossman, and of Linda Eastman, the nationally acclaimed director of the Cleveland Public Library.

But far more space was devoted to social doings, with a paragraph noting, for example, that “Miss Martha Stecker left Thursday night for the East. She will attend the Yale-Princeton game today in New Haven.” Or an aside that “Mr. and Mrs. Clarence Osborne have closed their home in Chardon and are at 3222 East 140th Street for the winter.” Or again, a mention that a tea was held at the Hunt Club in honor of Miss Jean McMillan’s debut.

Stories of society weddings, though, were an occasion for high specificity of detail.

The wedding of Miss Elizabeth Chisholm to John Rust Chandler listed every type of floral arrangement and fabric featured, from the bride’s white satin gown to the blue hyacinth chiffon worn by the bride’s 14 attendants at the ceremony at Trinity Cathedral. Walter Halle, of department-store fame, was the groom’s best friend and best man.

But amid the stories of parties and teas were sadder tales, many conveyed in obituaries or memorial notices.

A memorial service was held for Myron T. Herrick, the U.S. ambassador to France, also at Trinity Cathedral, at which former Pennsylvania Sen. George Wharton Pepper spoke of Herrick’s valor in the days leading up to the Great War, in 1914 in Paris. Pepper also spoke of Herrick’s charitable work with French soldiers blinded in the war.

Obituaries featured the far less prominent, too, and some are especially heart-rending. One is that of William Fullerton, 20, of Cleveland, who was an honor student at Dartmouth College. He died one February night along with eight Theta Chi fraternity brothers as they slept, “from poisonous fumes from a faulty furnace.”

A reflection of the times

Sadness seemed to pervade the pages as the 1930s wore on. Town Topics had combined with the Bystander in 1930 in a last-ditch effort to save itself and had begun using that name.

By 1933, as the Depression worsened, its page count grew paltry. The single-copy price dropped from 15 cents to 10 cents, and it became a monthly instead of biweekly. Art Deco-style covers in vivid greens or fuchsias turned black-and-white.

Covers began to feature unglamorous daily life — one cover photo was of a steel blast furnace; another was a grim black-and-white shot of pigeons and sparrows scratching for food on a snow-covered Public Square.

Even the stories inside had changed. Now, there was a full-length feature on how the employment provided through the New Deal’s Civil Works Administration fed some 40,000 people in Cuyahoga County. An inside photo showed CWA workers clearing Doan Brook.

Magazines that were 52 pages trickled down to 36. By April 1934, the Bystander printed what was to be its last issue.

There were still dashes of style — an interior design feature showed the sleek Moderne aesthetic of the Pumphrey family’s apartment at Moreland Courts.

But the cover of that issue gives it away, featuring a drawing by Salvatore Liscari that the magazine called “La Nymphia.” It’s a sketch of a sad little girl, looking down at the ground.

It may not have been intentional, but the image conveyed a future with little hope for gladness.

The slice of the world depicted with such joie de vivre in Town Topics and the Bystander for decades was gone, never to return to Cleveland in quite the same way again. Turning back through their pages, however, the ’20s continue to roar.

News researcher Jo Ellen Corrigan contributed to this story.

Jane Edna Hunter from the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History

Jane Edna Hunter from the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History

The link is here

HUNTER, JANE EDNA (HARRIS) – The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History

HUNTER, JANE EDNA (HARRIS) (13 Dec. 1882-17 Jan. 1971), prominent African American social worker, founded the PHILLIS WHEATLEY ASSOCIATION. The daughter of a sharecropper, she was born Jane Edna Harris at Woodburn Farm near Pendleton, SC. She acquired her last name by a brief marriage. Hunter graduated in 1905 as a trained nurse from Hampton Institute, VA, and came to Cleveland, serving in various nursing jobs. She attended Marshall Law School (later Cleveland Marshall Law School of CLEVELAND STATE UNIVERSITY) and passed the Ohio bar examination. Hunter organized the Working Girls Association in 1911 to provide safe living quarters for unmarried African American WOMEN and girls who needed a place of residence. Later that year, the name changed to the Phillis Wheatley Association. The association was modelled by 9 similar institutions throughout the United States. Hunter served as the association’s executive secretary until 1948. Following retirement, she founded the Phillis Wheatley Foundation, a scholarship fund for African American high school graduates. The foundation later established the Jane Edna Hunter Scholarship Fund in her honor. Hunter held honorary degrees from Fisk University, Allen University in Columbia, SC, and Central State University in Wilberforce, Ohio. She founded the Women’s Civic League of Cleveland (1943), belonged to the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF COLORED PEOPLE (NAACP), and served as vice-president and executive committee member of the National Association of Colored Women.

I, Fred Kohler: 40 Years of Cleveland Politics by Nathaniel Howard, Cleveland Plain Dealer Series 1934

Multiple part series that ran in Plain Dealer February 2 through March 14, 1934

Each part is a pdf file, approximately 8mg in size (so be patient)

i-kohler-1-5 (part 1)

i-kohler-6-10 (part 2)

i-kohler-11-15 (part 3)

i-kohler-16-20 (part 4)

i-kohler-21-25 (part 5)

i-kohler-26-30 (part 6)

i-kohler-31-35 (part 7)

i-kohler-36-40 (part 8)

i-kohler-41-43 (part 9)

Four “Influential Race Women” and their Community By Marian Morton

 

 

Jane Edna Hunter, Lethia C. Fleming,

Hazel Mountain Walker, L. Pearl Mitchell

The pdf is here

Four “Influential Race Women” and their Community

By Marian Morton 

In 1939, these “influential race women” were applauded for “their service to the Negro race and its progress”1: Jane Edna Hunter, Lethia C. Fleming, Hazel Mountain Walker, and L. Pearl Mitchell. These ambitious, accomplished women – a social worker, a Republican activist, an educator and actress, and an officer in a local and national civil rights organization – pursued racial progress through institutions and organizations, some black and some racially integrated; through local and national politics, in schools and on stages, through accommodation and confrontation.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Cleveland’s small black population of 5,988 lived in almost all neighborhoods of the city although many blacks lived on the East side. Most remained closer to the bottom than to the top of the economic ladder, but some made small fortunes, and others earned middle-class incomes. By 1930, however, the city’s black population had soared to 71,899,2 swelled by newcomers from the South, fleeing disenfranchisement, rural poverty, and racial segregation enforced by law and by violence. The sheer numbers of this first great migration eroded Cleveland’s “tradition of racial fairness.”3 Clearly defined black neighborhoods developed – most notably the Central area – as blacks were forced, or chose, to live close to one another. Informal exclusion from public and private facilities followed. Compared to other ethnic groups, the economic opportunities of African Americans diminished. Considered unsuited to industry because of their rural background, they were also often excluded from the skilled trades by unions.4

Hunter, Fleming, Walker, and Mitchell watched this enormous influx with dismay and concern. Middle-class by virtue of their education and financial security, these women felt an obligation to help those less fortunate than themselves. The task was enormous: to remedy the history of involuntary servitude in the South and racial prejudice nation-wide, worsened by the trauma of uprooting, the newness of urban life, and growing racial discrimination. Each woman approached this task differently.

“No race of people will do more for you than you are willing to do for yourselves,“5 announced Jane Edna Hunter at a dinner in her honor at the Phillis Wheatley Association (PWA) she had founded two decades earlier. Hunter’s philosophy of black self-help – with significant financial aid from whites – was borrowed from Booker T. Washington, the founder of Tuskegee Institute and the country’s most prominent spokesman for African Americans in the late nineteenth century. Hunter’s autobiography, A Nickel and a Dime, published in 1940, was modeled closely on Washington’s Up from Slavery; both books told the story of the author’s rise from poverty to success with the help of generous white people. Hunter emphasized her own difficulties as an African American woman, recounting her efforts to fend off unwanted advances from men when she worked as a chambermaid and describing the

  1. 1  Lethia C. Fleming, MSS 3525, container 1, folder 1, Western Reserve Historical Society (WRHS), Cleveland, Ohio.
  2. 2  Kenneth L. Kusmer. A Ghetto Takes Shape: Black Cleveland, 1870-1930 (Urbana and Chicago. University of Illinois Press, 1978), 10.
  1. 3  Kusmer, 115.
  2. 4  Kusmer, 87-89.
  3. 5  Cleveland Plain Dealer, June 2, 1933: 12.

1

sexual perils she faced when she arrived in the big city of Cleveland. The PWA was intended to address those problems, providing safe, respectable shelter and job training for young African American women.

Hunter, born in 1882 in South Carolina, arrived in Cleveland in 1905, looking for work as a nurse; she had trained at Hampton Institute, a vocational school modeled after Tuskegee. Six years later, she established the Working Girls Association, a boarding home for young, single black women, similar to the whites-only YWCA. The home was renamed the Phillis Wheatley Association after an African American poet, and in 1927, the association moved into an imposing building, designed by the architectural firm of Hubbel and Benes (also the designers for the Cleveland Museum of Art) on Cedar Road in the heart of the Central neighborhood. Hunter cultivated powerful white allies and patrons including Henry A. Sherwin, founder of the Sherwin Williams Company; Elizabeth Scofield, a trustee of both the PWA and YWCA; and soon-to-be congressman, Republican Frances P. Bolton.

Although the PWA flourished, providing classes, clubs and social activities as well as room and board for dozens of young women, Hunter had her critics in the black community. They charged that the PWA endorsed the principle of racial segregation, was controlled by the wealthy whites on its board of trustees, and specialized in training young black women as domestic servants for white families. To those critics, Hunter responded pragmatically: where else would she get the money to maintain an institution that did so much good for her clients? And what other jobs were available to them? Most of Hunter’s black critics eventually came around.

Hunter also had her enemies. Chief among them was African American entrepreneur, Albert D. Boyd, also known as “Starlight,” described by Hunter as the “procurer for wild, wealthy men; later master of the underworld; and finally, manipulator of the Negro vote for unprincipled politicians.”6 Hunter accused Starlight of being a pimp whose saloons and brothels kept the Central neighborhood – also known as “the Roaring Third”– a center of vice and crime. His accomplice, Hunter claimed, was “Timothy Flagman,” whom her readers recognized as Thomas W. Fleming, the first black elected to Cleveland City Council. Hunter mounted a futile campaign to defeat Fleming in 1919.

Out of necessity or conviction, Hunter cultivated good relationships with the white community. But like her role model Washington, she was not uncritical of the racial status quo. In her autobiography, Hunter pointed out the hypocrisy of whites “from society’s leading families” who encouraged vice in the Roaring Third by patronizing its clubs and dives but who barred blacks from their own “respectable white neighborhoods.”7 She also maintained that separate facilities, such as schools, must be equal: “I am … fully convinced that we cannot make real advancement in our pursuit of education … until Boards of Education provide equal educational facilities under the law.”8 Equal, if separate, would also be the position of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for another decade.

6 Jane Edna Hunter, A Nickel and A Dime: The Autobiography of Jane Edna Hunter, edited by Rhondda Robinson Thomas (Morgantown, W. Va., West Virginia University Press, 2011), 70.
7 Hunter, 112.
8 Hunter, 153.

2

Like Washington, Hunter achieved enormous popular acclaim – with honorary degrees from half a dozen colleges – but at some cost to herself. A candid admirer described her in 1939: “Friend and foe alike admit/ There’s only one Jane/ Peerless in her realm, to wit/ a gem so rare. They say/ ‘We’ll never see her like again.’”9

In the post-World War II era when dreams of racial integration revived, the racial separatism and accommodationism that Hunter had successfully used to promote her cause, and herself, had become outdated. In 1947, she was forced to retire at age 65 by the Cleveland Welfare Federation, which, as a funder of the PWA, had some control over its direction.

Hunter died in 1971. The Phillis Wheatley Association today provides inexpensive housing and programs for children and the elderly.

Despite Hunter’s open animosity to her husband Thomas W. Fleming, Lethia C. Fleming was a charter member of the PWA and in 1933 organized a dinner honoring Hunter. Perhaps Fleming realized that the PWA was a force for good in her own neighborhood; she lived around the corner on E. 40th St. Or perhaps her long career in politics allowed her to overlook personal slights or philosophical disagreements. Like her husband, she believed that politics were the avenue to success for black people.

Like Hunter, Fleming was a southerner, born in Virginia in 1876 and educated at Morristown College in Morristown, Tennessee. She came to Cleveland in 1912 after her marriage. In 1914, Fleming was one of the few black women to march down the streets of Cleveland in the parade of 10,000 male and female supporters of votes for women. Like most blacks of the first decades of the twentieth century who remembered that the party of Abraham Lincoln had freed the slaves, she was a Republican. Republicans had also elected Clevelander John P. Green to the Ohio House of Representatives in 1881 and in 1892, to the Ohio Senate, its first black member. And Republicans had sent George A. Myers, a powerhouse in Cleveland’s black community, to its national convention in 1892, 1896, and 1900.

Fleming staunchly stood by her husband at his trial for bribery in 1929, testifying on his behalf, and after his indictment, she unsuccessfully asked Ohio Governor George White to pardon him. “A power among the women voters of the Third District and a Republican party leader of recognized ability,”10 she was briefly considered for his vacant seat in City Council. (Clevelanders did not elect an African American woman to City Council until 1949 when Jean Murrell Capers was chosen.)

The concentration of African Americans on Cleveland’s East side – in the ghettos created by the first great migration and racial discrimination – made possible the election of other black councilmen who gained patronage and political clout. Their early victories included the integration of the staff at Cleveland City Hospital.11 In 1934, the three African American councilmen persuaded their white colleagues to pass a resolution condemning the exclusion of blacks from the restaurant in the U.S. Capitol.12

Republican political boss Maurice Maschke, a patron of both Boyd and Fleming, assiduously cultivated the black vote, making public appearances at the PWA and other black

9 Lethia C. Fleming, MSS 3625, container 1, folder 1. 10 Cleveland Plain Dealer, February 11, 1929: 6.
11 Kusmer, 273.
12 Cleveland Call and Post, December 8, 1934: 1.

3

institutions. When he died in 1936, the Cleveland Call and Post gave him credit for “getting the Negroes’ feet placed on the first step of the political ladder.”13

Fleming remained active in Republican women’s organizations and managed the local campaigns for Republican presidential candidates in 1928 and 1936. She stayed loyal to the Republican Party long after most blacks switched their political allegiance to the Democrats during the New Deal. In 1953, she was the only black on the nominating committee of the Republican National Committee.

Described as a “tall woman [of] striking appearance,”14 Fleming was a frequent speaker at civic events, popular with all audiences, white and black, male and female. She supported organizations specifically aimed at blacks: the PWA, the Home for Aged Colored People, and the Negro Welfare League, later the Urban League, which had ties to Washington. But she also belonged to the NAACP, one of whose founders was Washington’s rival, W.E.B. DuBois, which was dedicated first and foremost to racial integration.

Fleming worked for the Division of Child Welfare of Cuyahoga County for twenty years and retired in 1951. Ever the politician, she gave this testimony at her retirement: “I will never forget the loving cooperation in which the two races have worked together in this city.”15 Fleming died in 1963.

Hazel Mountain Walker was less diplomatic than Fleming. When asked in 1954 about the school desegregation case, Brown v. Board of Education, then pending before the U.S. Supreme Court, Walker responded: “Abolishing separate schools without abolishing slums and ghettos will not usher in the millennium. We have no Jim Crow schools in Cleveland, but still this school [George Washington Carver Elementary School, where she was principal], and other schools in the Central Area are nearly 90 percent colored because the residents of the area are more colored than white.”16 Walker made her contribution to her race as an educator, an actress, and an activist for racial integration.

Born in Ohio in 1883, Walker received a bachelor’s degree and in 1909 a master’s degree from Western Reserve University; she also graduated with honors from Cleveland School of Law in 1919 but never practiced law. She became the first black principal in the Cleveland public school system in 1936 and the first to rise directly from the classroom to the principal’s office.

She began her teaching career at Mayflower Elementary School in 1909, earning $45 a month 17 and retired in 1958 as principal of George Washington Carver Elementary School.
That was a challenging half-century for Cleveland public schools. In its crowded classrooms, black children from the American South sat next to the white children of Irish, German, Russian, Italian, and Jewish immigrants. Public school teachers and administrators had to teach all of them how to read, write, add, subtract, and live together. Living together remained Walker’s goal throughout her life.

Walker combined the roles of teacher and actress. She was an early member of the Gilpin Players, a theater group initiated in 1920 and sponsored by Karamu House. Founded in

  1. 13  Cleveland Call and Post, November 26, 1936: 6.
  2. 14  Cleveland Plain Dealer, February 10, 1929:8.
  3. 15  Cleveland Plain Dealer, July 21, 1951: 6.
  4. 16  Cleveland Call and Post, February 27, 1954: 1D
  5. 17  Cleveland Plain Dealer, September 1, 1963: 74.

4

1915 as the Playhouse Settlement, Karamu was the creation of Russell and Rowena Jelliffe, who believed that interracial theater would bring interracial understanding. Walker is credited with giving Karamu its name, which in Swahili means “place of joyful meeting.”

She performed at Karamu for more than two decades in plays that revolved around racial themes and plays that did not, in plays that featured Negro dialect and in classical drama. She got rave reviews from the Cleveland Plain Dealer for her performances in Nan Bagby Stephens’ “Roseanne,” a 1930 play by and about blacks, and as the cigarette-smoking Maria in “Porgy,” the play upon which the musical “Porgy and Bess” was based.18 In a 1935 production of “The Soon Bright Day,” Walker’s were the opening lines: “Mornin’ Jesus, and thank yuh Suh for this soon bright day.” The Cleveland Plain Dealer exclaimed that she was “better than she has ever been.” 19

In 1951, in a performance commemorating the 100th anniversary of a woman’s rights convention in Akron, Walker recreated the dramatic speech of the former slave Sojourner Truth, “Ain’t I A Woman?”20 The question was directed to the hostile minister in the audience who maintained that women couldn’t have equal rights because they were weaker than men, to which Truth famously replied: “Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man – when I could get it – and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman?” Walker also performed in Ibsen’s “Ghosts” in 1951 and in 1954 starred in “Member of the Wedding” as Berenice, the cook, counselor, and confidante to the family’s children.

Karamu highlighted the abilities of blacks in a city that had trouble believing in them, and Walker’s performances on Karamu’s stage underscored her own belief that blacks and whites could succeed together.

Walker also pursued interracial progress through politics. She remained active in Republican politics at least through the 1930s. So active in fact that the Cleveland Citizens League complained to the Cleveland School Board in 1932 about her “political activities” while she was teaching at Mayflower Elementary School. 21 The complaints apparently went unheard; Walker continued as precinct leader in the city’s 11th Ward and only three years later, got her path-breaking appointment as principal of Rutherford B. Hayes Elementary School. In 1943, she and L. Pearl Mitchell, “two of Cleveland’s most prominent Negro women,” were appointed to the Cleveland Womanpower Committee, designed to recruit women into war-time industries; “Both women are expected to bring into full focus the problem of integrating Negro women into the city’s many war plants, where, with few exceptions, they have not previously been welcomed.”22

Cleveland’s booming industries during World War II created jobs for a second great migration of blacks to the city. And in the post-war period, Cleveland’s spirit of racial openness revived. City Council, conscious of new black voters, set up a Community Relations Board in 1945 and in 1950 passed fair employment practices legislation.

  1. 18  Cleveland Plain Dealer, February 3, 1930:1; Cleveland Plain Dealer, March 7, 1933: 5.
  2. 19  Cleveland Plain Dealer, November 7, 1935: 17.
  3. 20  Cleveland Plain Dealer, May 24, 1951: 12.
  4. 21  Cleveland Plain Dealer, June 7, 1932: 11.
  5. 22  Cleveland Call and Post, February 6, 1943: 1.

5

Walker remained a public advocate for equal opportunity, frequently speaking at conferences and other civic events. She was honored by Karamu for her long years of service and by the Urban League Guild for her work in public education. By the time of her death in 1980, she had become a symbol of African American success in Cleveland, often cited as proof of black capabilities and/or the city’s racial liberalism.

Although she and Walker often worked together, L. Pearl Mitchell was the more vocal critic of Cleveland’s racial status quo, reflecting the growing strength of the city’s black community during the 1930s and 1940s. Known as “Miss NAACP,” she led the charge for racial integration of the city’s public institutions.

Mitchell was born in 1883. Her father, Samuel J. Mitchell, was president of historically black Wilberforce College in Wilberforce, Ohio. She had roots in Cleveland. Her grandfather escaped slavery and settled in Cleveland; her father grew up in Cleveland before attending Wilberforce himself.

Her first public appearances were with the Gilpin Players at Karamu. In 1930, she was vice-president of the group, and Walker was president; both were in the cast of “Porgy” in 1933. Mitchell’s most noteworthy role, however, was in Jo Sinclair’s “The Long Moment,” which opened in 1950 at the Cleveland Playhouse. The plot revolved around a young black musician who was trying to “pass” as white; Mitchell, light-skinned herself, played his mother. The show got good reviews, but more important, it was the first show at the Playhouse with an interracial cast.

Mitchell worked for two decades at the Juvenile Court until the mid-1940s. Her real vocation, however, was the NAACP. Founded in 1909 by blacks and whites, its goal was the racial integration of all aspects of American life. The Cleveland chapter was established in 1914. During the 1920s it successfully challenged the exclusionary policies of stores, theaters, and public facilities and residential segregation in the new suburbs.

Mitchell’s main target was the public school system. In 1932, Mitchell, then vice- president of the Cleveland NAACP, filed a report with the Cleveland school board maintaining that the school district deliberately created racial segregation: forcing black children to attend Central High School when it was not in their neighborhood, discouraging black girls from attending Jane Addams School and black boys from the Cleveland Trade School, and assigning black teachers to black-only schools.23 In 1939, Mitchell argued that the new Central High School should be built east of E. 55th so that its student body would be more “cosmopolitan” – not entirely black. Hunter publicly disagreed24 and won the argument when the school was built on E. 40th, not far from the PWA in the predominantly black Central neighborhood.

In 1935, Mitchell complained that two new public housing projects would foster racial segregation because one project was designated for blacks and one for whites.25 (In 1961, Mitchell pointed out that all public housing projects had become black “ghettos.”26) In 1946, the NAACP opposed the building of Forest City Hospital in the Glenville neighborhood, intended to be a place where black doctors could practice, on the grounds that it would reinforce the

23 Cleveland Plain Dealer, August 8, 1932: 4.

  1. 24  Cleveland Plain Dealer, September 29, 1938: 8.
  2. 25  Cleveland Plain Dealer, January 32, 1935: 5.
  3. 26  Cleveland Call and Post, February 18, 1961: 4A.

6

racial segregation of existing hospitals. The hospital opened in 1957, its staff and patients became predominantly African American, and it closed in 1978.

Mitchell helped to end the racial segregation of children in the Ohio’s Sailors and Soldiers Orphan Home in Xenia, Ohio. As a member of its board of trustees, she took her case to the public and to state officials in 1958. Echoing the 1954 Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board, which mandated the desegregation of the country’s public school, Mitchell maintained: “It is difficult .. to understand what segregation and separation mean to human souls when you have never experienced it.”27

Mitchell’s other cause was Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, a social service organization founded in 1908 at Howard University. In 1964, Mitchell persuaded the sorority to donate $440,000 to the NAACP. 28 With federal money and initial guidance from Mitchell, the sorority in 1965 established the Women’s Job Corps Center in Cleveland, intending – as had Jane Edna Hunter 60 years earlier – to provide vocational training for women.

When Mitchell died in 1974, memories of her fierce confrontations with public officials had faded. The Cleveland Plain Dealer described her: “a soft-spoken but courageous, determined leader for social equality for minorities and the poor.”29

All four lived to see the civil rights movement gain strength through the 1950s and early 1960s under the leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; they probably heard him speak because he came to Cleveland often. All but Fleming saw the 1967 election of Carl Stokes, the first African American mayor of a big city. In 1976, federal Judge Frank J. Battisti, responding to a brief brought by the NAACP, validated Mitchell’s claim made more than 40 years earlier that the Cleveland School Board intentionally maintained racial segregation in the city’s public schools; he ordered the desegregation of the schools by busing students. Walker lamented that Cleveland’s residential segregation made busing necessary.30

For most of the twentieth century and for most of their lives, Jane Edna Hunter, Lethia C. Fleming, Hazel Mountain Walker, and L. Pearl Mitchell fought the deeply rooted racial inequities of Cleveland. They didn’t win all their battles. But these four “influential race women” did help to create new institutions and organizations and skillfully employed old ones; they enlisted the support of whites and blacks, and perhaps most important, they challenged public officials and private consciences.

  1. 27  Cleveland Call and Post, July 5, 1958: 7A
  2. 28  Cleveland Call and Post, August 29, 1964:1A.
    29 Cleveland Plain Dealer, September 7, 1974; 2-C.
    30 Cleveland Call and Post, October 13, 1979:2-B.

7 

Parks of Cleveland from the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History

Written by Carol Poh Miller

The link is here

PARKS – The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History

PARKS. Not until the 1870s were public funds allocated to establish parks. Cleveland in its early years was surrounded by wilderness, and city leaders saw no urgency to secure parkland beyond the 10-acre PUBLIC SQUARE set aside as early as 1796. By the time they awakened to the need for public open space, areas near the center of the city had long since been appropriated to other uses, and the city was unable to establish parks convenient to the crowded neighborhoods that most needed them. In Sept. 1865 a city council committee was appointed to consider the establishment of public parks. The committee reported that Cleveland was “far behind most cities of its class” and urged the purchase of parkland to accommodate the city’s “great future population.” In 1871, by authority of a new state law, the city’s first Board of Park Commissioners was created. The following year, park commissioners Azariah Everett, O. H. Childs, and John H. Sargent reported that they had spent almost $29,000, principally on improvements to Monumental Park (as Public Square was then known) andFRANKLIN CIRCLE. In 1874 the first park bond issues were sold to finance the purchase and improvement of Lake View Park. Other public parks established by 1880 included MILES PARK, CLIFTON PARK, and Pelton (see LINCOLN PARK) parks–all relatively small parcels.


The lagoon and fountain at Wade Park, ca. 1900. WRHS.

 

JEPTHA H. WADE‘s gift of 64 wooded acres in 1882 formed the first large park area in the city (see WADE PARK). In 1890 park commissioners reported that, in the development of parks, Cleveland stood “at the foot of the list” of cities in the U.S. having populations greater than 200,000. New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit, and Buffalo all had established well-planned park systems that had already resulted in “very material benefits.” The park commissioners were “convinced beyond doubt” that public parks had “passed beyond the domain of luxuries” and cautioned that Cleveland’s excellent natural park sites–among them the Doan Brook Valley, the lakeshore on the west side, and the Big Creek Valley south of Brooklyn Village–should be acquired before development encroached on them and put their purchase out of reach. Upon his death in 1892, WM. J. GORDON bequeathed to the city some 129 acres, already handsomely improved with winding drives and wooded groves. GORDON PARK answered part of the city’s need for parklands, but it also underscored the need for a comparable park on the west side.

In 1893 the state legislature passed a park act granting park boards expanded authority to appropriate parkland and issue bonds. Cleveland appointed a new board of 5 commissioners “to provide for the Forest City a system of parks commensurate with her size and importance.”, The new board–consisting of Chas. H. Bulkley, AMOS TOWNSEND, John F. Pankhurst, Mayor ROBT. BLEE, and City Council President A. J. Michael (soon succeeded by Chas. A. Davidson)–adopted the first general plan for park development in Cleveland and presided over the system’s most critical decade. The plan’s principal feature was the location of a large park on the outskirts of the city in each of 7 main sections. These would be connected by broad paved boulevards encircling the city. The board hired Boston landscape architect Ernest W. Bowditch to carry out the plan and issued $800,000 in bonds.

Acquisition of parkland accelerated dramatically. In 1894 the city purchased a large portion of the Doan Brook Valley between Gordon and Wade parks, the first 89 acres of EDGEWATER PARK, and 81 acres of Brooklyn Park (later BROOKSIDE RESERVATION). The same year, park commissioners decided on 3 farms located between Turney Rd. and Broadway as the site for a south side park (see GARFIELD PARK RESERVATION). In 1895 the Shaker Hts. Land Co. donated 279 acres embracing the upper Doan Brook Valley and the SHAKER LAKES. At the city’s centennial celebration the following year, JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER announced his gift of 276 acres along DOAN BROOK and $300,000 to cover the cost of land the city had previously acquired there. Rockefeller’s gift completed the city’s ownership of the entire Doan Brook Valley from the headwaters to Lake Erie. Other substantial additions to the park system during this period included the 86-acreWASHINGTON RESERVATION/WASHINGTON PARK in 1899 and the 100-acre Woodland Hills Park (LUKE EASTER PARK) in 1900. The first parks in Cleveland, as elsewhere in the nation’s cities during this period, were envisioned as passive “public pleasure grounds.” Cleveland’s park commissioners set out to create, in their own words, “a harmonious development of sylvan beauty to which all are welcome, rich and poor alike, where all may find rest and inspiration and pleasure.” Photographs show that they were indeed beautiful and, prior to World War I, they were by far the most popular subject for penny postcards.

Cleveland’s park board faced serious opposition in the late 1890s. The Park Board Reorganization Assn., led by attorneys John A. Smith and JOHN ZANGERLE, charged that the board was “autocratic, dictatorial, irresponsible and unaccountable to the people.” By establishing parks in SHAKER HEIGHTS, NEWBURGH, and BROOKLYN (Old Brooklyn), the association charged, the board made them convenient for “people of leisure” but inaccessible to city residents who could not enjoy them without “the expense of transportation and considerable cost of time.” The association further charged that city, residents were paying to enhance the property values of adjoining townships. After a sometimes bitter battle in the state legislature, the park board was abolished in 1900, and administration of the city’s parks was vested in the new Div. of Parks & Boulevards of the Dept. of Public Works (later the Dept. of Parks, Recreation & Properties).

By 1896 Cleveland had laid the foundation for a park system that park commissioners claimed was “excelled by few [cities], if any, in the world.” Within a comparatively brief period, some 1,200 acres had been assembled and improved. Fully two-thirds of the land had been donated, leaving the city to pay only the expenses of improvement and maintenance. But therein lay the problem that would plague the city’s parks almost from the moment they were added to the system: bond funds could be used only for the purchase and permanent improvement of parkland, while maintenance costs had to come from taxes. The city increasingly found that it lacked the resources to maintain what it had built. As early as 1901, parks superintendent Robt. J. Kegg cautioned in his annual report, “You must bear in mind . . . that every bit of new work added means greater maintenance expense the next year. . . . A proper appropriation should be set aside to take care of them, or they will soon deteriorate.”

The Cleveland parks entered a new era under Mayor TOM L. JOHNSON, who initiated an effort to “bring the parks to the people.” He ordered the removal of “Keep Off the Grass” signs, and during 1901, his first year in office, set as a goal the establishment of playgrounds in the more crowded districts of the city. The impetus for building playgrounds in Cleveland mirrored the situation in other large industrial cities, where park-reform advocates argued for the location of new parks on sites more accessible to the working classes and for organized sports and other activities that would ensure healthful recreation. Thus, during the early 1900s, the city’s Div. of Parks equipped new children’s playgrounds, constructed athletic fields and basketball and tennis courts, and introduced Sunday and evening band concerts. Winter sports, especially ice skating, had gained in popularity, and in 1901 the city established skating rinks at all the larger parks and hosted skating races at Brookside and Rockefeller parks. Park shelters at Edgewater and Woodland Hills parks were converted for use as municipal dancing pavilions. By 1904 8 children’s playgrounds were operating in the more congested areas of the city, and the Div. of Parks had embarked on construction of the first of 5 free public BATH HOUSES. In 1916 with 2,160 acres of parkland, Cleveland ranked 12th nationally in park area.

By the 1920s, Cleveland’s parks had begun to show the effects of intensive use and inadequate maintenance. The Community Betterment Council of the Welfare Federation undertook a study of the problem and issued its report in 1923. “Cleveland’s parks have, required, and should have received better care and upkeep than has been given them,” the council reported. According to the council, the city had recently cut 800 men from the payroll and had eliminated the positions of city forester and park engineer. Park buildings, the council charged, had been painted a garish orange and black to advertise work done by Mayor FRED KOHLER‘s administration, and the city was losing to disease an estimated 4,000 trees a year. Meanwhile, a separate suburban park system had been carved out of the city’s picturesque outlying districts, embracing some of Greater Cleveland’s finest natural areas. As early as 1905, Cleveland park engineer WM. A. STINCHCOMB had urged that the city take advantage of its outstanding natural areas by creating an outer system of parks and boulevards to encircle the entire metropolitan area. The independent Cleveland Metropolitan Park District was created in 1917. Similar metropolitan systems already had been established in Boston, Westchester County, NY, and Cook County, IL. CLEVELAND METROPARKS, as the metropolitan park district is known today, comprises 13 reservations in Cuyahoga and Medina counties, most of which are located outside the city limits.

In many respects, the Depression may be said to have come to the rescue of the city’s parks. With aid from the WORK PROJECTS ADMINISTRATION, the parks were extensively rehabilitated and redesigned to accommodate automobiles and better withstand intensive use. In 1938 a force of nearly 9,000 men, divided into 2 shifts, worked 6 days a week building dams, bridges, culverts, bath houses, swimming pools, athletic fields, tennis courts, and playgrounds, and planting trees and shrubs. After 1940 the city’s parks suffered from serious outbreaks of vandalism and theft, water pollution, and perpetually inadequate maintenance and security. Highway construction decimated large portions of Edgewater, Gordon, and Brookside parks. The parks department traditionally received the crumbs from the city’s budget, and as the budget grew leaner in the 1960s, park personnel were continually reduced. The parks, once one of Cleveland’s finest assets, were reduced to a deplorable condition. Mayor Ralph Perk’s attempt in 1972 to address the situation with “Operation Turn Around” was ineffective, as was a $500,000 federal Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) program in 1975. No longer able to manage its extensive park system, the city looked to other government agencies for help. In 1977 the city negotiated a long-term lease with the Ohio Department of Natural Resources making Edgewater, Gordon, and Wildwood parks part of a new CLEVELAND LAKEFRONT STATE PARK. Ten years later, EUCLID BEACH PARK, a popular amusement park closed in 1969, was added to the lakefront chain. Under the state’s management, these waterfront parks have seen extensive capital, improvements, as well as improved maintenance and security. In 1986 Cleveland Metroparks agreed to lease and operate the 180-acre Garfield Park for $1 a year for 99 years; the agreement followed bitter and long-standing complaints by the city of GARFIELD HEIGHTS that Cleveland had failed to maintain the park and that it had become an eyesore and a haven for derelicts. In 1993, in a similar deal, Cleveland relinquished control of 135-acre Brookside Park to Cleveland Metroparks. The lease required Metroparks to make substantial capital improvements by 1 July 1996, and permitted the park district to use a portion of it for expansion of the zoo. With few exceptions, Cleveland’s parks bear witness to the great shift of the city’s population in the last 4 decades. With the flight of the middle class to the suburbs, the city’s poor and working-class residents have inherited a greatly diminished park system that continues to suffer from inadequate maintenance.

Carol Poh Miller

Miller, Carol Poh. Cleveland Metroparks, Past and Present (1992).

Cleveland Metroparks System ( 141 Kbytes ) Last Modified: 27 Mar 1998 10:53:37 AM

Teaching Cleveland Digital