How Was Cleveland Built

Cleveland was planned as a New England town and built as an industrial one.

The square

Moses Cleaveland’s 1796 survey laid out a ten-acre common in the Connecticut manner, and Public Square is still there at the centre of the street grid — unusual in a midwestern city, and the reason downtown radiates the way it does.

The arcades

The Cleveland Arcade of 1890 is a five-storey glass-roofed galleria of iron and brass connecting two streets, modelled on European precedents and among the earliest indoor shopping arcades in America. Two more survive nearby. They were a response to the weather as much as to fashion.

Terminal Tower

Completed in 1930 above a railway station, at 216 metres it was the tallest building outside New York for two decades and remains the city’s emblem. The complex around it — the Group Plan of monumental civic buildings arranged on a mall — is one of the most complete City Beautiful schemes ever executed.

Bridges

The Cuyahoga valley required them: lift bridges, swing bridges and the high-level Detroit-Superior and Hope Memorial spans, the latter carrying the carved Guardians of Traffic that gave the baseball team its name.

Churches

Each immigrant group built its own, often at considerable sacrifice, and the result is a density of substantial churches out of all proportion to the current population — Byzantine domes in Tremont, Gothic in the Polish districts, and a Slovenian national home among them. Many now serve congregations a fraction of their original size, and their reuse is an active local question.

Neighbourhood housing

Timber double houses and worker cottages on narrow lots, with ornate churches in each ethnic district.