Time and Again from Cleveland Magazine July 2009

Cleveland Magazine article by Michael Roberts
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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.

Masterpiece Man from Cleveland Magazine March 2006

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Issue Date: March 2006 Issue   

Masterpiece man

A nationwide, 100-day exhibit kicks off this month, honoring legend Viktor Schreckengost.

Ian Hoffman
At age 99, there are a few things that Viktor Schreckengost no longer does. Though renowned for creating the singular art icon of the Jazz Age, he has given up crafting ceramics. And Schreckengost – widely considered the greatest industrial designer ever – also has stopped revolutionizing products.

You will be glad, then, to learn that among the many things Schreckengost still does is plan for the future.

Later this month, those plans have Schreckengost flying from his home in Cleveland to New York City where he will oversee the opening of a nationwide exhibit of his varied work. When the exhibit ends its 100-day run on June 26, Schreckengost plans to celebrate his 100th birthday. In addition to the New York show, there will be at least 99 other simultaneous displays (making 100 in all) in the 49 other states.

As of late January, nearly 40 exhibits were planned for the Greater Cleveland area alone, including at Nighttown, the Cleveland Heights jazz club that is Schreckengost’s favorite hangout, and where we sat for our interview. It’s a struggle to transfer from his walker to just the right spot at the dining room table, but eventually he finds it. “Perfecto,” he turns to me and announces with a smile. Then, over his traditional Gibson and shrimp cocktail, Schreckengost and his wife, Gene, relay a few of the many achievements that mark him as a Renaissance Man of the first water.
Viktor and Gene employ a tag-team approach to telling the tale of Schreckengost’s first century. He remembers the events, she fills in the details that he used to share with her when they were fresher in his mind. As his story unfolds, it involves so many careers – he’s been a fine artist, professor, designer and Navy captain – and so many contacts with historical figures, including Eleanor Roosevelt and Eliot Ness, that he comes across as a modern-day da Vinci with a bit of Forrest Gump thrown in for good measure.

Born in Sebring, Ohio, in a family of six children, Schreckengost’s father worked at a ceramics factory from which he would bring home clay for his children to model. Every week he held a sculpture contest among the children, the winner of which was allowed to accompany his father on his weekend trip into the local big city of Alliance, Ohio. It was not until years later that Schreckengost realized his father systematically rotated the winner.

Win or lose, the contest developed Schreckengost’s talents as an artist. So did drawing in the margins of books, a practice of which his mother was less fond. When he was ready for college, Schreckengost chose Cleveland School of Art (now the Cleveland Institute of Art). Once at CSA, Schreckengost was inspired by a ceramics show at the Cleveland Museum of Art and began to put his childhood skills to work.
Upon graduation in 1929, Schreckengost earned a partial scholarship to study at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Vienna. To make the trip, he borrowed $1,500 from two owners of Gem Clay, an industrial ceramics manufacturer in Sebring. When he returned six months later, Schreckengost paid back his loans – a fortuitous event for the men from Gem Clay since separate bank failures during the Great Depression had otherwise wiped them out.

Back in Cleveland, already widely recognized for his talent, a bidding war ensued for Schreckengost’s employ. Ohio State University wanted him to found a ceramics department, but R. Guy Cowan, the owner of Cowan Pottery and a part-time instructor at CSA, wanted Schreckengost to teach with him. Cowan offered Schreckengost a dual position at his factory and as a CSA professor that was more lucrative than OSU’s package. Thus, Schreckengost became the youngest faculty member ever at his alma mater.

These positions led to the two seminal events in Schreckengost’s career. The first began innocently enough when he was short of work one day at Cowan, and drew an assignment from the job jar. A woman had commissioned a punch bowl with a New York theme. The bowl Schreckengost designed was almost not fired in the kiln because his boss feared it was too ornamental. When it was eventually produced, the vessel was a such hit that the woman ordered another. Her husband, Franklin Roosevelt, was about to run for president and she thought the White House could use a punch bowl, too.

The bowls – eventually Cowan produced several versions of them, all in limited quantities – became known as the Jazz Bowls. In 2004, one sold at auction for $254,000. An aside: If the art world – where small paintings sell for large fortunes – was more rational in its irrationality, then the Jazz Bowls would fetch even higher prices. They are arguably the most arresting example of Art Deco design ever. Inspired by a visit to New York City, Schreckengost managed to distill both the magnificence of the Chrysler Building and the vitality of Manhattan into an object no bigger than a bread box.

The other seminal event in Schreckengost’s career occurred because he was unimpressed with the way students were taught to design products. Only one year into his teaching tenure, Schreckengost persuaded the administration to let him found a school of design – the first such program in the nation.
Schreckengost brought real-world experience to the classroom, which in turn prepared his students for jobs outside academia, says John Nottingham, a co-founder of the prestigious Cleveland design firm Nottingham & Spirk who graduated from CIA’s school of design in 1972.
Nottingham also raves about Schreckengost’s creative approach to design, which encouraged students to think about all possible ways to make a project. “The approach is so powerful that what he started in 1930 is still practiced today,” says Nottingham, who plans to host one of the 100 Schreckengost exhibits in his firm’s University Circle studios. Note, if Schreckengost still taught design, one thing that would not be practiced today is computers. “Who says it’s art at all,” he dismisses. “It’s make-believe.”

It is clear though that Schreckengost still observes manual design with a teacher’s eye. At dinner he happily critiques his water glass. (“Easy to hold, not easy to tip over. It gets by.”) And his eyes light up when he recounts his many students’ many achievements, such as founding Nissan’s design department. According to Nottingham, so highly revered is the school of design that Schreckengost founded and led for decades that CIA is one of only three schools from which today’s automakers recruit designers.

Schreckengost, however, was not content to just teach. Mid-20th-century Ohio was ablaze with manufacturing and Schreckengost’s designs lit the way to success. For the Murray Ohio Manufacturing Co. he reinvented pedal car production, making the children’s toys affordable for the masses. For Cleveland’s White Motor Co., he also designed the cab-over-engine design that is ubiquitous in today’s city buses. And he revolutionized printing presses so that they were safer and cleaner.
As if those achievements were not enough for one lifetime, Schreckengost also voluntarily joined the Navy in 1943 – at age 37 – where he flew on secret missions to Europe and used his modeling skills to improve the Allies’ radar capabilities. Later he designed prosthetics for wounded soldiers. After the war, Schreckengost joined the Reserves and eventually retired as a captain.

And though he’s retired today, he still does plenty. He helps catalogue his work for the eight-person Viktor Schreckengost Foundation, which is run out of his Cleveland Heights house – when he’s not vacationing with Gene in Florida. He also plans to judge a Gates Mills art show next summer. That would be after he celebrates his 100th birthday by attending the closing of one of the 100 exhibits (in either Los Angeles or San Francisco) honoring his work. Why so far away? “I love the California coast,” Schreckengost explains.

Oh, and that story about Eliot Ness? One evening while attending a party in Cleveland Heights where Ness was a guest, the famed safety director was called away by an urgent phone call and invited Schreckengost along for the ride – at 80 miles an hour down Euclid Avenue. Just another day in the extraordinary of life of Viktor Schreckengost. A life for which a 100-day celebration hardly seems long enough.

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