On a high, grassy knoll overlooking East Cleveland stands the Warner & Swasey Observatory. Once a scientific landmark, today it is a bleak sentinel. Although it operated for more than sixty years, offering what the Plain Dealer called "a plumb line to the heavens," light pollution from a growing Cleveland reduced its usefulness with each passing year so that by midcentury it was no longer a reliable resource for astronomical research.

The Warner and Swasey Company, maker of machine tools and precision instruments, got its start in 1880 when Connecticut machinists Worcester Reed Warner and Ambrose Swasey decided to go into business for themselves. Moving to Cleveland, eventually they built a large factory on Carnegie Avenue at East 55th Street to manufacture turret lathes and telescopes. Their products found military uses during both world wars, and they built a number of telescopes for leading observatories, including the University of California's Lick Observatory, which reigned as the world's largest refracting telescope for about a decade in the late 19th century, and the U.S. Naval Observatory. Warner and Swasey operated in Cleveland until being bought out in 1980 by the Bendix Corporation.

Warner and Swasey became trustees of Case Institute of Technology. Among their many gifts to the institution was the Warner and Swasey Observatory. Designed by the renowned Cleveland firm of Walker and Weeks and situated some 270 feet above the level of Lake Erie, the observatory, which opened in 1920, was equipped with a Warner and Swasey-built 9.5-inch refractor. Unlike today's telescopes, which use mirrors to reflect light from objects in space to form an image, older refracting telescopes utilized a lens to refract, or bend, light and render an image.

The initial telescope was used until 1941, when the company delivered a much more powerful, 24-inch telescope, the Burrell Schmidt, housed in a second dome. The observatory mounted groundbreaking studies in the early 1950s, including one to prove the theory that the Milky Way was a spiral galaxy and another that found that cooler stars (red giants) were mainly near the center of the Milky Way. But these discoveries marked the twilight of the observatory's short-lived heyday. When light pollution--a common problem for observatories located near cities--became insurmountable in the 1950s, Case acquired a new site for the Burrell Schmidt telescope near the "chimney" of Geauga County, some thirty miles east of its original location. There it operated from 1957 until 1979, when it was again moved to Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona.

Meanwhile, the Warner and Swasey Observatory was outfitted with a 36-inch telescope. Hailed as the nation's finest for public viewing, it operated for more than twenty years until the observatory closed permanently in 1980, the same year that Warner and Swasey sold out to Bendix. Just as its maker's success led to a corporate takeover that ultimately brought its liquidation, the observatory itself succumbed to a byproduct of the relentless expansion of the city that had attracted two young machinists westward a century before.

Today one can still find the original refracting telescope built for the observatory. Since 1982 it has operated in a small dome atop Case Western Reserve University's Albert W. Smith Building.

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Shaw High School in East Cleveland opened in 1838 thanks to a donation made by Sarah Shaw after the death of her husband John. Since they had no children, she decided to give back to her rural community by donating some of the family's farmland for use as a school yard. Since then, Shaw High School has taken a number of physical forms, but it continues to be located on the Shaw's old farmland along upper Euclid Avenue.

Shaw Stadium — a half-mile northwest of Shaw High — was built in 1923 and served as the home of the National Football League's Cleveland Rams (the city's first professional football team) in 1938. Spectators at football games there today are sure not to miss a performance from Shaw High School's world-renowned Mighty Cardinal Marching Band. In 2008, the band made headlines after traveling to China to perform at ceremonies for the Beijing Summer Olympics.

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The National Electric Lamp Association (NELA) formed in 1901 under Franklin Terry and Burton Tremaine. Much of NELA's light-bulb innovation stemmed from, and competed with, both Charles F. Brush's arc light technology, and Thomas Edison's incandescent lamp technology. GE became a major stockholder in NELA as soon as 1902, and provided the former facilities of the Brush Electric Co. as a new home for NELA. GE's stake in the company become so substantial, 75%, federal courts ordered GE to dissolve the company in 1911. GE quickly absorbed NELA and successively gained ownership of NELA's new industrial complex in the suburbs, Nela Park.

The location for Nela Park was known as Panorama Heights, a place where German immigrants held vineyards prior to the parks development. Nela Park was designed by New York landscape architect Frank E. Wallis in a Georgian style. The finished product was the first ever industrial park, costing roughly $400,000 in 1913. The actual move from the old Brush Electric Co. factory on East 45th Street to Nela Park on Noble Road took nineteen hours to complete on April 18, 1913.

The "park" was developed with the acquisition of 44 land parcels between 1911 and 1925, as well as a few more in the 1930s and ’50s. Ultimately, its 71-acre campus stretched between Noble and Belvoir Roads in East Cleveland and reached into Cleveland Heights to the east for a few blocks. Construction of eleven buildings by 1915 provided facilities for engineering, manufacturing, administration, maintenance, utilities, operations, and lamp laboratories. Eight more facilities were added by 1930, and four more in the 1950s brought Nela’s campus to its present status as a comprehensive lighting development center. Throughout this period, the Nela “camp” was developed on the campus grounds to house recreational, assembly, event, and dining facilities. Its annual holiday light display started in 1924.

The business park also contained several features to appease employees including a decent cafeteria, general library, a dispensary that provided dental, nursing, and medical care, a barber shop, transportation office, ample garage parking, and a local bank branch. Nela Park also provided a range of recreational facilities such as tennis courts, baseball fields, an in-ground swimming pool, bowling alleys, and even an auditorium. Due to its reputation as a leading innovator in electrical lighting research and development, and university campus environment, it doesn't come as much of a surprise that Nela Park developed a reputation as a "University of Light."

A century after Nela Park was built, a centenarian time capsule was unearthed. Originally sealed and buried on March 25, 1912 in front of a crowd of high-ranking employees, the capsule was concealed within a cornerstone of Marketing Building #307 for 100 years to the day before its exhumation in 2012. The capsule contained a newspaper, photos, and most notably several incandescent light bulbs, which in 1912 were a state of the art development. To the delight of the hundreds of current and former employees who witnessed the opening of the time capsule, one of the bulbs was placed on display and successfully produced light despite being stowed away for an entire century. The President and CEO of GE Lighting took the opportunity to point out how appropriate it was that such a lamp still functioned, citing that GE's Nela Park was responsible for the development of quality, energy-efficient lighting products that benefited countless individuals and organizations. Another time capsule was ceremonially buried in 2013 at Nela Park. Among its contents was a GE Energy Smart 60-watt replacement LED bulb with a 22-year service life when operated three hours a day.

By the latter half of the 2010s, General Electric Corporation was undergoing reorganization of its business model and priorities to include the divestiture of the lighting business. In 2020, Savant Systems Inc., of Massachusetts, acquired GE Lighting from General Electric, preserving its name and keeping maintaining its century-long lighting operations intact. Two years later, GE Lighting sold Nela Park to Milwaukee-based Phoenix Investors, with plans to consolidate its operations in one building and attract other tenants to the remainder of the Georgian-style campus.

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