On November 1, 1970, Reverend George Ramon Castillo and his wife were received into the membership of East View United Church of Christ. The ceremony marked the occasion of Reverend Castillo being installed as the first Black pastor of a Shaker Heights church. Presiding over the service, Rev. John Huston passed on a mission of expanding the fledgling house of worship to his successor with a sermon titled “A Man for This Time.” When Huston accepted the post just four years prior, the future had appeared bleak for the small church. The congregation had not been able to afford a full-time pastor for over six years, during which time membership dropped from 550 to under 100. The congregation held votes on whether to disband or move to a new site in both 1959 and 1965. Each time, however, members chose to stay at the present location. The aging institution, with over half its members in their sixties, was financially distressed and facing atrophy; change was needed to remain relevant and survive.

Although East View would only find stability following 1979 through the efforts of Rev. Valentino Lassiter, the church was given new life by Huston and Castillo’s pastoral leadership between 1966 and 1973. Membership numbers slowly rose during these years, and the church was rescued by the new African American community it served and represented. A rapid demographic shift in the surrounding Shaker Heights community was at the heart of these changes; regional and national efforts by the United Church of Christ to promote integration within both its congregations and society provided the backdrop to realize this transformation. This moment of transition required that East View reach out to its surrounding community and address what the United Church of Christ recognized as the most pressing moral issue of the day: promoting racial equality by breaking down race barriers and battling the discriminatory behavior inherent in a segregated society.

The troubles that accompanied declining church membership were nothing new for East View by the 1960s. While many Cleveland religious institutions shuttered their doors or relocated as congregants increasingly moved to the city’s outer suburbs following World War II, living within a rapidly changing neighborhood was par-for-the-course for East View church members. Transformation was illustrative of life in the dynamic Moreland neighborhood, imprinted on the community's design as a stepping stone into the exclusive world of Shaker Heights. Since its founding in December of 1912, seldom had extended stretches of time passed for the Protestant congregation when either an empty pulpit or financial distress wasn’t following closely behind. A contributing factor to these lurking obstacles, as well as the congregation’s resilience, was the church location: the religious institution was born and grew up along the ever-morphing Kinsman Road. Within the first year of the congregation’s founding, members briefly worshiped at a storeroom near East 139th, quickly moved to a six-room home on East 143rd, and finally purchased a lot on 142nd Street (Elm Street) where a stucco building was constructed.

Formally named East View Congregational Church, the thirty-member organization was received into the Cleveland Congregational Union in January of 1913. The small band of founders came from households of Bavarian, German, English and Manx descent, and held jobs such as a factory foreman, rolling stock laborer, steel mill clerk, paint factory tester, and motorcar machinist. The streetcar line running down Kinsman Road not only connected the City of Cleveland with Chagrin Falls, but allowed these workers to live in the semi-rural environs of East View Village.

While land west of East 140th Street was annexed by Cleveland in February of 1913, the area remained fairly undeveloped until the 1920s. The congregation spent its first decade at this border of Cleveland and East View Village. The area would develop outward from Kinsman Road during these early years. On the Cleveland side, population grew in bounds and extended east towards East View Village. Known as Mount Pleasant and Kinsman Heights, the neighborhoods predominately attracted eastern and southern Europeans; they also included one of Cleveland’s few Black enclaves. To the east of the small church, the Van Sweringen brothers were purchasing all the available lots and farmlands in East View Village that their agents could acquire at a reasonable price.

With East View Village’s population never growing much beyond 600 persons, the pool of potential recruits for East View Congregational Church was severely limited during its first decade of existence. A growing Jewish and Catholic community of neighbors along Kinsman Road in Cleveland didn’t increase the odds for growth either. Despite these evangelical limitations, the congregation slowly increased and an addition to their building was constructed in 1918 for use in programs such as Sunday School. The church struggled to retain their leadership throughout this time, and often relied on support from the Congregational Union of Cleveland to assist with salaries. During periods between the revolving cast of pastors, it was common for visiting ministers to arrive at the church only to find a handful of attendees. In 1919 and 1920, the congregation voted on whether to disband. Both times it was decided to persevere despite financial hardship. To save money, East View began sharing a pastor with the struggling United Church Congregational Church in 1920. Additionally, joint services were held with local Methodist Episcopal congregations during summer months.

By the end of 1922, East View was once financially again able to employ their own pastor - the congregation’s sixth in ten years; with the hiring of Reverend John Logan, the church would find a period of relative stability between 1922 and 1929. Although characterized as a “man without the slightest suggestion of gifts as a speaker,” the new minister offered patience, persistence and administrative capabilities. This set the stage for the congregation to not only grow, but embark on a campaign to build a new place of worship. In June of 1923, the members of East View Congregational Church unanimously voted to sell their property on East 142nd Street and relocate a half mile to the east on Kinsman Road.

East View Village was no more by the time the congregation voted to move. The area surrounding East View Congregational Church had been annexed to Cleveland in September of 1917, as well as additional sections of the village being acquired by the city in February of 1919. With much of their lands gone, residents of East View Village voted to be annexed by Shaker Heights in November of 1919. The church on 142nd Street sat within Cleveland, and the ruralesque character of Kinsman Road was beginning to change as the Jewish and Italian communities grew and migrated eastward. Similar to the residents of East View Village, the small church congregation looked towards the restrictive suburban community of Shaker Heights to be their new home. Herbert C. Van Sweringen, treasurer of the Congregational Union of Cleveland, assisted East View Congregational Church in finding the new location. The brother and occasional employee of Oris and Mantis Van Sweringen encouraged the congregation to choose land in Shaker Heights, and negotiated the purchase of a lot of land and farmhouse where the church now sits.

By March 1924, the deal was complete and East View’s congregation acquired the Gibbs homestead at East 156th and Kinsman Road. The farmhouse was used by the congregation while construction of the new structure was underway, and later sold in order to help pay for the new church. Reverend Logan then began the laborious project of scraping together the necessary $100,000 in funding to move forward with church building plans. This proved difficult as the congregation only consisted of 195 members, but they held high hopes for expanding their institution within the rapidly growing Village of Shaker Heights. The only competition for the church would be the more affluent Plymouth Congregational Church, which was miles away and served a “different constituency.” While encouraged to keep their eye on the goal, East View was advised by the Congregational Union against taking steps toward construction in 1926. Undeterred, the congregation proceeded to reduce their expenses by convinced the Church Building Society and Congregational Union to provide the necessary loans and approval. The final cost of the new structure was $60,000. On February of 1928, a capacity congregation attended the dedicatory rites for East View Congregational Church in Shaker Heights.

Having successfully utilized his skills to build a home for the East View congregation, Reverend Logan “wisely left to open the way for a man capable of building a larger congregation” in 1929. With a pristine building in the rapidly growing village of Shaker Heights, the church was finally positioned to thrive. Then came the next stumbling block for the working and middle-class congregation: The Great Depression. A brand-new debt in tow, the congregation found themselves in a financial struggle that lasted through the 1930s. Not all was bad, however. With salary supplements from the Congregational Union, the church procured a dedicated full-time pastor willing to work for below average wages. Membership grew to above 300 by the mid-1930s. Membership collections, on the other hand, plummeted.

The anticipated expansion of the church was checked by changes to the areas surrounding the Moreland neighborhood. Throughout the 1930s, the population of Mount Pleasant along Kinsman Road rapidly grew and expanded eastward. As part of a member canvas performed by the congregation in 1935, a census of the community a half mile distance from East View claimed that 80 percent of residents were either Catholic or Jewish. By 1939, the church reached what they viewed as the “maximum strength of 275 members including children and young people” from about 100 families. Congregants contributed this ceiling to the continued influx of Italian families into the community. Anticipated annual collections were only between $3,000 and $3,500 that year, as at least 25 percent of families were either unemployed or on relief. The “distressing condition” of outstanding loans was accompanied by the physical deterioration of the building, which was in need of a cosmetic makeover and some minor repairs.

The church fared much better over the next two decades as America’s economic depression ended and organized religion experienced a revival following World War II. The 1940s brought the creation of multiple auxiliary groups to foster the social, professional and religious development of its membership. Church grounds were improved in 1942 as the congregation contributed time and labor during a drive to prepare for the institution’s 15th anniversary. Members also undertook a campaign to eliminate indebtedness and pay off $16,000 of outstanding loans in 1944. In December of that year, the congregation burned its mortgage.

The impact of the war went beyond just bringing in new church members and temporarily ending economic woes. To the west of East View, the area along Kinsman Road was undergoing a new demographic shift. African Americans from the South migrated en masse to northern cities during and following World War II to meet demands for industrial labor. Cleveland’s Black community grew from 85,000 in 1940 to 279,350 in 1965. While Cleveland’s African American population was highly segregated in the Cedar-Central neighborhood, the community quickly reached outwards towards Kinsman Road. Discriminatory lending and rental policies similarly shaped the population movement and segregation of working class and poor African Americans along the inner city’s east side.

The African American enclave in Mount Pleasant had already expanded to as many as 700 families by 1940. Lacking deed restrictions or restrictive covenants, this long-standing Black community continued to attract middle class and professional African Americans with the financial resources to move away from the deteriorating and over-priced inner-city housing. Simultaneously, both physical and economic pathways such as new highway infrastructure and the G.I. Bill presented much of the city’s white and European-descendant communities the opportunity for suburban home ownership. The Kinsman Road Jewish community began to disperse, moving further east into both Cleveland Heights and Shaker Heights neighborhoods following a U.S. Supreme Court decision making deed restrictions illegal in 1948. Cleveland’s border with the Moreland neighborhood and East View church was predominately African American by 1960. Beyond a small population of live-in domestic help and a grouping of about 80 black families in the Ludlow neighborhood, however, Shaker Heights remained nearly all-white. While East View Congregational Church was listed as open to integration in 1957 by the Congregational Union of Cleveland, congregants that year determined that segregation was not yet a pressing problem for their church. Church members decided against taking any type of action at the time to address the issue.

As the problem of segregation was increasingly brought to light by a national civil rights movement, the small church faced institutional changes. In 1957, Congregational Christian churches merged with the Evangelical and Reformed church to create the United Church of Christ. East View voted to join the United Church of Christ in 1961, although the delay was not unique. The process of creating, redrafting and receiving approval for a church constitution took time: meeting the needs of 1,419,000 Congregationalists and 810,000 Evangelical and Reformed Church members, in over 8,000 semi-autonomous congregations, proved to be a long and labor-intensive undertaking. With a united leadership, however, the national institution could provide a stronger voice promoting its religious and social agendas. National, state and regional offices were also better equipped to offer financial support to economically distressed institutions such as East View Congregational Church.

At the time of joining the United Church of Christ, East View Congregational Church was once again financially troubled. The aging congregation was led by an interim pastor completing studies at Oberlin Theological School. While congregants previously voted to both remain open and not relocate following the resignation of their pastor due to health issues in 1959, church membership decreased dramatically. Demographic changes in the Moreland neighborhood during the 1960s presented the congregation a new chance for growth. Moreland transitioned from a nearly all white community to over two-thirds African American by the end of the decade. Previous problems of growing the church in a predominately Catholic and Jewish community no longer applied as this wave of Protestants settled into the neighborhood; issues of integration and segregation could no longer be ignored, however, if the church wished to remain relevant to its surrounding community.

Despite declining membership, the path to integration was not clearly laid out and little changed for the church until the mid-1960s. The issue of segregation and race, however, became the primary national social cause for the United Church of Christ after its Fourth General Synod in 1963. With civil rights legislation being filibustered in the U.S. Senate, and a mass movement pivoted against segregation visibly displayed on America’s streets, issues of racial justice were at the forefront of the nation’s consciousness. Informed by studies and over 20 years of work by sociologists at Fisk University’s Race Relations Department, the United Church of Christ narrowly approved a new policy at its annual national conference that helped define the progressive character of the church going forward. The newly formed United Church of Christ would cut off all funding to churches that practiced segregation. Additional efforts to advance racial justice were also approved that provided legal aid to demonstrators, developed scholarships for African Americans, supported civil rights legislation, and promoted voter registration drives.

Born from a union of the Board of Home Mission of the Congregational Christian Churches and the Board of National Missions of the Evangelical and Reformed Church, the United Church of Christ-affiliated United Church Board for Homeland Ministries was charged with administering and leading the efforts to desegregate all churches within the year. Open membership covenants were sent to all members, but it was soon discovered that the demands for integration had little effect at the local level. A 1964 survey indicated that churches were still discriminating against African Americans, even if by not soliciting for new memberships. Only one-third of United Church of Christ churches were open to all races. Outside of the South, the Midwest had the smallest proportion of integrated congregations at 6.6 percent. Problems in the North rested with its highly segregated society: white churches sat in white neighborhoods, and few African Americans were available for membership.

Since East View Congregational Church was located in a rapidly integrating neighborhood of Shaker Heights, and bounded on the West by a predominately African American section of Cleveland, the struggling church presented an opportunity for the United Church of Christ to develop a strong interracial congregation. In 1964, the Board for Homeland Ministries voted to provide substantial financial support for this project in Shaker Heights. State and regional associations of the United Church of Christ also offered financial assistance to the endeavor of integrating East View; the United Church of Christ’s regional governing body, the Western Reserve Association, undertook a research project and set aside money to assist with hiring a full-time minister and developing a complete church program. The pastor-less East View congregation consisted of 145 members at the time, and its membership only included three Black families.

After a year of declining membership and financial troubles, the church received its new full-time pastor. In January of 1966, it was announced that John Huston would leave his 1,000-member congregation in Lorain, Ohio to take up the cause of rebuilding East View Congregational Church. Huston was known for his anti-poverty and race relations work in Lorain, and chosen for the Shaker Heights “interracial project” because of his commitment to civil rights. In leaving the large church where he had spent over a decade, the pastor wished to concentrate on his ministerial role as a counselor while earning a doctorate in psychology.

East View membership had fallen to just 95 members at the time Huston stepped into his new role. A publicity campaign was immediately initiated to let residents of the surrounding community know that the church desired to be integrated. As part of reinventing the church, the congregation changed its name to East View United Church of Christ. After-school programs and Sunday School, both of which had disappeared over the prior decade, were reinstated. Church doors were opened for daily use by community service groups and area students. Huston’s stated goal was to build a symbol of friendship and service, thereby dispelling any distrust or suspicion the community had about the institution. The efforts were met with success over the following year. Huston successfully engaged local youths to participate in a youth choir and multiple charitable volunteer programs. He also implemented an integrated nursery school program that proved popular with parents wishing to give their children a chance to play with youngsters of different races. Organizations such as the Scouts, Brownies and Moreland Community Association used the church space on a formal basis, while neighborhood children took advantage of an open invitation for after-school play and study groups.

Between 1966 and 1970, Huston continued his efforts to advocate for racial and economic justice. The church would be used as a dialogue center to host group discussion of racial problems, and two college students working at East View coordinated support for the Poor People’s Campaign and Operation Breadbasket. Huston also acted as a member of Mayor Stokes’ Citizens Advisor Committee for Community Development, and worked with other United Church of Christ ministers to develop ways of dealing with problems of urban renewal, police regulations, discrimination in housing and unemployment, and school integration. Huston expanded his role for the United Church of Christ in 1968 to fill a vacancy of pastor for another struggling parish, the Immanuel Church of Shaker Heights.

National and regional efforts of the United Church of Christ during the late 1960s also continued to focus on promoting race relations and battling discrimination both within the church and in society. Rooted in the premise that the church had a responsibility to remain active in promoting civil rights, the Board of Homeland Ministries continued to allocate its financial resources to support efforts at breaking down racial barriers. New programs aimed to recruit civil rights workers to fight a rise in terrorism by southern segregationists. Recognizing shortcomings within the church, a committee of Black ministers was formed to act as a pressure group in 1966 to give a stronger voice to the church’s African American membership and address the limited opportunities available to ministers of color.

As the 1970s drew near, increased national focus was placed on promoting social and economic opportunities for African Americans and promoting racial pluralism. The church also began using its economic and social influence to advocate for an end to the Vietnam War, combat apartheid, draw attention to ecological exploitation, and fight gender discrimination. At the regional level, efforts were made to invest United Church of Christ funds in Black-owned businesses and promote church development in African American communities. Localized attempts to improve race relations also continued, as through the development of a Western Reserve Association task force to identify ways of eliminating conscious and unconscious white racism within the church structure. Much of the regional group’s focus on issues of racial discrimination receded in the 1970s, though, as other pressing issues of church development arose.

In a 1967 letter posted to Martin Luther King Jr., John Huston wrote, “I have felt that unless I did something significant in the area of racial justice I would have been wasting much of my life.” Huston found this calling in his work with Operation Breadbasket, a selective patronage program implemented by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference that was meant to improve economic opportunities in African American neighborhoods. A little over a year later, hoping to find “a greater opportunity to work in race relations, helping to achieve justice in our society, reconciliation and understanding,” Huston submitted his written resignation as pastor of both East View and Immanuel Church. During his brief stay at East View, both the church and the neighborhood had transitioned to becoming predominately African American. Church membership stabilized at around 145 members and the day nursery program continued to be popular within the Shaker Heights community. The small church, however, still required financial assistance from both regional and national offices for survival.

In November 1970, Rev. George Castillo replaced John Huston. Castillo, who had previously held a pastorate in Detroit, was brought into the church with a track record of recruiting new members, working with youth, and developing educational activities for the community. Newspapers accounts reported that Sunday service attendance doubled during his brief stay at East View United Church of Christ, although general membership numbers dropped slightly. The pastor expanded upon United Church of Christ efforts to reach out to the Moreland community; a new Sunday School program was initiated, and the church began offering day care services to working mothers. He also helped found the Western Reserve Association’s Criminal Justice Committee of the United Church of Christ, acted as chaplain of the Warrensville Workhouse, and was a member of the Ohio Black Minister’s Conference. In June 1973, however, the pastor assumed new duties as a chaplain for the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary in Georgia. Castillo was soon after replaced by Rev. Michael Barker, but the remainder of the decade presented new obstacles to the small church’s survival.

As the popularity of institutional religion waned over the 1960s, and eventually fell below pre-Cold War averages in the early 1970s, regional and state offices of the United Church of Christ were forced to explore budget cuts. In this changing environment, East View United Church of Christ found company in its difficulties attracting both steady pastoral leadership and hordes of new congregants. Over 75 percent of Western Reserve Association congregations had less than 300 members by 1974. East View faced additional financial burdens that year, however, having received notice from the City of Shaker Heights of building code violations. The repairs would cost at least $10,000, and the small church needed to take out new loans from both the Board of Homeland Mission and the Western Reserve Association to cover them.

The Board of Homeland Ministries quickly renewed its commitment to the small church during this time of crisis. In part due to the efforts of Castillo and Huston in opening the church to the surrounding community, East View was one of only a handful of churches in Ohio representative of the United Church of Christ’s goals of promoting church desegregation and fostering racial pluralism in its ranks. The Western Reserve Association held the highest percentage of African American membership of any Ohio conference at three percent, primarily because this governing body placed value on its affiliation with churches such as East View United Church of Christ, Hough Avenue United Church of Christ, Shaker Heights Community Church, and the People’s Church in East Cleveland. The Transitional Church Committee was formed in 1975 by the Western Reserve Association to research strategies for aiding these east side churches. The committee developed plans to help the congregations become self-sustaining, and provided each church five years of financial support to be divided by and paid through the United Church of Christ’s regional, state and national offices.

With financial assistance in place, the congregation was once again confronted with the all-too-common problem of an empty pulpit. Reverend Barker accepted a calling in Chicago to act as pastor in September 1976. East View faced plenty of competition in attracting new leadership; eleven Western Reserve Association churches simultaneously had vacancies of either pastor or assistant-pastor that year, four of which were on Cleveland’s East Side. East View remained without a full-time minister until the installation of Reverend Valentino Lassiter in September 1979. Church membership fell to 79 persons. Lassiter later recollected that, upon becoming the new pastor, Sunday services rarely attracted more than twenty-five persons.

Starting from scratch, the new pastor personally reached out to the surrounding community and began slowly re-growing the congregation. Using fliers and word of mouth, Lassiter worked to revive interest in the small church. Even after more than a decade as a predominately African American congregation, the new pastor found many neighborhood residents did not know that East View aimed to serve the surrounding community. As in the past, the church was opened to the community for use by clubs and community service organization such as the Scouts and Moreland on the Move. Departing from precedent, though, the new pastor slowly revamped services that were steeped in traditional Congregational practices to take on elements of the Black church and African American worship. Within a decade of Lassiter's arrival, church membership had expanded to over 200 persons. More importantly, Sunday masses — with the church's gospel choir sitting high above the pulpit — was regularly filled with just as many joyful attendees. Beyond the popular children's and gospel choir, East View United Church of Christ offered its growing congregation a variety of opportunities for civic, religious and social involvement. Church members advanced the formation of a large bible study group, held a popular annual community essay competition, and cultivated a variety of women's and men’s social clubs.

Rev. Lassiter also kept busy. The full-time pastor began work in John Carroll's religious studies department shortly after the completion of his theology doctorate in 1989, where he eventually became the pastor in residence. In addition to his day jobs, the pastor participated as a member of a variety of community groups including Moreland on the Move, the Interchurch Council of Greater Cleveland, the Harambee Board, the Mt. Pleasant Ministerial Alliance, the Moreland Community Association Credit Union, the Greater Cleveland Roundtable, and the 25th District advisory committee.

Valentino Lassiter continued to act as pastor of the parish until his death in the summer of 2015. Under his leadership, the United Church of Christ's mission for the small parish was finally achieved. The church had become a vibrant religious institution within the community it served. Rev. Lassiter's leadership and thirty five-plus year tenure as pastor offered a stability that allowed the church to not only evolve under his guidance, but to be both shaped by and representative of its congregants' lives, experiences and interests.

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As you drive east on Kinsman Road today through Cleveland's Mount Pleasant neighborhood and approach East 154th Street, you come upon and notice it--almost before you notice anything else. You see it before you see that Kinsman Road has now become Chagrin Boulevard. And it greets your eyes even before they are greeted by the nearby Shaker Heights welcome sign. It's that long expanse of yellow brick wall--interrupted only once by a driveway-- that stretches for more than two city blocks along the south side of Chagrin. It is the Shaker Heights Service Center and it tells you that you have left Cleveland and have now entered one of the area's premier suburbs. How the Service Center came to be sited there, in Shaker’s Moreland neighborhood, is a fascinating story about city planning and resident activism.

Before the Service Center was built, Shaker Heights had for decades kept all of its service department trucks, other vehicles, and equipment on a five-acre parcel of land on East 173rd Street in Cleveland, just south of Harvard Avenue. In the early 1960s, nearby Cleveland residents and businesses began complaining to their ward councilman about odors coming from the yard as a result of Shaker using it also as a transfer station for city garbage. In large part as a result of these complaints, the city, which had since the previous decade been looking for a better location for its service yard, intensified its search and in January 1962 proposed to relocate it to a vacant parcel of land on the southeast corner of the intersection of Chagrin Boulevard and Warrensville Center Road, adjacent to Highland Park Cemetery. Opposition from Shaker residents living in the Mercer and Sussex neighborhoods, as well as nearby businesses, however, prompted the city to reject the site. Five years would pass before Shaker Heights would again attempt to relocate the service yard to within its city limits. In the interim period, it and Cleveland remained at impasse. Cleveland could not shut down Shaker's lawful activities on land that Shaker owned, but Cleveland could prohibit Shaker from expanding its activities there and from constructing modern buildings to house its service department vehicles and equipment.

It was Shaker Heights' decision in 1966 to hire two nationally known architects, Leonard Styche from Milwaukee and Don Hisaka, whose offices were in Cleveland but who was a resident of Shaker Heights, to create a city master plan that eventually provided the opportunity to site the Service Center in Moreland. The Styche-Hisaka Plan recommended a substantial redevelopment of the southwestern and southeastern sections of Shaker Heights, stating that it was necessary in order to improve the city's tax base for the future and to stem the tide of white flight from the aging middle class housing of these sections that was occuring during racial transition there. Official meetings on the plan had not even been scheduled in January 1967, when news leaked that a key feature of phase one of the plan was a proposal to construct a large civic center (a building that was expected to house the Shaker Historical Society, the Shaker Players, the Shaker Symphony and other cultural groups) at the intersection of Hildana and Hampstead Roads, in the southern part of the Moreland neighborhood. In order to calm residents' fears, the city scheduled an informal meeting, under the auspices of the League of Women Voters of Shaker Heights, on February 22 at Woodbury Junior High School to share the details of the master plan.

Hundreds of residents, mostly from the Moreland neighborhood, showed up for the meeting. There, Shaker Heights officials confirmed that a civic center was indeed proposed for the Moreland neighborhood and that it would likely displace 75 families whose houses would be demolished to make room for it. The officials added, however, that, prior to this occurring, the city planned to provide new housing in Moreland which would be available to displaced residents. Anxious residents responded by expressing their concerns over losing their homes and questioning whether they would even be able to afford the planned new housing. While representatives of Operation Equality, an organization created to expand housing opportunities in the Cleveland area for African Americans, and the Urban League of Cleveland, both of whom had been in contact with the city administration, stated that they saw no evidence that the plan was intended to remove African Americans from Moreland, at least one Moreland resident who had attended the meeting disagreed, calling it "a thinly disguised containment program for the Moreland negro population."

Following the February 22 meeting, the Moreland Community Association (MCA), an organization formed in 1962 and largely funded by the Cleveland Foundation to help stabilize Moreland during its racial transition, and a number of local block clubs, scheduled almost weekly meetings with residents to discuss the Styche-Hisaka master plan as it pertained to their neighborhood. When Council held its first official public hearing on the plan on May 1, 1967, more than 300 residents showed up. According to news accounts, it was the largest audience in the history of Shaker Heights council meetings. Netta Berman, MCA president, who attended the meeting, conveyed the residents' feelings, including their strong opposition to the proposed civic center, and suggested that, in phase one of the plan, the city do something about the south side of Chagrin Boulevard between the Cleveland city line and Lee Road, the condition of which she intimated was adversely impacting the neighborhood.

Within days following the May 1, 1967 hearing, Shaker Heights Mayor Paul K. Jones announced that the proposed civic center would not be built in the Moreland neighborhood. Several months later, Jones appointed a 15-member master plan advisory committee, which included two MCA representatives--Patricia James (whose husband Clarence would be appointed Cleveland law director in 1968 by Mayor Carl Stokes) and William B. Hammer (who also served as operations coordinator for the Metropolitan Housing Authority), charging the committee with the task of coming up with alternatives to the master plan's proposed redevelopment of the Moreland neighborhood. Meeting for the next several months, the committee presented its recommendations to Shaker Heights City Council in January 1968. Among them was a proposal to fund the construction of a service center along the south side of Chagrin Boulevard near the Cleveland city line, the area that MCA president Berman had stated needed immediate redevelopment. City Council accepted that committee recommendation and thereafter voted to submit a bond issue to the electorate providing funding for land acquisition and construction. While the bond issue was endorsed by the Moreland Community Association, it was not without its opponents. On July 22, 1968, Robert LaChance, who lived at 3742 Menlo Road, submitted a petition to Council signed by 71 residents of Menlo and Pennington Roads, opposing the issue. (At the same meeting, MCA vice-president James Peoples spoke in support of the issue.) Shaker housing officers Alan Gressel and Suzanne Spetrino also actively campaigned against the issue, and were, allegedly as a result of their opposition, fired by Mayor Jones. On November 5, 1968, the Shaker Heights electorate passed the issue by a vote of 8257 to 5275.

Over the course of the next two and one-half years, the city purchased 32 homes on Menlo, Pennington and Ludgate Roads, as well as a number of commercial properties on Chagrin Boulevard, that were located on the site of the new Service Center, moving some of the homes and demolishing the rest, before then proceeding to construct the Center. Pursuant to a relocation policy that it had entered into with the Moreland Community Association in January 1968, the city offered housing assistance to all residents who had been displaced. County deed records and local directories show that, of the 27 families whose relocation information could be found, only 12 moved to a new address in Shaker Heights, with the remaining 15 moving out of the city. The new Shaker Heights Service Center became operational in April 1971 and was officially dedicated on May 1 of that year.

The Shaker Heights Service Center has now for 47 years fulfilled the city's need to have a service yard located within its city limits. It is a notable gateway to Shaker Heights and improved the appearance of the south side of Chagrin Boulevard near the Cleveland city line. It also blocked commercial retail traffic on Chagrin from Menlo and Pennington Roads. But the story of the Shaker Heights Service Center is not just one about the needs of the city that were filled or the benefits that may have been derived by the Moreland neighborhood. It is also, and maybe more importantly, a story about neighborhood activism and how residents, working together and making sure that their voices are heard by city hall, can have a positive impact on the future development, and redevelopment, of their neighborhood.

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Benjamin McClane Spock (1903-1998) was born to an upper-class Connecticut family. He attended private schools and Ivy League colleges, along the way capturing a gold medal in rowing for his Yale team in the 1924 Olympics. He graduated first in his class at medical school, and after a series of internships and residencies in both pediatrics and psychiatry, he settled into a pediatrics practice in New York City. In his practice, he discarded the lecturing style that traditional pediatricians at the time used with new mothers, instead listening to what mothers had to say and then applying Freudian psychoanalytic concepts to help them to raise their babies and children in what he believed would be a healthier way. At the urging of a publishing company, he organized his progressive child rearing advice into a book entitled "The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care," which was published in 1946. Consistent with his desire to empower new mothers, he began the book with the now famous words: "Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do." Almost overnight the book became a huge success, selling millions of copies. Soon it was known as the "bible" for raising children in post-World War II America.

In 1955, after teaching stints at the Mayo Clinic and University of Pittsburgh, Dr. Spock moved to Cleveland, where he became an assistant professor at the Western Reserve University medical school, heading a newly established child development program there. In addition to teaching medical students and being a popular figure on the lecture circuit, he sought funding to conduct a study on some of the era's more controversial questions regarding child-rearing. In 1958, he received a grant to do so from the W. T. Grant Foundation. The study was conducted by a group of twelve pediatricians, psychologists and psychiatrists at the medical school who followed and counselled twenty-four young families in the Cleveland area. The families were selected by obstetricians on the staff of the MacDonald House (now known as University Hospitals MacDonald Women's Hospital). For his part in the study, Dr. Spock became pediatrician to two families with ties to Shaker Heights. The first was the Diener family--James and Nathalie and their children Kenneth (b. 1959) and Linda (b. 1960). The Dieners lived in South Euclid at the time the study began, but in 1963 they moved into the Boulevard neighborhood of Shaker Heights, purchasing a house on Weymouth Avenue that had been previously owned by Mrs. Diener's parents. Later, the family moved to Larchmere Boulevard buying the house of legendary Cleveland Orchestra conductor George Szell.

The other family that Dr. Spock studied was the Rosenberg family--Marvin and Janet, and their twin girls, Miriam and Ruth (b. 1960). Janet was at the time a social worker at the Jewish Family Services Association. When she and her husband became participants in the study in 1959, she was pregnant and they were living on South Woodland Road in Shaker's Onaway neighborhood. After their daughters were born the following year, they moved into the Moreland neighborhood, a largely Jewish area that was then beginning to undergo racial transition. The Rosenbergs first rented at 3286 Milverton Road, but several years later purchased a house up the street at 3452 Milverton where they lived for nearly the next three decades. And thus the legend of a twins study by Dr. Spock in the Moreland neighborhood was born.

Growing up in Moreland, the Rosenberg twins attended Moreland Elementary School, then Woodbury Junior High, and finally Shaker Heights High School from which they graduated in 1978. Their first friends in the neighborhood were African Americans, a fact likely not lost on Dr. Benjamin Spock, who was a staunch advocate for integrated neighborhoods and schools. On May 14, 1964, a year before Miriam and Ruth Rosenberg were scheduled to begin kindergarten at Moreland Elementary School, Dr. Spock, at the invitation of the Moreland Community Association, an association formed to stabilize the neighborhood during racial transition, came to the school and gave a talk, urging parents to teach their young children not to grow up to be bigots.

When Miriam and Ruth Rosenberg were very little, they had weekly visits with Dr. Spock, with the visits becoming less frequent as they grew older. Dr. Spock typically saw the twins at his office on the campus of Western Reserve University, but he also interacted with them over the years at their home and at their schools. When the Rosenberg twins were seven years old, Dr. Spock retired from Western Reserve University, moving back to the east coast and becoming more active in the peace movement and in other social justice causes. According to his biographer Thomas Maier, the child rearing study begun in 1959 floundered after Spock left Cleveland, and no comprehensive study results were ever published.

Though he departed the area and his child rearing study suffered as a result, Dr. Spock continued to keep in touch with the Rosenberg family, making annual visits, when possible, to Cleveland to check up on them. During these years, according to one of the twins, Dr. Spock became like a grandfather to them, a sentiment that was echoed by Ken Diener, a child from the other Shaker Heights family that Spock studied. Spock's last visit with the Rosenberg twins, whom he referred to as "his last babies," was in 1996 when they were 36 years old. He told them that it would be his last visit, as he was becoming too frail for travel. Dr. Benjamin Spock died two years later in 1998, less than two months before his 95th birthday. For the Moreland neighborhood of Shaker Heights, Dr. Spock will always be remembered as more than just a famous pediatrician, author and social activist. He was the personal pediatrician to one of their families and a guiding light in the neighborhood's struggle in the 1960s to maintain stability while undergoing racial transition.

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Derrell Max Ellis (later known simply as Max Ellis) was born on March 10, 1914, in Wellington, Kansas. The youngest of four children, Max grew up in Iowa and studied theater at the University of Iowa, performing in plays in the 1930s written by fellow Iowa student Thomas Williams, later more famously known as Tennessee Williams. After graduating in 1939, and serving a short stint as assistant director of the Erie Playhouse in Erie, Pennsylvania, Ellis came to Cleveland in 1942 and became an actor at the Cleveland Play House. Founded in 1915, the Cleveland Play House is America's oldest professional regional theater. Ellis landed his first role the following year in the theater's production of "Arsenic and Old Lace." Described by one reporter as "portly, rotund and mustached," he soon became one of the most sought after and popular local actors at the Play House, performing in more than 200 roles over the course of the next two decades.

In 1956, Ellis was asked to take on a new role on a Cleveland local television show. An advertising agency had come up with a new idea for promoting Christmas shopping at the Halle Brothers department store downtown. It had created a story about a fictional elf, Mr. Jingeling, who had manufactured new keys for Santa Claus's toy treasure house after Santa had misplaced them. Jingeling was rewarded for his ingenuity by being named Santa's chief elf and keeper of the keys. The character of Mr. Jingeling had initially been performed by Tom Moviel, a Cleveland police officer, but once the decision to produce the television show was made, it was decided that a professional actor was needed for the role. The show began airing twice every afternoon every year between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Cleveland children soon learned that one of the best ways to get Santa's ear for that special holiday toy was to visit Mr. Jingeling on Halle's seventh floor.

In the year following the introduction of the television show, Max Ellis and his wife Myra, also an actor, moved from their apartment on East 86th Street, just down the street from where the Play House had then been located. They chose a home in the Moreland neighborhood of Shaker Heights. The house at 3427 Ashby Road was a modest Cape Cod-style house which had been built in 1942, during the decade in which many new houses were built on Ashby and surrounding streets in the northern part of the Moreland neighborhood. This neighborhood, located in the southwest section of the suburb and often called the Gateway to Shaker Heights, is notable--and distinguishable from much of the northern and eastern neighborhoods of Shaker--for its grid streets and moderately priced houses. In the mid-twentieth century, many people of moderate means moved into the neighborhood in order to have access to Shaker's exceptional educational system, the Shaker Rapid Transit, and nearby Chagrin-Lee-Avalon Shopping Center.

It is not known which, if any, of these traditional attractions drew the Ellises to Moreland. It may have simply been that they learned that the house had become available when its prior owners, John and Frances Ryan, also members of the Cleveland area acting community, suffered tragic deaths within 15 days of each other in September 1956. The Ellises purchased the house from the Ryans' estate in January of the following year. Max Ellis only lived at 3427 Ashby for seven years, but from an article appearing in the Cleveland Press in March 1964, it was obvious that the house was a source of pride for him. He described its interior in detail to the reporter who interviewed him and boasted of the addition to the rear of the house that he and his wife had added. Sadly, Max Ellis, just 50 years old, died suddenly in June 1964, just several months after this interview.

The Mr. Jingeling role that Max Ellis had performed for almost a decade was taken over by Earl Keyes, who had been the director of the Christmas season television show. Keyes, today perhaps the better known Mr. Jingeling, continued to play the role of the jolly elf for the next thirty years. Myra Ellis, Max's widow, continued to live in their home on Ashby Road in Shaker's Moreland neighborhood until 1969, when, after remarrying, she moved from the area. Today, the well-maintained house at 3427 Ashby Road still looks much like it did more than a half century ago when it was the home of the original Mr. Jingeling.

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“Entering Apartheid Shaker: Home of Barricades” was the message commuters read as they drove under a large banner while entering Shaker Heights along the Cleveland border in September of 1990. The banner was put up by Cleveland city councilman Charles Patton, who stated that “if the Berlin Wall can come down, so can the Shaker barricades.” His frustration was fueled by years of negotiation leading nowhere regarding the traffic barriers installed along the Cleveland and Shaker Heights border fourteen years prior.

In 1976, temporary traffic barrels were placed on six streets in the Lomond neighborhood of Shaker Heights: Scottsdale Boulevard at Lee, Avalon, Ingleside, and Warrensville Center Roads; Rawnsdale Road at Lomond Boulevard; and Kenyon Road just east of Lee Road. Some of these blocked Cleveland motorists from entering Shaker streets, creating overflow in the adjacent neighborhoods of Warrensville Heights and Lee-Harvard. Shaker Heights declared that the barriers were put up at the request of residents to prevent accidents and traffic jams. Few traffic accidents or backups were recorded in newspapers from this time, but traffic influx was a problem many suburbs faced during the increase of suburban migration during the twentieth century. By the time the barriers were installed, the suburban fringe that makes up the Cleveland-Shaker border had become predominantly African American as a result of black migration into the suburbs during the 1960s. Therefore, the roadblocks along or near the border were perceived as a racially driven decision by many Cleveland residents, some even decrying “the Berlin Wall for black people.” 

The 1976 barricades were not the first racially charged traffic decision made by Shaker Heights. As early as 1959, Shaker changed the name of Kinsman Road to Chagrin Boulevard, beginning at the border of the suburb. The name was changed after the murder of a white businessman by three African American youths on Kinsman, about a mile west of the Shaker city limits. Merchants, business owners, and community members petitioned to have the name changed. Some residents even stated they were embarrassed to give their addresses while shopping because clerks would assume they “lived near the murder.”

That same year, Shaker Heights politicians were discussing the use of traffic diverters in their attempt to separate the wealthy suburb from its inner-city neighbors. Shaker Heights mayor Wilson G. Stapleton, who also happened to be the Dean of the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law, stated, “As mayor of this community … I certainly am not going to go out and promote integration in the face of many of our citizens who would not favor it…” Stapleton’s comments highlight the fear many suburbanites had toward city folk--particularly African Americans--for they thought the newcomers' presence would lower property values and jeopardize the safety of their neighborhoods. This fear is what led Shaker to attempt to block off streets in 1959, although the barricades were not approved by city council.

By 1976, the barricade debacle was in full swing and six streets had been blocked off as part of a 180-day trial. In 1979, two of the six original barriers became permanent, at Avalon and Ingleside Roads in the block between Scottsdale Boulevard in Shaker and Invermere Avenue in Lee-Harvard. With many residents upset about their permanent installation, the decades that followed saw an ebb and flow between local disputes and court battles. A Common Pleas Court hearing in 1985 resulted in an order to take down the barriers immediately at the suburb’s expense. The ruling was soon met by a 60-day reprieve ordered for Shaker Heights until the barricade dispute was officially settled. By 1987, after an 11-year conflict, the Ohio Supreme Court overturned the prior court rulings and stated that the suburb had constitutional rights when it first installed the traffic diverters. Shaker was now legally able to keep the barricades on the streets where they were permanent. 

Shaker Heights was cheerful after the Supreme Court ruling, but with its excitement came discontent in Cleveland. Many residents worried about the relations worsening between the two cities. Frustrated with the pending debate, residents and community members of the Lee-Harvard neighborhood took matters into their own hands, planning protests and boycotts of Shaker businesses. One man, Everett Gregory of Invermere, along with fifty other demonstrators, held a protest at the Shaker Rapid one morning in October 1987. Gregory, 76 years old at the time, laid on the railroad tracks at 7:30 a.m., stopping five trains packed with more than 100 commuters. Although there were no injuries or arrests, Shaker Heights was upset and the mayor called his behavior undesirable and “uncivilized.”

Today, more than forty years later, two of the original barricades remain on Avalon and Ingleside Roads at Scottsdale Boulevard. Although they may be unusual locally, traffic diverters like these are also found elsewhere in the nation. In the late 1960s, an almost identical barrier was installed on Van Horne Avenue on the border of El Sereno and South Pasadena, California. Similarly, multiple roadblocks were installed in Detroit, Michigan, along Alter Road, a street that runs north and south along the border of Detroit and its wealthiest suburb, Grosse Pointe Park. In both of these cases, the barriers were ostensibly installed to prevent speeding motorists and to foster neighborhood safety.  After comparing the barricades in El Sereno, Detroit, and Shaker Heights, it is crucial to note a common element. All of the barriers only have traffic signs facing the non-white neighborhoods reading, “Not a Through Street” or “No Outlet,” whereas the signs facing the predominately white suburbs are left blank and in the case of Shaker Heights, nonexistent. Placement of signposts suggests that barriers were intended only for one community and in all three of these examples that community happens to be of a lower-income minority. 

Defenders of the barricades have always denied racist motives and mention that Shaker Heights is one of the most racially diverse suburbs in the United States. Other people question how race could be a factor when the Lomond neighborhood of Shaker Heights, which lies immediately to the north of the barricades, had a substantial black population when the barriers were erected. Approaching this question requires grappling with the messy intersection of class and race. In other words, we must consider the possibility that when middle-class blacks obtained homes in Shaker, perhaps they bought into an exclusive, if not exclusionary mindset. Shaker’s concerns on traffic and neighborhood safety are plausible and legitimate, but they are not necessarily independent from attitudes of class and race.

Whether the reasoning behind the barriers was racism or not, they remain an example of the trials cities face in the wake of suburban migration during the twentieth century. The political issues that were created by the Shaker barricades are a result of the dual political cultures in the two cities. Localism and the often conflicting ideologies of the two communities were at the core of the debates in the years that followed the installation of the barricades. More importantly, the legacy of the barricades left a stamp on the community. The changing demographics in Cleveland, without doubt, created racial tension between the city and its suburban neighbors. After exploring the Shaker barricades, one thing is for certain: Local community politics play the most important role in shaping racial tensions on the suburban fringe.

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In 1811 Jacob Russell moved his family from their home in Windsor Locks, Connecticut, into the wilderness of the Connecticut Western Reserve. Upon his arrival, Russell purchased 475 acres in Warrensville Township, founded by the Daniel Warren family from Ackworth, New Hampshire, in 1808. Ralph Russell, the ninth of twelve Russell children, first visited his parents' tracts of land in 1811. After his visit, he returned to Connecticut to lead 18 other Russell family members to the Northeast Ohio settlement in 1812. Between 1818 and 1821, Ralph Russell experienced a whirlwind of life events. In 1818 he married Laura Ellsworth, a childhood friend from Connecticut. Then in 1821, the patriarch of the Russell family, Jacob Russell passed away.

Ralph Russell was stricken with grief due to the loss of his father and traveled to Lebanon, Ohio, to seek spiritual guidance from the Union Village Shaker Community in 1822. Russell was so moved by the beliefs and teaching of the Shakers that he returned to his family's settlement and began converting family members to his newfound religion. Russell converted three of his brothers to the religion, and they dedicated their family, land, and belongings to the North Union settlement, land within modern day Shaker Heights and Cleveland Heights. The first official meeting of the North Union Shaker community occurred in 1828, where 36 members signed the Covenant, officially dedicating their lives to Shakerism. Oddly enough, Ralph Russell's name does not appear on the Covenant. Russell and his family later moved away from the community to Aurora, Ohio, where he lived until his death in 1866.

Visitors to meetings of The United Society of True Believers in Christ's Second Appearing named them "Shakers" or "Shaking Quakers" due their sporadic and erratic movements during worship. Although it was not their official name, the Shakers across America adopted the nickname and used it in the marketing of their products. The Shakers were one of a number of utopian-minded sects that originated in the "Burned Over District" in western New York and were inspired by the Second Great Awakening, such as the Oneidas, Millerites, and Mormons. Founded by Mother Ann Lee, who immigrated to the United States from Manchester, England, in search of religious freedom in 1774, the Shakers were known for their communal living, pacifism, celibacy, and equality amongst all people. Within their communities, men and women were viewed as equals. Men and women leaders, called Elders and Eldresses, were viewed as having the same level of power within the community. The Shakers enjoyed a reputation as hardworking and industrious people who lived their motto of "Put your hands to work and your Hearts to God."

At their height of membership in the 19th century, the Shakers occupied a total of 24 settlements in the United States. Shaker settlements worked within certain industries not only to put their hands to work, but also to provide for community members and generate economic stability for the community. North Union was no exception. The North Union community, who named this place "The Valley of God's Pleasure," was known for bee keeping, broom making, textile production, blacksmithing, animal husbandry, and harvesting seeds and herbs used for cooking and medicinal purposes. The community made sure that all of the needs of the community members were met before selling their products and services to the "outside world." For North Union, interaction with the outside world usually consisted of doing business at markets in downtown Cleveland and at Doan's Corners (East 105th and Euclid Avenue - present day University Circle).

Shaker communities were divided into different families where familial ties were dissolved, and everyone became a Shaker brother or Shaker sister. North Union was divided into three families: Mill, Center, and East. These families were relatively autonomous as each had its own Elder, Eldress, Deacon, and Deaconess. The Mill family was closest in proximity to and worked in the community's mills, and the East family oversaw childcare and education for new converts. The Center family was the most spiritually advanced and served as the administrative center for the whole community. North Union took in orphans and runaways. After completing a "novice period" and signing a covenant to give up all their personal belongings, new members were assigned to a junior family order. Each family played a significant role in the development of North Union, which reached its peak membership of 300 Shakers by 1850.

In 1843, the North Union Shakers claimed that Jesus Christ visited their community for three months. Nonetheless, by the 1870s any residual excitement from the purported visit had surely dwindled in the North Union Shaker community. Although the North Union Shakers took in orphans and runaways, it was not enough to overcome the repopulation challenges resulting from their celibate beliefs. Along with the decrease in devout dedication to Shaker beliefs after the Civil War, the lure of industrialization pulled the younger members away from the community. The remaining members decided to move to southwestern Ohio Shaker colonies, and the North Union settlement officially closed in 1889. Also, it has been suggested that Brother Joseph Slingerland influenced the sale of North Union in order to strengthen Union Village and bolster that community, which continued until July 1920.

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The settlement of the Heights on Cleveland's east side was dependent upon electric streetcars with sufficient power to ascend the Portage Escarpment at Cedar Glen in the 1890s. From there, streetcars opened heights land for development progressively farther east until the Van Sweringen brothers faced the task of making their distant Shaker Heights project accessible to downtown. The Vans created the Cleveland & Youngstown Railroad to make this connection, envisioning an interurban train linking Cleveland to the growing east side, and specifically their Shaker Village development (later Shaker Heights). The C&Y became their means of performing a number of transportation projects, building freight yards for other railroads and, here, putting in place the infrastructure necessary to bring the Shaker Rapid down off the Heights.

Trains, including the Rapid, require gentle grades in order to be operated economically. Too steep a slope and additional engines have to be added, or less weight can be hauled up hill, or both. To traverse the eighty feet of elevation between Shaker Square and the base of the Escarpment cliff west of Woodhill Road, a long elevated roadbed was required, including several bridges to allow north-south traffic to cross below the tracks. This roadbed is a little over a mile in length, meaning the resulting 1.25 percent grade could permit the Rapid to run affordably between Shaker Heights and downtown Cleveland.

The grading of the Rapid's right-of-way actually starts at Shaker Square, as the roadbed gradually descends into a trench between the two lanes of Shaker Boulevard, eventually becoming deep enough to pass underneath Woodhill Road. From that point west the tracks emerge onto an elevated bed that gradually descends to the level of the city. In doing so, it crosses over nine streets and two sets of railroad tracks, each of which has a bridge carrying the Rapid overhead. The bridge at Holton Avenue is one of Cleveland's most interesting and unappreciated structures.

This roadbed was created by building a temporary trestle of logs to get the tracks sufficiently elevated. Then trains of hopper cars were brought in on these tracks to dump large quantities of dirt and stone ballast to fill in the trestle. This was more economical than trying to pile up the ballast from below and then place tracks on top later.

At first the Rapid reached the bottom of the roadbed and moved onto tracks in the city's streets to finish the journey to Public Square, but that was only a temporary expediency. The ultimate goal was to bring the Rapid into the lower level of the Van Sweringens' new Cleveland Union Terminal passenger station beneath their Terminal Tower complex. To do this, the trains needed to come into town near the level of the river, where the major railroad passenger trains would also be delivering passengers to the C.U.T. This entailed extending the Rapid's grade dozens of feet lower, which they did through the gradual descent of Kingsbury Run, a tributary of the Cuyahoga River. It was the need to secure rights to use existing tracks of the Nickel Plate Road that led to the Vans purchasing the Nickel Plate Railroad and becoming a major player in North American railroading in the 1930s.

But the original focus of their attention was developing Shaker Heights up on the Portage Escarpment and making it possible to move their homeowners quickly to their jobs in downtown Cleveland. This led to their building the Cleveland & Youngstown's elevated roadbed that is largely unseen by the multitude of people who still ride the RTA's Green and Blue Lines west of Shaker Square, but deserves to be recognized as an important piece of Cleveland's urban infrastructure.

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In 1956, an explosion disturbed the usually quiet suburban neighborhood of Ludlow. Someone had planted a bomb in the garage of John G. Pegg, an African American lawyer who was building a new house on Corby Road. The racial attack sparked a biracial movement in this pastoral corner of Cleveland and was one of the first incidents that brought the neighborhood together to support integration.

Ludlow straddles the border between Cleveland and Shaker Heights, bounded by Van Aken Boulevard, Milverton and Livingston roads, South Moreland Boulevard, and South Woodland Road. This area of curvilinear streets corresponds with the Ludlow Elementary School district in the Shaker Heights City School District. In the 1950s and 1960s, Shaker Heights was among the nation's most affluent suburbs and was known for its quality of education. As a result of this prestige, more families wanted to move into the school district. Adjacent to the Mt. Pleasant neighborhood of Cleveland, which already had a large black population, Ludlow's location invited the attention of aspiring African American homeowners who hoped to obtain better housing. As in many suburban neighborhoods in the United States at the time, the arrival of the first black families unsettled many white homeowners. Realtors stopped showing houses in Ludlow to whites and warned those who still lived there that their property values would decrease as more African Americans moved in. Accordingly, many whites began scrambling to leave the neighborhood.

What makes Ludlow's story different is that a determined contingent of its people decided to take an active stance against this "white flight." They founded Ludlow Community Association (LCA) in 1957, a reflection of a newfound communal goal to purposefully and proactively integrate the neighborhood. The founders knew this would not happen without a fight, as Shaker Heights's housing and deed restrictions, which dated back to the time of the Van Sweringen brothers, had been built around policies of exclusivity--and exclusion. In order to integrate Ludlow and effectively work around these restrictions, LCA focused its efforts on real estate. However, LCA did not attack the issues of integration in a conventional way, and began to host multiple open houses to white families only. Ludlow had a steady flow of black house buyers, but lacked white interest in real estate, so LCA contended it was necessary to get white families to move back into Ludlow to counteract white flight. LCA soon aggressively fought with realtors to help dictate who would buy the houses with recent "For Sale" signs. This approach to integration was very controversial, inviting protest from the NAACP--but it succeeded in engineering an integrated neighborhood for at least a generation.

The Ludlow Community Association hosted an array of fundraisers and events to support its real estate campaigns. Many were hosted at Ludlow Elementary, but others were held at bigger venues. One of the most significant fundraisers included the jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald performing at Severance Hall, and many movie events at Colony Theater in Shaker Heights. All of these activities were highly organized and reflected LCA's integration efforts: an orderly and stable community, even in the "turbulent" 1960s. Ludlow became such a diverse and peaceful neighborhood that soon cities from all over the country were calling for advice about integrating their own communities. Not only did Ludlow set a national example for integration, the Moreland and Lomond neighborhoods in Shaker Heights soon followed suit. However, neither was as successful as Ludlow. Although the Ludlow neighborhood is now home to an approximately 85 percent black population, the efforts of the Ludlow Community Association assured that the neighborhood never suffered the wrenching shifts that brought panic and disinvestment in so many other communities.

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The famed Van Sweringen brothers, known for developing Shaker Heights, envisioned an architect-designed neighborhood rubbing shoulders with three grand estates in the countryside of Cleveland Heights. The resulting neighborhood, now the Inglewood Historic District, attracted doctors, lawyers, industrialists and others to its finer homes nestled on large wooded lots.

The Van Sweringens purchased the forty-one acres for this development from Charles Pack in 1920 through their Shaker Heights Development Company. Like all of their deed covenants, the Van Sweringens outlined strict rules that guaranteed a high level of construction and residents. All the single-family homes had to be architect designed in English Tudor, French or Colonial styles, with no two exactly alike. Prominent Cleveland architects such as Howell and Thomas, Walker and Weeks, Charles, Schneider, Bloodgood Tuttle and Abram Garfield worked on homes in the neighborhood.

Essential to the success of the neighborhood were sales to upper middle-class clientele, whom the company called "selected people of culture and refinement." Promotional materials for Inglewood described it as "a select neighborhood for Finer Homes, a natural Park of Great Beauty ... Hemmed in by the splendid Severance, Prentiss and Gownlock estates, its character is established, itself a beautiful park, shaded by lovely trees and commanding a view of Lake Erie for many miles, Inglewood has long been the residence site most envied by Clevelanders." The neighborhood attracted leading members of Cleveland society, including noted attorneys, businessmen, a newspaper publisher, professors, businessmen and many others. Over the years, the neighborhood acquired the nickname "Pill Hill" because of the number of medical personnel living in Inglewood (in part to its close proximity to Cleveland Clinic, University Hospitals, and Case Medical School).

The Inglewood Historic District maintains the original beauty and parklike setting of the original development. Since the original estates surrounding Inglewood have since been developed into commerical and residential areas, many visitors are surprised to find this pocket of lovely homes just off Mayfield Road in Cleveland Heights.

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Bloodgood Tuttle and the Van Sweringen brothers were a perfect match for each other. The Van Sweringens used strict building codes to ensure that every house in Shaker Heights was constructed and designed in a sound and attractive manner. Tuttle, too, stressed the need for high-quality design and workmanship in home building, but unlike the famously reticent Van Sweringens, Tuttle was not afraid to share his impassioned views in public forums.

During a speech to the Building Construction Institute in 1933, for example, Tuttle stated that "90% of all buildings in Cleveland should be either razed or renovated." These remarks built on his 1931 article in the trade magazine "Building Arts," where he again used the figure of 90%, this time attaching it to the "percent of the small houses erected today [which] are badly designed ...The fundamental reason for this is the fact that the general public has not demanded better design." Of course, in Shaker Heights the Van Sweringen Company maintained a tight grip on the types of houses being built, limiting the options for the public whose poor taste and scrimping ways (not hiring an architect or relying on low-quality materials, for example) Bloodgood Tuttle so clearly disliked.

Tuttle designed nine Van Sweringen demonstration homes in two clusters along South Moreland Boulevard (later renamed Van Aken Boulevard) in 1924. Built early on in Shaker Heights' history, the Demonstration Homes provided potential home owners with examples of the high-quality type of home that could be found in the exclusive suburb. The first cluster of Tuttle's homes is located at 3105 Van Aken, 3113 Van Aken, 3125 Van Aken, 3137 Van Aken, and 3149 Van Aken. The second cluster, further southeast down the road, can be found at 18405 Van Aken, 18419 Van Aken, 18435 Van Aken, and 18513 Van Aken. The homes include three designed in English style, five featuring French design, and one designed in Dutch Colonial style. Tuttle, like the Van Sweringens, did not approve of Italian and Spanish-style houses being built in Cleveland, declaring them "better left in Florida and California," because "they are intended to keep out the sun while we want to let it in...since we get so little of it at best."

Before his death at age 47 in 1936, Tuttle went on to design more than 30 houses throughout Shaker Heights, and several more in the neighboring suburb of Cleveland Heights. The city designated his Demonstration Homes as Shaker Heights Landmarks in June 1983.

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While most Clevelanders have never heard of the architect Philip Small, it is very likely that they have seen his work around town. In the 1920s, Small and his associate Charles Rowley became favorites of the Van Sweringen brothers, who commissioned them to design Shaker Square, the interior of the Higbee's department store on Public Square (now the site of the Horseshoe Casino), and the brothers' own Daisy Hill estate in Hunting Valley, to name a few. Separate from his work with the Vans, Small also designed nearby John Carroll University, the Cleveland Playhouse, the Karamu House, and a number of buildings on the Case Western Reserve University campus.

The Van Sweringens also entrusted Small and Rowley with the task of designing one of the four clusters of demonstration homes in Shaker Heights. Built early on in Shaker Heights's history, the Demonstration Homes provided potential home owners with examples of the high-quality type of home that could be found in the exclusive suburb. Indeed, the homes were a symbol of the dignified, up-scale community that the Van Sweringen Company desired to create, and they provided the foundation from which the city grew. The houses were designated as Shaker Heights Landmarks on June 27, 1983.

Small's five demonstration homes, built in 1924, lie along South Woodland Boulevard, just west of Warrensville Center Road at (from east to west) 20000 South Woodland, 19910 South Woodland, 19700 South Woodland, and 19600 South Woodland. The fifth is nearby at 3158 Morley Road. All of the houses were designed in various types of English style, are built of brick and stucco with wood shingle roofs, and feature Tudor half-timbering and leaded glass casement windows on their exterior. English architecture was popular during the development of Shaker Heights, and Van Sweringen Company newspaper advertisements from the 1920s favorably compared Shaker's ambience with the "charm of England." A 1926 ad even refers to Small's Demonstration Home at 19910 South Woodland Road as "a true modernization of the famous old country houses of Dickens' England." At this time, the idealized English countryside served as a symbol of peacefulness, beauty, and security to wealthy Clevelanders looking to escape an increasingly chaotic big city. Indeed, as the same 1926 ad asks, why "go to England, thousands of miles away, to visit that charm" when "we can live with it always in Shaker Village, thirty minutes away[?]"

Philip Small's masterfully designed Demonstration Homes helped further this conception of the English countryside in northeast Ohio, contributing to Shaker Heights' ultimate success. It is little wonder, then, that the Van Sweringens continued to turn to Small for the design of some of their most important construction projects.

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The construction of the Scottsdale Boulevard Master Model Homes was part of a nationwide effort to improve the quality of homes in the nation during the 1920s. The Better Homes Movement, launched in 1922 by a women's household magazine, viewed home improvement as a means for both personal and material betterment. In 1928, Herbert Hoover, then Secretary of Commerce, spoke in lofty terms when describing the movement's goals, saying that "The construction of better built houses is a civic and economic asset to the community" that makes possible "a higher and finer type of national life deriving its strength from well-managed, self-reliant homes and wholesome family life."

It is safe to say that the tens of thousand of people who flocked to view the Master Model Homes in Shaker Heights were more interested in the new technology and master craftsmanship on display than in Hoover's claims that "better citizenship" and "character training" would be the result of the Better Homes campaign.

The architectural firm of Fox, Duthie, and Foose built eight Master Model Homes on Scottsdale Boulevard in 1928. Like the rest of the houses in Shaker Heights, the Master Model Homes were designed in either English, French, or Colonial style.

At 18320 Scottsdale is a French Norman house with a stucco exterior, steeply pitched slate roof, and turreted front entrance. There is also a Rural English Cottage at 18716 Scottsdale which features Tudor-style half-timbering and leaded glass casement windows. The six other Master Model Homes include an English Studio at 18305 Scottsdale, an American Colonial at 17725 Scottsdale, another Rural English Cottage at 18302 Scottsdale, an Urban French house at 18108 Scottsdale, a Pennsylvania Farm House at 17732 Scottsdale, and an American Colonial at 18421 Scottsdale.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer co-sponsored the construction of the Master Model Homes and heavily promoted their progress in the newspaper, inviting the public to view the houses during weekend exhibitions. Articles stressed the campaign's theme that "moderate priced homes can be constructed in first class residential districts, of the finest nationally advertised materials, and using attractive plans designed by well known architects without adding to the cost." Shoddy building materials and do-it-yourself construction projects, the paper argued, led to unsightly and unsafe homes that tarnished the character of a neighborhood.

Shaker Heights, which enforced similar standards of high-quality design and construction, was a perfect fit for the Master Model Homes. In addition, Scottsdale Boulevard, near the border with Cleveland, sat in a neighborhood of more modest sized lots that were a far cry from the palatial estates associated with Shaker Heights. Originally selling for around $15,000, the Master Model Homes served as an example to middle-class Clevelanders that an attractive, single-family home in a safe suburban neighborhood was an obtainable goal.

The Shaker Heights Landmark Commission designated all eight of the Master Model Homes on Scottsdale Boulevard as City of Shaker Heights landmarks on August 27, 1984.

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