The City

As we walked along Superior, then cut along East Sixth, walking North towards Lake Erie, the stadium loomed on the horizon, a brown bowl of concrete and rusting girders, and beyond it the lake, shimmering like dull metal in the brisk air.

The stretch of downtown we walked that day - first, along East 9th between Euclid and Superior, and then along Superior towards Public Square - is a canyon of tall, gorgeous buildings, conceived by planners of the great cities of the early twentieth century. The bricks, pillars and cornices of the Huntington Building have always seemed to me to possess a forgotten sense of civic purpose. Across the street lay the Colonial Arcade. There was the glossy windmill of its circular doors, the ornate archway that framed its wide entrance, and, of course, the gleam of brass handrails that you couldn't see from the street. And there was Cleveland Public Library, whose marble steps cascaded downwards, like the gentle slope of a stream over graded shale. Inside, WPA murals hung on walls: portraits of an earlier America, flush with industry and progress, overcoming the hard times of Depression, forging through a new wilderness.

Although I didn't know it then, these buildings had an illustrious history. When built, the Huntington Building was the second largest office building in the world. It was erected in 1923-24 for $17 million and designed by a prominent Chicago architectural firm. In the 1920's its tenants included railroads, iron and steel industries, shipping companies, legal firms and insurance and securities businesses - the economic forces that raised the city. The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History states that the building contained an L-shaped 3-story banking room, and basilican halls with 38-foot-high Corinthian columns and barrel-vaulted ceilings. It was an artistic expression of Cleveland's brash will to succeed in the 1920's, and a way of establishing the city as a Mid-western metropolis as distinctive as New York or Chicago.

The Union Trust Company owned the building until 1933, when the bank went belly-up in the Depression and sent Cleveland's fortunes into a tailspin. The city rose again, for twenty years, between the onset of World War II, and the riots and the burning river of the late '60's, then sank again to its knees (though not quietly).

The gleaming Arcade, whose entrance lay across the street as we walked along Superior at East 6th "has no peer in the U.S. and has been compared with the Galleria Vittorio Emmanuele in Milan, Italy" states the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History. It was built for $867,000 by a company presided over by Stephen Harkness, an original partner of Standard Oil. The five-story, iron-and-glass arcade threads together two nine-story office buildings on Superior and Euclid. The facades are in the Romanesque style, and the Arcade is, according to the Encyclopedia, a "three-hundred-foot long covered light court ringed by four levels of balconies... The effect of the vertical lines of the columns rising approximately one-hundred feet to the glass roof creates the most breathtaking interior in the city." The entrances of both facades contain load-bearing walls, and use the skeletal principle - a steel support frame on which the building is hung, in this case I-beams that rest on steel brackets attached to columns. Such technology, used in Chicago a few years earlier, made the twentieth-century skyscraper possible.

The building was nearly empty of tenants by the mid-'90s. Residents and businesses moved to the suburbs and fewer people shopped downtown. If you walked through the building, you'd have to step past the homeless men that slept outside, wrapped in newspapers. Inside lay a gleaming shell, nearly empty of the downtown workers and shoppers that had once thronged to the glass-enclosed, sunlit hall.

The stretch that we walked down that day feels like a real city. Cleveland is pocked by holes where buildings have been ripped down like loose strips of old wallpaper. Its downtown never attained the density of urban life in cities like Chicago, because the suburbs, after severing themselves from the city, attracted residents out.