For the hard-core unemployed in Cleveland’s Gladstone neighborhood, the Woodland Job Training Center represented a way out; a way out of poverty and unemployment, a way to a better future. When the Center opened in 1968, it was part of Superintendent Paul W. Briggs’s strategy of improving the quality of education in Cleveland. Through collaboration with General Electric Co. and funding from the U.S. Department of Labor, the Woodland Job Training Center provided job training, basic education, counseling services, and even personal hygiene and citizenship classes. In short, the Woodland Job Training Center represented a full-frontal assault on the cycle of poverty. Briggs’s idea for the Center echoed the sentiment of President Johnson and his War on Poverty. It also played into greater development plans for the neighborhood itself.

Gladstone, which ran from East 37th to East 55th streets between Woodland Avenue and the Nickel Plate Road rail yard, was often described as the “worst slum” in the city. As such, Cleveland designated Gladstone as an area for urban renewal and sought to revitalize the neighborhood without federal funding. In the late 1950s, however, efforts to convert the neighborhood to light industry stalled as the city of Cleveland found the cost of buying and clearing the land too expansive. In 1968, as federal funding rolled in to aid the development process, Mayor Carl Stokes remained committed to turning the vacant land in the Gladstone neighborhood into a viable place for light industry. Given the mandate from President Johnson to combat poverty where it lived, and Briggs’s commitment to quality education, the Gladstone neighborhood represented the perfect place for a job training center.

The Woodland Job Training Center, located at 4966 Woodland Avenue, connected the unemployed and future workers with job opportunities as they learned. The three-story, 200,000 square foot warehouse—donated by the General Electric Co.—housed classrooms while local companies rented out warehouse and office space. Students were employed part-time by partner companies in the building. The Center offered three different programs. The Job Opportunities in the Business Sector program targeted those who had gone to high school, but were now unemployed. The Work-Study Program for Dropouts paired work opportunities with education to serve those who had dropped out of high school. The Job Training for New Workers program was aimed at at-risk youth—students between 16 and 22 years old and either dropouts or potential dropouts. This program provided training in shops operated by cooperative firms. The diversity of programs offered at the Woodland Job Training Center made the center a resource to combat poverty across the spectrum of the urban community.

From the very beginning, the Woodland Job Training Center produced results. By November 1968, one hundred students had already passed through the center, received training, and found themselves employed by one of fifteen different companies in Cleveland. By the mid-1980s, the Center boasted that less than six percent of students remained unemployed six months after completion. President Johnson’s War on Poverty, however, had waned. In 1985, despite evidence that the center was successful and nearly self-sustaining, the Cleveland Metropolitan School District announced the closing of the Woodland Job Training Center, along with three other facilities, in a cost saving measure. Instead of spending money on schools and vocational programs, politicians prioritized prisons over job-training programs. Money that might have gone to keep the Woodland Job Training Center open went instead to build new, multi-million dollar prisons.

Rumors that Cuyahoga Community College might buy the Woodland Job Training Center left many people hopeful for the future. For community members, the idea of losing the job training and employment opportunities would mean dire consequences for those the center served. Without the ability to get skills training and education, the hard-core unemployed of the Gladstone area would be left with no real option but to turn to criminal activity or dependence on the welfare system to survive. On May 29, 1985, however, any thought of saving the center evaporated when a fire broke out in a third-floor broom closet. The fire department estimated damages at $20,000 and determined the cause of the fire to be arson.

Today, the building at 4966 Woodland Avenue is still owned by Cleveland Metropolitan School District, although students no longer go there. Just down the road sits the Unified Technology Center, part of Cuyahoga Community College’s efforts to provide job training. CMSD offers vocational programs at other high schools around the city, including at Max S. Hayes High School. The idea of combating systemic poverty through a concerted, collaborative effort, however, has disappeared. The mission of Paul Briggs, evidenced by the Woodland Job Training Center, ultimately remains unrealized.

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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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