The Stockyard Area, or Stockyards, is a neighborhood
covering roughly a square mile of Cleveland's West Side, south of Interstate
90 between West 48th and West 73rd Streets. The area is home to about 3,000
households and more than 100 businesses. Named after the big meatpacking district
that dominated West 65th St. from the 1890's to the 1950's, Stockyards is a
historically solid blue-collar neighborhood whose residents are now increasingly
low-income.
History of a Working Neighborhood
Part 1: From Wilderness to Urban Neighborhood (1805-1920)
When Moses Cleaveland entered the mouth of the Cuyahoga in 1796, the square mile of woodland and meadow that would become "Stockyards" was mostly untouched wilderness. A minor Indian trail ran along the crest of the ridge that was to become Denison Avenue. (Known to geologists as the Middle Ridge, the ridge is the shoreline of ancient Lake Whittlesey, an ancestor of Lake Erie... see Michael Hansen's History of Lake Erie.) To the southeast of the ridge, the land fell sharply to the Big Creek valley; to the north, it sloped more gently down to a glacial stream that rose in the vicinity of today's West 65th and Clark and flowed northeast two miles to the Cuyahoga. This stream, which had flowed for 15,000 years, became known as "Walworth Run" after Cleveland's first postmaster, who had a farm near its mouth.
Along with the whole West Side, our neighborhood remained Indian Territory until 1805, when the treaty of Fort Industry secured the large area west of the Cuyahoga for the Western Reserve. The West Side was promptly surveyed into the standard 160 acre lots and incorporated into Brooklyn Township, with the future Stockyard Area becoming Lots 33, 34, 35, 46, 47 and 48.
Among the area's first white settlers were the Storer family, who came to Brooklyn Centre in 1827 and took land for farming in what is now the Saint Boniface area. The farms owned by Joseph and George Storer included all the land south of today's Storer Ave. (once their back lot line) between today's West 46th and West 56th Streets, extending a few acres south of Denison. When they arrived their land was wilderness a mile west of town, and George Storer had to cut the road that became Denison Avenue in order to travel to Brooklyn Centre. The Joseph Storer farmhouse was probably located on the hill by Saint Boniface. The Storers were a "founding family" of Brooklyn Centre who helped start the Methodist Church and other institutions, and they're buried in the old cemetery on Garden Ave.
Other families from Brooklyn Centre, Cleveland or Ohio City bought allotments for farms or speculation during the 1820s, '30s and '40s. James Sears, another Brooklyn Centre founder, bought Lot 35 just west of the Storers, and Diodate Clark, the village's first schoolteacher who became a wealthy merchant, owned property just to the north; he gave his name to Clark Ave.
In the late 1840s Cleveland's first railroad, the Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati ("CCC", which became part of the New York Central), started making its way from the Flats up the Walworth Run valley. The project was first chartered in 1835, but nothing happened until 1945 when the charter was revived and Cleveland City Council agreed to make a major investment in the enterprise. The first train in Cleveland ran on CCC track in the Flats in 1849, and by March 1850 the first 15 miles had been finished, rising out of the Flats by way of Walworth Run.
This was a major addition to the sleepy rural landscape at the Walworth Run headwaters, and land speculation started in earnest. H.P. Weddell, a CCC stockholder and son of the founder of the Weddell House hotel, and John Sargent, the CCC's chief engineer, were among those buying and selling acres near the railroad's right of way. Weddell bought 175 acres northwest of Clark and Gordon (65th) for about $8 an acre in 1947 and 1948; he sold some of this land to developer James Hoyt twenty years later for about $1500 an acre. Meanwhile Sargent, a respected Ohio City figure who had toiled with a shovel in 1847 along Walworth Run to help keep the CCC charter alive, acquired acreage southwest of Clark and Gordon through which the right-of-way passed; thirty years later he sold it to the railroad's newly formed Cleveland Stock Yard Company.
During those thirty years (1850-1880) the pace of events in the vicinity of Walworth Run and Clark got a little faster, as the railroad grew, the city expanded, and the Civil War changed everyone's life. The farmers, scattered shopkeepers and artisans living in the area must have seen a lot of young men (including their own sons) going off to the war on the CCC, one of the nation's main lines to the West. They certainly had a chance to see President Lincoln as he rode through Cleveland, including his last trip home aboard his funeral train.
In 1867 the Cleveland city line east of Gordon moved to the south side of Clark, and soon Walworth Run was bridged at Swiss St. (now 53rd), making a second dry connection from Clark to Ohio City. In 1873 Cleveland moved another three blocks south to Storer and west past 73rd. 1874 maps show most of the streets in these areas already platted for house lots by their developer-owners. Cleveland City Council in that same year was considering how to clean up ponds created by businesses along Walworth Run, and how to keep little streams from flooding streets on their way from Storer to Walworth. A school was established at Clark and Hamburg (56th). Slowly but steadily, the future Stockyard Area was changing from a rural township into a city neighborhood.
Then came the Stockyards.
The CCC had first built stock pens at Scranton and Fairfield in the 1850s. In 1878 the railroad established the Union Stockyards at that location. But in 1880 or 1881 a landslide detroyed the pens, and the railroad decided to find a safer site. They looked to John Sargent's holdings at Clark and Gordon, the first flat spot on their route west... and thus began the industrial history of the Stockyard Area.
The new Stock Yard Company moved to the Gordon Avenue location (3200 West 65th) in 1881. It built pens, offices and a hotel for the drovers who came to buy the livestock disembarking from the CCC cars. Soon small slaughterhouses were established. The "Hotel de la Hoof" was on its way.
Things really got going in the 1890s, as the 20th century Stockyard Area started to take form. The city's biggest meatpacker, Cleveland Provision, came to West 65th armed with the new mechanical refrigeration. Lake Erie Provision and other packers were there too. At the corner of Clark and Gordon, across the CCC track from the stockyards, Wendell Medlin's new Pilsener Brewing Company opened its brewery in 1892. Almost overnight, the corner of Gordon and Clark near the head of Walworth Run had turned into an industrial center.
The boom continued well into the first two decades of this century. Standard Brewing opened its doors on Train Ave. in 1905, making Erin Brew and Old Bohemian. The stockyards and packing houses just kept growing... by 1920 the stockyards themselves covered sixty acres and the whole operation employed about 4,000 workers. Also by 1920, Joseph and Feiss had built the world's biggest clothing plant on 53rd Street. A large share of the Stockyard Area's other significant industrial buildings -- the Swift Building, Apex Box's factory on Walworth, the old Bettcher building at 61st and Clark, Theurer-Norton (now Schibley Chemical) on West 63rd, and the list goes on -- date from this "neighborhood industrial revolution" of eighty to ninety years ago.
With industry came jobs and with jobs came people... thousands of immigrants moving to the area, first from Ireland and Germany and then from eastern and southern Europe: Bohemians, Poles, Hungarians. The Stockyards population explosion of the 1890s and 1900s was so intense that by 1910 the neighborhood was close to its all-time population high, even though it had been semi-rural (especially south of Storer) just twenty years before. (The combined population of our two main census tracts was over 13,500 in 1910, and rose modestly to 14,200 by 1920; it has fallen in every census since and was down to 8,500 by 1990.)
This influx left its mark in many ways:
The majority of our current houses, especially north of Storer, date from 1895-1910; small and functional, they were obviously built for working-class residents.
The City converted the many streams and ditches leading into Walworth Run into a covered sewer system in the 1890s... think of the stuff that must have been flowing in those ditches from slaughterhouses, livestock pens, the brewery, the railroad and hundreds of new homes! Walworth Run itself was turned into a covered sewer in 1894, after flowing freely for 150 centuries.Considerations of public health also led the City to build the Clark Bath House (now Clark Recreation Center).
The neighborhood's main ethnic institutions -- Saint Boniface Parish, the Sachsenheim Hall, Ceska Sin Sokol at 41st and Clark -- date from this period.
The CCC (by then the New York Central built its overpasses in 1905, by which time traffic must have made its old grade crossings on Clark and 65th too dangerous.
By the mid-1890s the original Clark School was no longer adequate, so a new school, Gilbert Elementary, opened its doors in 1898. By 1910 Gilbert was already planning an annex for more classrom space.
So in many ways, the Stockyard Area's combined industrial revolution and population explosion of 1890-1920 built the neighborhood we live in today. Not just our physical surroundings, but our driving economic forces, our important institutions, and many of our families all got created in that big community growth spurt a century ago. As late as 1890 the Stockyard Area was still a sort of semi-rural railroad village off on the edge of a growing city. (Our southern half only came into Cleveland in 1894!) Thirty years later, Stockyards had become a dense, industrialized, urban ethnic working-class neighborhood... basically the same neighborhood we still share.
-- Bill Callahan