10. Planning the Circle: Land Use and Cooperation, 1870-1940

The new park commissioners (which included not only the mayor and president of the city council, but three appointed commissioners with strong connections to the city’s business class) hired Ernest W. Bowditch, a landscape architect from Boston, to draw up a plan for the parks. His plan for the Doan Brook valley was issued at the end of 1894 and included a boulevard running the length of the park.^[4] Executing the plan required negotiations with the trustees of Case School, who owned a crucial tract of land straddling Doan Brook. They ceded the tract on the condition that it be used for parkland in perpetuity.^[5]

The park board was very successful both in creating a park system and in obtaining the support and cooperation of the city’s elite. But opposition to its efforts came from a citizen group styled the Park Board Reorganization Association, which charged that the board was “autocratic, dictatorial, irresponsible, and unaccountable to the people.” The association also charged that the new parks were located and designed more for people of leisure than the average citizens. (This would have matched the experience of New York City, where the wealthiest residents lived nearest Central Park and made the most use of it.) Their agitation led directly to the abolition of the park board in 1900 and the creation of a Division of Parks and Boulevards in the city government.^[6]

Nonetheless, the elite vision for the park system in Doan Brook valley essentially was fulfilled. A seven-mile boulevard was constructed from the Shaker Lakes to the Lake Erie shore, enhanced by four stone bridges across the valley (designed by Cleveland architect Charles Schweinfurth and funded by  John D. Rockefeller^[7]) that separated local traffic from the boulevard. The adjacent areas, as well as some other areas of the park corridor, were landscaped and planted with trees and shrubs.^[8] This was a perfect route for leisurely carriage or bicycle rides, recreations of the middle and upper classes.

In other aspects, too, the portions of the park adjacent to University Circle were developed with those classes’s, rather than the working class’s, recreation in mind. Wade Park and Rockefeller Park each had lakes with rowboats for rent, and several tennis courts. Wade Park had special roque courts (for playing a form of croquet). Rockefeller Park’s one baseball diamond and its basketball facilities were concessions to citizens without financial resources for rentals or expensive equipment.^[9]

The park system also had another role in separating the classes. The continuous greenbelt from the Shaker Lakes to Lake Erie effectively created a boundary between the Circle and the core of the city to the west. Parkways and greenbelts in late-19th and early-20th century America often were laid out to follow natural features, or designed to be natural barriers against catastrophic urban fires, but were also used to create boundaries between neighborhoods.^[10] Certainly, the parkland along Doan Brook provided a buffer for the University Circle institutions against what their leaders probably thought was undesirable neighborhoods, and the buffer was consciously extended in later years by the University Improvement Company.^[11]

The short-lived effort to plan for at least part of the Circle through park boards was succeeded in the first three decades of the century by plans which were developed in committees of, or by leading members of, the Cleveland Chamber of Commerce, and subsequently executed by civic groups or the city government. The Chamber’s efforts in the Circle followed its successful creation of the Group Plan for government buildings in downtown Cleveland.

Cleveland’s Group Plan was one of the early results of the late 19th-century American fascination with classicism so successfully formulated in the arrangement of buildings at the World’s Colombian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. The Chamber of Commerce had planned Cleveland’s exhibit at the exposition, and afterward showed an enthusiasm for replicating the exposition style (later known as “city beautiful” movement) in Cleveland. In 1899 the Chamber appointed a committee to develop a plan for locating new government buildings in the core of the city, and in 1902 the Chamber sponsored state legislation to create a Group Plan Commission.

The supervising architect of the Chicago exposition, Daniel Burnham, was selected as one of three commissioners. With architects John M. Carrere and Arnold W. Brunner, he drew up a plan in 1903 that called for demolition of several blocks of old buildings to the northeast of Cleveland’s Public Square in order to create a wide mall flanked by new buildings of closely-related designs for city, county, and federal government offices. (Much of the land acquired for the Group Plan was owned by the Case School of Applied Science, a legacy of Leonard Case, Jr.) The plan was adopted, and over the next thirty years a series of neoclassical buildings of matched cornice height were constructed in an attempt to fulfill the plan’s goal.^[12]

The city beautiful impulse also powerfully influenced planning at the Circle, though in the train of the success of the Group Plan. The architects W. Dominick Benes and Benjamin S. Hubbell, designed a monumental neoclassical building (completed in 1916) for the Cleveland Museum of Art on the most dramatic site in the Circle, a slope overlooking the pond, and followed immediately with a plan for a formal grouping of several other cultural buildings at the Circle.^[13] Though not officially adopted, into the 1930s their plan generally was followed.

Hubbell also was instrumental in persuading members of the Cleveland Chamber of Commerce to establish the University Improvement Company in 1918. This real estate enterprise purchased parcels on the western and southern perimeter of the Circle in order to control their future use. As in the Group Plan, a uniform cornice height was set for future public buildings. However, of the expected public buildings (such as a Roman Catholic cathedral) only a few were completed, including John Hay High School, and Epworth-Euclid United Methodist Church.^[14] The University Improvement Company went out of business in the late 1920s, but the idea of a buffer zone for the Circle lingered on in some of the later land purchases of Western Reserve University and Case School.^[15]

In the 1910s there were two further attempts to plan for the Circle which reflected the progressive-era desire for rationalization and efficiency. One, the attempt to create a University of Cleveland, had little chance for fulfillment, but the other, the creation of a University Hospitals-Medical School complex, was completed with great effect on the future of the Circle.

The idea for a University of Cleveland first surfaced during the mayoral years of Newton D. Baker, a leading Progressive-era politician. Baker proposed to unite Western Reserve and Case to form a University of Cleveland with municipal support and brought the proposal before the trustees of both institutions in 1912. He thought that the city’s need for scientific and technical experts could be best supplied by a formal association with the institutions of higher learning in the city. In spite of the city councils’ offer of its full support “both in a financial way and in the enactment of appropriate legislation to the establishment and maintenance of a municipal university,” neither board of trustees took the proposal seriously.^[16]

The idea resurfaced in 1922 when Baker, returning to Cleveland from his post as Secretary of War, broached it while he was a trustee of Reserve. He even approached John D. Rockefeller about donating the Rockefeller estate in East Cleveland and Cleveland Heights as new site for the two institutions.^[17] But the idea of a University of Cleveland did not become a significant issue again until Robert B. Vinson, the newly-arrived president at Reserve whose candidacy had been strongly supported by Baker, began developing plans for the physical expansion of Western Reserve University in 1924. Recognizing the limited possibilities at the Circle, Vinson looked again to Rockefeller estate (which John D. Rockefeller no longer visited after a fire destroyed his home, “Forest Hill”), and to an undeveloped tract in Shaker Heights. Having other plans in mind for his father’s land, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. rejected Vinson’s approach. The Van Sweringen brothers, promoters of Shaker Heights, offered a three-hundred acre site on the condition that the long-mooted merger of Reserve and Case would be consummated. Although the two institutions were able to cooperate in several other ventures at the time, including the founding of Cleveland College, a merger still was not seriously considered.^[18]

The more successful planning venture initiated in the 1910s was the addition to the Circle of a cluster of new medical institutions. The keystone of the cluster was the Medical School of Western Reserve University, which had been part of the university since 1843 but was located downtown.

By 1911 the forefront of medical education was closely allied with laboratory study and research. Western Reserve University was in the process of raising a million dollars in endowment to support the School’s growth and development, and the School had been identified by the Flexner Report (1910) as one of the outstanding medical schools in the nation. But improvement of the school was limited by space and location. The building it occupied had been opened in 1887, and the laboratory adjacent to it completed in 1898: both were inadequate for the physical needs of modern medical research and Instruction. Moreover, the research faculty regarded the downtown site as “deficient in natural light” and as hampered by high levels of smoke and dirt.^[19]

Plans for a new building were first drawn in 1912 and new sites along the city lakefront were considered. One location adjacent to Lakeside Hospital (the school’s teaching hospital) was selected in 1913, but abandoned a few months later when it appeared that a new railroad terminal soon would be built there (bringing more smoke and dirt from the coal-fired locomotives of the era).^[20]

In 1913 the University had joined with Lakeside and the Babies Dispensary and Hospital to form the University Medical Group (in 1926 reorganized as the University Hospitals Corporation), and in 1914 a committee was appointed to plan a site to accommodate all three institutions. The committee was unable to reach a swift conclusion, but the university trustees independently reached a consensus in favor of moving the school to University Circle. In 1913 a group of the wealthiest of them purchased land east of Adelbert Road to accommodate both the hospitals and the Medical School. Wartime distractions postponed action, but in 1922 the trustees decided to proceed with construction at the Circle. Samuel Mather, chairman, personally took responsibility for funding the new medical school, and eventually contributed $2.5 million toward its completion.^[21]

The Medical School began operations at the Circle in 1924 and was joined on adjacent sites by the Babies’ & Childrens’ Hospital and the Maternity Hospital in 1925, and by Lakeside Hospital in 1931. The board of trustees of all the hospitals were merged in 1940.^[22] The new group of hospital and medical school buildings at the Circle was much tighter than those of the Group Plan or in Wade Park. They were relatively unornamented, even while generally Beaux-Arts in inspiration and detail, and had their axes aligned with the rectilinear bordering streets: Euclid Avenue, Adelbert Road, and Abington Road.^[23]

The University Hospitals complex continued to grow and change over the following decades. In 1956 the Hanna Pavilion was opened to treat psychiatric patients, and from 1953 to 1983 Benjamin Rose Hospital (renamed Abington House in 1969) focused on the treatment and rehabilitation of the elderly. Rainbow Hospital for Children moved to the complex in 1971, becoming a constituent of the new Rainbow Babies’ and Children’s Hospital. The research programs of the University Hospitals were strengthened by the opening of the Joseph T. Wearn Laboratory in 1962, jointly funded by the Hospitals and Western Reserve University. The success of that project was followed by another Hospitals-WRU plan which called for renovating old buildings and constructing new ones. The culmination was the opening in 1972 of the Health Sciences Center that housed offices of the medically-oriented academic departments of the now-federated Case Western Reserve University.^[24]

The largest-scale planning attempt for the Circle prior to the 1950s was carried out by the Cleveland Conference for Educational Cooperation (CCEC) in the 1920s. in 1924 Frederick A. Whiting, director of the Cleveland Museum of Art, approached the Carnegie Corporation of New York (a philanthropic foundation created in 1911 by Andrew Carnegie) for initial funding for a planning organization of the Circle institutions.^[25]

Successfully obtaining funding from the Carnegie Corporation (which was interested in promoting adult education through existing cultural institutions), and a pledge from Beardsley Ruml of the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fund that he would serve as an adviser, the Conference was organized on March 25, 1924 with 18 members: Case School of Applied Science, Cleveland Institute of Music, Cleveland Kindergarten Primary Training School, Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland Museum of Natural History, Cleveland Public Library, Cleveland Public Schools, Cleveland School of Architecture, Cleveland School of Art, Cleveland School of Education, John Huntington Polytechnic Institute, Musical Arts Association, The Play House, Welfare Federation of Cleveland, Western Reserve University, Western Reserve Historical Society, the Y.M.C.A., and the Y.W.C.A. The Adult Education Association joined the group later.^[26]

At the second meeting of the Conference in 1924 “the hope was expressed that some way might be found to enable many of the rapidly growing organizations which were members of the Conference and which would soon need new and permanent quarters, to locate themselves with reference to one another in such a way as to render co-operation easy.”^[27] This concern for expansion and proximity dominated the subsequent agenda of the Conference, although the members drew up lengthy lists of desired areas for inter-institutional cooperation.^[28]

The members of the Conference quickly recognized that possible sites for future institutions locations were limited, and focused their attention on the vacant tract in the heart of the Circle bordered on two sides by East Boulevard and Euclid Avenue. (The site was subsequently occupied by Severance Hall and, later, Freiberger Library.) Some of that land had been purchased by the Catholic Diocese of Cleveland as the site for a future cathedral, and some by the Christian Science Church, and some was still in the hands of the Wade Realty Company. When Jeptha H. Wade II learned about the Conference’s interest he withdrew the company’s land from the market, pending the coalescence of the Conference’s plans.^[29]

The seed which crystallized action on the triangle of land was the Cleveland Museum of Natural History’s interest in erecting a new building in the Circle. The museum, founded in 1920, had attractive but inadequate quarters in the former Leonard Hanna mansion at Euclid Avenue and East 26th Street.^[30] The museum’s trustees, led by their president, Harold T. Clark, sought the cooperation of Western Reserve University in acquiring the land, and received an enthusiastic response from Robert B. Vinson, the University’s president. Shortly thereafter both the Cleveland School of Art and the Western Reserve Historical Society, both already located at the Circle, indicated that they were interested in future expansion on the site. After negotiation with the Diocese of Cleveland and the Christian Science Church, the University purchased the land fronting on Euclid Avenue and the parcel on East Boulevard was reserved for the Museum of Natural History.^[31]

It was clear from this episode that future competition for land in the Circle could be severe, and that it was in the best interests of all the institutions to share their plans for expansion. By the winter of 1925-26 the Conference members had come to some general agreements about future endeavors. Yet much of the open land remained in the hands of Wade Realty, or had been sold by Wade with certain restrictions. The Conference appointed Harold T. Clark to consult with Jeptha H. Wade II to seek modifications of the existing deeds. Wade’s approval was obtained shortly before his death on March 6, 1926.^[32]

With this assurance the Conference created a planning commission in 1927.^[33] The commission appointed Abram Garfield, B.R. Walker, and W.R. McCornack, noted planners and architects, as consultants to develop a general architectural scheme for the new buildings. The most significant achievement of this commission was helping to formulate plans for what became Severance Hall of the Musical Arts Association.^[34] Further cooperative efforts seemed unlikely, however, because, as President Vinson put it at a planning meeting early in 1928, “certain problems…, had arisen in connection with the possibility of cooperation around University Circle, especially that of effectively presenting to trustees and others the advantages of centralizing institutional efforts.” In other words, the institutions were unwilling to delegate authority to a joint planning board.^[35]

Without substantial support, the idea of a comprehensive plan for the Circle quickly foundered on the first shoals of the Great Depression. When the institutions began to find that merely keeping their doors open was a serious struggle, the expansionary visions of the 1920s were forgotten. The last meeting of the Conference was in April of 1930.^[36]

The Circle in the 1930 reverted to piecemeal planning, with individual institutions having to take the brunt of land-use decisions. Epworth-Euclid United Methodist Church is an example. Built in 1926-28 in the Circle’s western “buffer zone” created by the University Improvement Company the church had to act alone after 1930 when trying to deal with what it considered unacceptable conditions in the neighborhood.

In 1933 Epworth-Euclid trustees asked the owner of the old Whitehall Hotel just south of the church to tear down the building because it presented a fire risk, and voted to ask the city to take action if there was no response. After the hotel was gone the developer intended to put a gasoline station and restaurant on the site, and the church attempted to enlist the support of other Circle institutions in order to prevent him from doing so. However, with the University Improvement Company liquidated and the CCEC moribund, the church had to sue the developer on its own. In another case, a representative of the church met with the zoning committee of city council to lobby against commercial development of the frontage opposite the church entrance on 107th street.^[37]

The Museum of Art similarly took its own initiative. William Milliken, who succeeded Whiting as museum’s director in 1930, claimed that the Museum of Art’s role in city planning was “to serve the whole city and to use its influence wherever it is possible for the development of a better and more beautiful Cleveland.”^[38] Yet Milliken’s major planning focus was planting trees and shrubs in the Circle, particularly to screen the unsightly parking lots that seemingly were springing up everywhere.^[39]

In spite of the hopes and dreams for a planned “city beautiful” the leaders of University Circle had failed, up to the end of the 1930s, to find a way to develop a comprehensive plan which would rationalize the competing land use needs of the growing number of institutions in the Circle. The compelling visions that had created the Circle and its institutions had not yet been supplanted by visions of how to bring them to agree on common goals and responsibilities.