West of the Cuyahoga by George Condon

Author:George Condon
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781631010392
Publisher: The Kent State University Press

The Changing Street Scene

THE WINDS OF CHANGE SWEPT OVER the city streets in 1905 as Cleveland wrestled with the problems brought on by sudden, overwhelming growth. The immediate problem was how to bring order out of the chaos that was a direct result of the unexpected addition of too many people in too short a time. The canals, the lake boats, the new roadways, and the new trains were moving a major part of the western world into Ohio and the Northwest Territory’s other new states.

Cleveland was the first sizeable town many of the migratory newcomers would see in their first encounter with the New World, and what they would see was a most pleasing sight. It was, unmistakably, the kind of town that anybody would recognize as a nice place to live, a town with an inviting personality.

But there was a growing realization in the town that too many newcomers were accepting the unspoken invitation and that Cleveland, as a result, was quickly becoming a different place. There could be no doubt that it had become a bewildering place to the people whose hometown had changed between the time they went to bed and the time they got up.

Housing was becoming the most pressing need on both sides of the river valley due to the extreme migrant demand for permanent places to live. Too many of the newcomers were living in wagons, tents, and other temporary shelters that hardly deserved to be called homes but were important refuges for people worn raw by travel, tired of living under the elements. The crudest of the temporary homes, even quickly erected log cabins, had an inviting charm to weary travelers, among them some whose journeys had begun months before on the other side of the big sea.

Many substantial homes were being built on both sides of the river, creating new neighborhoods in every section of the city. The new streets being added to the community required names, of course, and they were usually coined on the spot. They would be the simplest of names for the pathways, the lanes, the dirt streets, and eventually the cobblestone-paved avenues. Street naming was not an art, depending on the person responsible for creating them. Politicians were honored by streets named after them, of course, and occasionally the names were poetic and sentimental. As a general rule, the names of the builders, their family members, and their relatives dominated.

As boomtown Cleveland discovered, the difficulty of moving about in a city is compounded by size. Trying to find a specific family in an unfamiliar neighborhood was becoming a challenge that mounted with the continuing expansion of population. The problem is a long-standing one in every city of size.

Clevelanders had felt the problem around 1850 with the arrival of the first wave of newcomers, and it had developed to near-critical level by the end of the century. All the pretty street names acquired in the early years of growth, the historic street names and the pretentious street names, seemed to have lives of their own even in the smothering growth.

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