VIII. On the Square

The Public Square is the most controversial piece of real estate in Cleveland; a civic anachronism with impressive staying powers that has successfully resisted attack, criticism, and almost all efforts at beautification since Seth Pease sketched it in on the first crude maps of the city-to-be. It is believed that it was incorporated into the master plan at Moses Cleaveland’s behest.

As it is now constituted, the Square is a ten-acre area which is divided into four quadrants of equal size by Ontario Street, a north-south thoroughfare, and Superior Avenue, which runs east and west. Where these two streets meet, in the middle of the Square, is the geographical heart of the city.

The principal criticism of the Square among progressive Clevelanders is that it is an old-fashioned, hick-townish concept, serving little or no utilitarian purpose and failing even to meet the minimal standards of a civic decoration.

There are the traditionalists, on the other hand, who will fight to the death to save the Square. It is their stout contention that this open area in the center of downtown is one of Cleveland’s principal charms, a distinguishing characteristic that links the city with its New England origin and sets it apart from most other large cities of the Midwest.

The Square is no grassy commons, although it was planned as a wide open meadow where Clevelanders would have a convenient place to graze their cows, ibex goats, horses, and other livestock. The idea is both attractive and sound, but wholly impractical in this day and age. By the time a householder walks his cow downtown and fights his way through the crowded city streets, be has wasted half his day. Now it’s entirely possible that wouldn’t bother him at all; there are people who enjoy wasting their time, as we all know. But he no sooner gets back to his house than it’s time to hop the bus and return downtown to lead the cow home. That means he runs into the rush-hour traffic, and only the man who has tried to walk his cow across the Detroit-Superior High Level Bridge, or the Main Street Bridge, in the five o’clock congestion can appreciate the impracticality of (a) grazing cattle in Public Square, and (b) owning a cow.

As matters stand, each of the four quadrants today is devoted to a different civic purpose. The northwest quadrant, for example, has as its feature piece a statue of Mayor Tom L. Johnson. It is different from most statues of great men in that the sculptor eschewed the usual heroic pose. He is not standing, one leg forward and bent at the knee, with outstretched hand. He is not even seated on a horse. He is sitting in a comfortable armchair and he is staring reflectively out at the Square. It is not what you would call a heroic stare either. Chances are the sculptor probably got thrown out of the sculptor’s union for breaking all the rules.

There is an area set aside in Tom Johnson’s quadrant as a free speech rostrum in the tradition of London’s open-air free-speech area in Hyde Park. Cleveland has provided people who are seized with the ungovernable impulse to speak with a two-step stone rostrum, and it is put to strenuous use. People who are hustling through the Square on their way to work, or rushing for the bus, usually stop long enough to find out what subject the speaker of the hour has selected. They may even tarry long enough to determine if the speaker is making any sense. Very few speakers do. The rostrum seems to draw heavily on the lunatic and fanatical fringe, but there is no harm done and perhaps some good. The Public Square regulars- i.e., the bench brigade- appear to enjoy every word spoken. The pigeons are all for free speech, too, because when a speaker draws a good crowd, it almost always includes some sports who are willing to buy a bag of peanuts from the man with the peanut wagon. When that happens, the pigeons flutter about, wheeling gracefully above in exultation before they descend in a flapping, cooing uproar that almost drowns out the man on the rostrum.

The northeast quadrant is more sedate. Its main feature is a round pool with a weak, hesitant fountain which no doubt used to be a great civic attraction, but which loses considerably in comparison with the many new fountains on the magnificent Mall, which can be seen clearly from this particular section of the Square. But there are shade trees, grass and floral arrangements which please a good many people. It is the part of the Square which is most reminiscent of the leisurely, peaceful atmosphere of the nineteenth century. The nostalgia is heightened considerably by the Old Stone Church (the First Presbyterian Church), which faces the Square from the north as it has since 1834. The mellow chimes in the tower of the church sound across the Square every fifteen minutes, and twice a day, at noon and at 6 P.M., the carillon plays old airs in concerts that often slow the hurrying commuters and sometimes bring passersby to a complete, appreciative halt.

The southwest quadrant, directly in front of the Terminal Tower, which overpowers the entire Square with its height and massive bulk, has the statue of Moses Cleaveland, a band shell, and an information booth of the Cleveland Transit System, a miscellaneous grouping that does nothing to cheer the eyes of onlookers.

But it is the southeast quadrant which draws most of the critical comment. Herein resides the single most controversial element of the entire Public Square- the Soldiers and Sailors Monument. It was born in controversy and there is every likelihood that it will disappear in controversy, but while it stands it will not be ignored. Everybody in Cleveland, resident or visitor, has an opinion on this structure which so dominates the entire central area, and the opinions range from patriotic approval to aesthetic revulsion. The criticism generally is kept to a low undertone because to attack the monument, which has been the artistic centerpiece of the civic area since the tum of the century, is to be classified not merely as a Philistine but as an un-American troublemaker.

There is one point on which everyone can agree: the monument, conceived as a labor of love by Captain Levi Tucker Scofield, is both massive and unique. Its main feature is a central granite shaft which rises 125 feet in height, topped by a statue of Liberty. Its bulky base is a somber, mausoleum-l ike structure which has inside it a room with marble panels on which have been inscribed the names of the ten thousand officers and men from Cuyahoga County who served the Union in the Civil War. There also are bronze panels which portray patriotic service. Around this base-building are four splendidly executed life-size battle groups in bronze depicting the infantry, the artillery, the cavalry, and the Navy, all in heroic action.

The monument was proposed in 1879 by a man named William J. Gleason. He, a leader among the Civil War veterans, was instrumental in marshaling support for the memorial and pushing the project through to fulfillment despite a civic furore which became so heated as to project the fear of violence. The dispute centered not on the issue of building a Civil War monument- every hamlet, town, and city in the United States was racing to build memorials at the time- but on the question of where it should be placed. Public Square, the center of the city, was the obvious choice for the largest and grandest monument in town, but there was this minor obstruction-Public Square already had a fine monument. It was the Perry Monument, dedicated to Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry and commemorating his decisive victory in the Battle of Lake Erie in the War of 1812.

The dispute over which monument should win the coveted position on the Square settled down gradually into an argument over which of the wars represented by the respective memorials really was the better war. Some Clevelanders pleaded the case of the War of 1812 quite eloquently, pointing out that there would not have been a War between the States if Commodore Perry hadn’t whipped the British on Lake Erie. Furthermore, they added, the proximity of Perry’s battle- within earshot of Cleveland- gave it more local interest and significance than any of the Civil War battles.

However eloquent were the supporters of Commodore Perry, they were not able to prevail against the planners of the Civil War memorial, who had tremendous political strength at that time, only a few years after the Civil War. They easily won approval of the Cleveland city administration. The Perry supporters even went to court on the issue, but the Supreme Court of Ohio, in 1892, ruled that the building of the veterans’ monument in the southeast quadrant of the Square was legal.

The Perry Memorial was removed from Public Square finally on December 3, 1892. It had held a proud place in the heart of Cleveland since September 10, 1860, the forty-seventh anniversary of the date of the Battle of Lake Erie, when it was unveiled and dedicated in a great civic ceremony.

Harvey Rice, the noted pioneer-educator, had conceived the idea of the Perry Monument, and it was he who made the presentation address at its dedication before a crowd estimated at one hundred thousand persons, including the son of the hero, Oliver Hazard Perry II. Among the newspaper reporters covering the ceremony was a Plain Dealer writer named Charles Farrar Browne, who already was winning fame as a humorist under his pen name of Artemus Ward. Browne’s account of the dedication was straight and factual, but his sense of humor was irrepressible, finally forcing its way into the story with his observation that “the procession was more than two miles in length, as was the prayer of the clergyman.”

At that time, a two-railing fence closed in the entire Public Square, preventing use of Superior and Ontario streets through the area. The fence was a manifestation of another famous Cleveland dispute, one involving the use of Public Square by traffic. One faction held that the Square should be a single, unbroken unit; a park area, not trespassed by streets bearing vehicular traffic. The opposing faction was in favor of allowing the streets to cut the Square into four separate areas rather than inconvenience people by making them travel around the sides of the Square.

Perhaps the best suggestion of the emotional effect of the dispute over the fence around the Square is to be found in some doggerel printed by the Herald in 1867 relative to the controversy:

“Let fossils creak their crumbling bones,

Let Dotards shriek in quavering tones;

They cannot stop the tides that flow,

The fence about the Square must go’”

The Perry Monument sat in the geographical center of the fenced-in Square while the argument raged, and while it was not a large monument, it was well executed and was regarded with approval. It was twenty-five feet high, with an Italian marble statue of Commodore Perry eight feet, two inches high standing atop a Rhode Island granite base twelve feet high. An iron picket fence with gas lamps at each corner surrounded the memorial.

On August 21, 1867, the argument over the use of Public Square by the main thoroughfares was settled with the decision that the original plan of the city allowed for such practical use of the land. The rail fence was removed and the Perry Monument was moved from the center of the Square to the southeast quadrant, where, shortly, it came under attack from the promoters of the large Civil War monument. After its removal from Public Square, Perry’s peregrinating memorial wandered on to a site in Wade Park, overlooking the lagoon, where it stayed until it was evicted by the construction of the new Museum of Art. It moved again, in 1913, to the bank of the lake in Gordon Park, where it is to this day.

The Soldiers and Sailors Monument was built at a cost of $280,000 and was dedicated on Independence Day 1894, with a great civic celebration that included yacht races in the harbor, a band concert on the Square under the direction of Professor Frank H. Hruby, the firing of cannon, the shriek of whistles and, of course, old-fashioned Fourth of July oratory. The principal speakers at the dedication ceremony were former Governor Joseph B. Foraker of Ohio, who was also to serve in the U. S. Senate, and the future President of the United States, William McKinley, then governor of Ohio.

They must have dedicated the monument well, because it still sits on the Square, a vestigial reminder of another century such as is rarely found in prominent display in larger American cities. While nobody questions its high-minded representation, or the sentiment that inspired it, not even the kindly patina of the weather and the years can conceal its baroque features and bulking disfigurement of the heart of the city. Still, wise politicians hesitate to attack tradition, and this memorial certainly has become a fum part of the Cleveland tradition.

As should be apparent, Cleveland’s Public Square, which daily is the scene of some of the most overpowering traffic jam-ups in America, never has been the placid, pastoral retreat that Seth Pease and Moses Cleaveland bad in mind when they laid out the town. It has been, instead, a battleground of one kind or another ever since the day that Lorenzo Carter and his fellow townsmen fought to hang the reluctant John O’Mic approximately at the place where all the free speech enthusiasts today denounce the devil, established authority, and our social system.

One of Cleveland’s veteran editors, Charles E. Kennedy, liked to tell about the time he was walking across Public Square in the company of a friend when a brilliant light shot out of a building on the southwest corner of the Square. He looked up at the building in surprise, but his friend tugged at his arm and assured him there was no reason to be alarmed.

“It’s a young fellow named Brush,” he told Kennedy. “He’s got a laboratory in that building, and he’s experimenting with a newfangled lamp run from a galvanic battery.”

It was one of the understatements of the century. Charles Francis Brush, a graduate mining engineer, analytical chemist, and consultant in the iron are industry, had become caught in the fascinating possibilities of electricity, and out of his experiments emerged the successful arc light and dynamo.

When his invention bad reached the paint where it warranted a trial outside of his laboratory, Brush fastened the apparatus to the sill of his window facing the Square on the second floor of the little building.

On that particular night, a downtown parade had been scheduled and just as the cavalry rounded the corner, past the Forest City House, Brush threw the switch, causing a purplish bright light to glow in the crude lamp, growing steadily brighter as it burned.

The cavalry horses had never seen an electric light before. Neither had their riders. The horses reared in wide-eyed terror and pranced excitedly about, forgetting military discipline.

Brush, looking out his window in amazement at the light he had caused to Hare in the lamp and at the accompanying panic disrupting the parade, was chortling in triumph when he heard a pounding at his laboratory door. It was a huge policeman, a man who was not to be put off his duty by a lot of scientific gobbledygook and legerdemain.

“Put out that damned light!” he roared. The inventor, aware that this was not the moment to explain the significance of the arc light, immediately hastened to comply.

Brush’s experiments with electrical arc lighting continued, and finally, in 1879, his work had advanced to the point of experimenting with the new marvel as a means of street illumination. The place for the experiment in the world’s first street lighting was Public Square; the date, April 29. The Cleveland Telegraph Supply Company, with which Brush was associated, erected twelve lamps of two thousand horsepower on 150-foot-high poles set about the Square.

Thousands of spectators from cities all over Ohio and Pennsylvania thronged the Square that night, joining almost all the people of Cleveland, to see the promised miracle. Most of the sightseers, forewarned by the newspapers of the blinding glare that might be expected, carried smoked glass to hold before their eyes.

There was an almost fearful hush as the moment for the demonstration approached. Thousands of heads tipped back to look at the opalescent glass globes suspended at the tops of the tall standards when, at 8:05 P.M., Brush signaled for the switch to be turned on. One of the lamps immediately gave off a purplish flickering light, and then all the others followed. The lights grew brighter steadily, losing some of their purple coloring as they did, and the glow from the lamps was sufficient to illuminate the entire Public Square. It was a dim light by modern standards, to be sure, but to the thousands who looked at it that night and who were bathed in its beams, it was a dazzling, blinding glow, and the crowd roared its pleasure and admiration while the Cleveland Grays Band played a number that called for smashing cymbals and the artillery lined along the lakeshore for the event boomed the news of Brush’s miracle.

In the six months that followed this demonstration, the Cleveland City Council contracted for Brush arc lights to be installed not only on Public Square, but also adjacent downtown streets, giving the city the distinction of being the first in the world to light its streets with electricity.

It was not the only worldwide first that the Public Square could lay claim to. The world’s first electric streetcar was demonstrated on the Square, and began service in Cleveland in 1884. And, earlier, in 1852, the Zion Evangelical Lutheran Church, then on a site facing the Square, set up a candle-lighted Christmas tree in the little church sanctuary during the holiday season. It was probably the first Christmas tree to appear in a church or to be allowed in a church ceremony, according to Historian William Ganson Rose. The innovation allows Cleveland to share with Wooster, Ohio, the credit for beginning the Christmas tree tradition in the United States. A twenty-one-year-old native of Germany, August Ingard, is credited with having installed the first Christmas tree in his home in Wooster in 1847.

The Square, predictably, was the focus point of the city’s centennial celebration in 1896- and a flamboyant celebration it was, reflecting the brash, cocky attitude of a community that had grown from a forested wilderness into a metropolis of more than a quarter-million persons in a mere hundred years, making it the tenth-largest city in the United States in the 1890 census. As part of the summer-long observance of the big birthday, a log cabin was built-under the direction of one Bolivar Butts, no less- on the northeast comer of the Square, while in the very center a great arch that closely resembled the Arc de Triomphe in Paris spanned Superior Avenue. The scientific highlight of Founders’ Day, July 22, came at 8: 15 P.M. when President Grover Cleveland, far away in his summer home in Buzzard’s Bay, Massachusetts, pushed a button that somehow, magically, illuminated the great Centennial Arch in Cleveland, dazzling the thousands of celebrators gathered on the Square.

Some people, as we all know, Simply cannot leave a good thing alone, so it isn’t surprising that numerous attempts have been made over the years to give Public Square a more impressive name, but the people stubbornly have stayed with the original, direct designation. It was proposed that the name be changed to Perry Square, when the admiral’s monument was the centerpiece feature, and again it was proposed that the name of “Monumental Square” be adopted, but both efforts failed. In 1861, on April 16, the city fathers yielded to pressure and formally renamed the area Monumental Park, which is the official name to this day, but it never has gained any popular usage, any more than Sixth Avenue in New York has been popularly called “Avenue of the Americas.”

Cleveland’s City Council hasn’t had too much luck in its administration of Public Square affairs over the years-the unsuccessful name change being but a sample-so it does not come as any great surprise to learn that at one time the council officially decided it was an area strictly for the birds. Back in 1859, a rather slow year legislation-wise, the City Council imported twenty pairs of English sparrows directly from their native land in the hope they would be helpful in destroying some insect pests which were attacking the trees in the Forest City. The first results must have been encouraging because the council shortly thereafter purchased an additional fifty pairs of sparrows and thoughtfully built birdhouses on the Square to accommodate the feathered imports in a style to which they certainly were not accustomed.

The councilmen, as everybody knows now, wrought better than they knew. The sparrows flourished and multiplied with dismaying speed, seeming not to care one bit that the city demolished the birdhouses and withdrew the welcome sign. Now they, the starlings, and the pigeons are all over, under, and around the Square, and living with them is one of the city’s current problems. The same council body that sponsored their migration to Cleveland occasionally tries to shoo them away, but all efforts along this line have been unsuccessful to date. The most dramatic counterattack by the City Council came in the 1940s, when guns were installed at strategic places around the Square. Every so often, at set intervals, the guns were triggered automatically and the sound of the fusillade boomed and echoed all over the Square.

This was an effective stratagem, in a limited sense. That is to say, the explosion of the guns did startle the birds. Thousands of them would take off at each blast and fly frantically about, their little bird-type brains and nervous systems rattled by the sudden roar. The trouble was that the reaction of the birds was as nothing compared with the reaction of the pedestrians within earshot of the cannonading. Some of them flew higher than the birds. Yielding to the entreaties of the citizens, the council reluctantly withdrew its noisemakers, and the birds took over the Square again. Clevelanders fortunately had chosen a softhearted bunch of legislators to represent them. In another Ohio metropolis, Cincinnati, the city government once offered to pay a bounty for birds brought in by eagle-eyed citizens. When the sound of the gunfire had died away and the smoke had cleared, the Queen City looked like Berlin at the end of World War II.

Clearly, there is something about a big, wide, open space like Public Square that is tempting to politicians. History is studded with stories proving that politicians, like nature, abhor a vacuum. Show them an empty space, like a park or a public square, and they rush to fill it. It is not surprising then that just as a Cleveland city administration in the 1950s would cast covetous eyes on the Erie Street Cemetery for use as a parking lot, or consider using the Mall as the site of a new Hilton hotel, so the city officials of 1895 would consider it absurd to buy land for a new city hall when so much acreage was going to waste in the Public Square. The city at that time was leasing space in a privately owned building, the Case Block on Superior Avenue, just east of the Square.

A new city administration building had been authorized by voters in November 1894, and the only question to be resolved was where to build it. From his temporary quarters in the Case Block, Mayor McKisson enjoyed a good view of the broad sweep of the Square, and the temptation was too much for his frugal character. With the approval of the City Council, McKisson made his determined effort to grab the land. He sent a swarm of workers onto the Square and they quickly enclosed the two northernmost quadrants with a board fence. That half of the Square would be the site of City Hall.

But the mayor and the council had underestimated the proprietary affection that Clevelanders always have had for their downtown center. A mighty storm of protest from citizens, newspapers, and politicians of opposing parties darkened the skies overhead and drove the city administration to cover. Ground for the new city hall had been broken on June 4, but sufficient opposition manifested itself in the week that followed to cause the McKisson forces to back down. The city filled the hole, removed the fencing, and the politicians retreated to their old rented quarters in the Case Block.

The people had spoken, as they always do in Cleveland when anyone tries to tamper with their Public Square; even as they did in 1966- by way of a more recent example- when it was proposed that a “hospitality building” be erected on the northeast quadrant to house the Cleveland Convention & Visitors Bureau and to serve as an information center for visitors wandering aimlessly around the Square. There was enough public indignation over that project to nip it in the bud quickly, demonstrating that the fierce sentimentality of the people toward the old-fashioned open space in the middle of the city still is alive.

A newspaper writer of the 1890s, possibly the same poet who penned the immortal lines denouncing the fence that had penned the Square in an earlier year, summed up Cleveland’s attitude toward its Public Square in the following heartfelt lines whose message still obtains:

Oasis in the city’s heart,

An Islet in the tide;

While men and decades both depart,

It stays–a people’s pride.