Visitors to the Moreland neighborhood in Shaker Heights are greeted with picturesque sights of an idealized inner ring suburban community. Attractive tree lawns line its residential streets, which lead past rows of well-maintained Cleveland Doubles, American Foursquares and Bungalows. City parks and designated recreation grounds are scattered throughout the neighborhood, with vacant lots appearing to receive the same high level of maintenance as their green space counterparts. Commercial and retail buildings stand along the main throughways, with many of the stores consolidated within a highly uniform suburban shopping strip. A stately civic building, now home to the public library, acts as the symbolic center of the neighborhood. The area seems to effortlessly combine the feel of city life with hallmark traits of suburbia. A tradition of intensive municipal planning and management, however, underlies the history of these commercial, residential and public spaces. The civic engagement of Moreland residents proved key to the success of these efforts. 


Since the early 1960s, Moreland’s community associations helped formulate, shape and implement nearly every urban renewal and redevelopment project initiated by the City of Shaker Heights in the neighborhood. The Moreland Community Association (MCA), established in the spring of 1962, was the first of these groups. The organization acted as the front line for identifying and publicly addressing perceived threats to community stability, and functioned as an intermediary between local residents and governing organizations. From the minutia of announcing everyday community activities to the tackling of contentious social, religious, economic and political matters, MCA had a hand in nearly every aspect of life in Moreland. Their resume of achievements included helping to guide the development of the Shaker Heights Service Center, Chelton Park, the Sutton Townhouse Development Project and Shaker Towne Center. The association also galvanized public support for urban renewal projects, advocated for street improvements, aided in implementing and educating residents about housing code enforcement, offered funds for housing upkeep to low income residents, precipitated a minor barricade controversy, purchased and rehabilitated vacant homes, published newsletters, sponsored public debates and held street fairs. By consolidating and amplifying the voices of neighborhood activists, MCA offered a platform for select residents to have a say in defining the future of their community. 


The establishment of MCA grew from concerns over the impact of integration in the southwestern region of Shaker Heights. A small group of Moreland residents began meeting in the fall of 1961 to discuss what they perceived to be the potential complications and benefits of African American settlement in the neighborhood. Racial tensions had mounted following the emergence of a small African American community in the neighboring community of Ludlow beginning in the mid-1950s. Panic selling ensued, and the garage of an African American resident was bombed in 1956. To further complicate the matter, realtors and banks steered potential white purchasers away from homes in the neighborhood. The Ludlow Community Association, composed of both African American and white residents, was formed in 1957 to quell fears over integration and counteract the institutional forces that discouraged white families from buying houses in the area.

While modeled after the Ludlow Community Association, the community meetings in Moreland were initially only opened to white residents of the neighborhood. The Moreland community was home to a large population of middle- and working-class southern and eastern Europeans and their descendants. The gatherings were meant as a forum for these residents to express concerns over integration, with the goal of dispelling fears and deterring any physical violence against African American community members. The first racially inclusive community meeting of the MCA was held in February, 1962. Nearly 400 residents attended. A statement of purpose was adopted: “It shall be the common goal of the Association to encourage, to develop and to maintain the quality, stability, high standards and community interests of the area, to promote the general welfare of the entire Moreland Community and to achieve these goals through a democratic community open to all races and religions.”  Following the drafting and ratification of a constitution during the next few months, the MCA was officially established. A second public meeting held in April also attracted 400 persons. The organization’s message to the surrounding community was simple: Panic was the only thing they had to fear.


Despite efforts to stave off panic selling and block-busting, the neighborhood witnessed an unprecedented rise of homes being placed on the resale market by 1962. MCA received a $9,330 grant from the Cleveland Foundation the following year as seed money to fund its operations. To counteract the dissuasion of white families from purchasing homes in the neighborhood by banks and realtors, the community association immediately formed a real estate committee. A listing service was developed to bring together home buyers and sellers, and marked the organization’s first endeavor to proactively attract white residents to rent and buy homes in Moreland. Early efforts to stabilize the community also focused on pressuring the City of Shaker Heights to enforce housing code violations. The City was urged to acquire and demolish homes deemed unsuitable for rehabilitation, thereby increasing the visual desirability of the community while decreasing its population. 


Moreland’s community activists quickly forged an alliance with the City of Shaker Heights through their work with School and Recreation Boards, the Mayor and City Council. As noted in a 1966 newsletter, MCA enlisted municipal help to “maintain a good neighborhood —clean, attractive, convenient, served by good schools, good municipal services, good recreational facilities, and good business establishment.”  The underlying objective of the association’s efforts was to create a stable, attractive and integrated neighborhood. While not presuming “to define by numerical ratio the idea of ‘racial balance,’” MCA advocated for a “neighborhood in which people of many racial, religious, and ethnic groups can live in fellowship and mutual trust.”


The African American community in Moreland continued to grow throughout the 1960s, facilitated by the increased number of homes placed on the resale market. While the integrated community association eased neighborhood tensions during a time of rapid racial transition, its successes in attracting new white home owners to the area were limited. 
 By the mid-1960s, MCA shifted its emphasis to advocating for large-scale urban renewal projects. A task force, composed in part by Moreland residents and representatives of the City, recommended the development of a master plan for the community in 1966. These efforts culminated in the Styche-Hisaka Plan, an ambitious locally funded urban renewal project that focused on the redevelopment of Shaker Heights’ southern neighborhoods. Plans for Moreland included the revitalization of its commercial district, street improvements and the removal of older, high-density housing stock. A civic center, townhouses, park spaces and service center were proposed to replace many residential homes. While the civic center was never realized due to objections by the Moreland community, homes would be demolished to make room for the Shaker Heights Service Center and a park-townhouse development. 


Lateral efforts to renew housing in Moreland were initiated by MCA beginning in 1967. The Shaker Foundation was established by the association to purchase and rehabilitate rundown houses. Properties were then rented or placed on the real estate market for sale. Loans with below-market interest rates were offered by the foundation to entice potential buyers. The community group was also represented in the Shaker Heights Housing Office, which hired one member of the Moreland, Ludlow, Lomond and Sussex community associations to act as housing coordinators. As an arm of the municipal government, the Housing Office’s committee worked to attract white homeowners into the southern region of Shaker Heights and combat practices by realtors and banks that discouraged neighborhood integration. Cooperative work between MCA and the City extended to pursuing private-sector investment for a $2 million revitalization of the Chagrin-Lee-Avalon shopping center in 1969. 


By focusing efforts on these City-sponsored urban renewal efforts, the work of MCA became intertwined with municipal government operations.  The association continued operating as a community group into the 1990s, but efforts to promote both integration and urban renewal projects were increasingly pursued by members through their involvement with City boards and committees. These official mechanisms for promoting the stabilization of Moreland emerged during MCA’s first decade of existence, and were largely a response to work undertaken by the organization. Projects implemented and advocated by the community organization during the 1960s and early 1970s guided the development of the neighborhood over the subsequent three decades, and helped redefine both the physical landscape and character of the Moreland community.

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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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Grant Wilson Deming, born in Sarnia, Ontario, at the southern tip of Lake Huron, moved to Cleveland with his brothers in the 1890s and became swept up in real-estate development. The Demings built upper-middle-class residential districts in Cleveland's Glenville area to the north of University Circle in the 1900s. Grant's brother Barton set out on his own to redevelop Rockefeller's old Euclid Golf Club in the "Heights" to the east as a fashionable destination for Millionaires Row families seeking a more sylvan setting away from the city. Sensing the eastward push into the Heights, Grant Deming also shifted his focus to suburban speculation. In the early 1900s, he acquired almost 200 acres of land owned mainly by John D. Rockefeller Jr. and the heirs of James B. Haycox, a dairy farmer. There Deming imagined Forest Hill, "America's Richest Suburb."

Deming thought big. His promotional literature attempted to situate Forest Hill in the company of Boston's Brookline, New York's Llewellyn Park, and Washington's Chevy Chase. Like these other garden suburbs, Forest Hill would have gently curving streets, setback sidewalks, and a pastoral air. Deming characterized the streets, laid out by the same company that platted Shaker Heights, as "natural openings through the giants of the forest," but the landscape was more accurately a mosaic of woods and meadows. An exception was the western side of the tract, where two branches of the Dugway Brook meandered through thickly forested ravines on their descent to Lake Erie.

Almost completely built out by the time the Great Depression hit, Forest Hill gradually lost its identity as residents came to identify more with the Coventry or Cedar-Lee business districts that flanked it to the northwest and southeast. Some also turned inward. The Lincoln Boulevard Club, formed by women on the street to sew bandages for the Red Cross during World War I, is reputedly the oldest surviving block club in Greater Cleveland. Far from the well-to-do allotment promised by Deming, Forest Hill became a mishmash of varying sizes of homes and even a number of two-family houses. To some extent the neighborhood also looked to nearby religious institutions for identity. Forest Hill lay wholly within the St. Ann's Roman Catholic parish, and many Jews who moved to the Heights from Cleveland's Glenville neighborhood lived in Forest Hill and worshipped a half-mile to the northeast at the Temple on the Heights. The arrival of the first African American family in 1927 in a house at Washington Boulevard and Cottage Grove Avenue prompted a bombing before cooler heads prevailed. It would take another four decades for racial integration to make real progress.

Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2010, Forest Hill is beginning to reclaim its long-obscure name recognition apart from the places it is near. Like Cleveland Heights itself, Forest Hill today melds historic sense of place with a socially diverse population.

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Carl B. Stokes is widely known as the first African American mayor of a major U.S. city. Yet, Stokes, elected to office in 1967, was neither the first black mayor in Ohio nor even in the Cleveland area. Nearly four decades earlier, a small community now inside the Cleveland city limits elected a Jamaican immigrant to its highest office.

Miles Heights Village existed as a suburb of Cleveland between 1927 and 1932. At the time, the village was bounded by Cleveland to the west, Shaker Heights to the north, Warrensville Heights to the east, and Garfield Heights to the south. The center of Miles Heights was located at the intersection of Lee and Miles Roads in what is today the Lee-Miles neighborhood in the southeast corner of Cleveland.

During its brief history, Miles Heights was one of only a few outlying enclaves where African Americans lived, as most blacks in the metropolitan area were confined to Cleveland's Central neighborhood at that time. Miles Heights counted about 500 African Americans alongside about 1,000 whites, including immigrants from Italy and other European nations. Although the black population was largely residentially segregated within the village, race relations were remarkably amicable. The village even had an interracial police force from its inception.

In 1929, following the death of Miles Heights's mayor, 35-year-old Arthur R. Johnston was appointed mayor of the suburb, making him the first black mayor in Ohio. He won election to a full two-year term that fall, no small feat at that time in a majority-white community. Johnston continued to work as a sewer foreman for Cuyahoga County during his tenure as village mayor, which stirred considerable controversy.

In the early 1930s a majority of the residents of Miles Heights voted to have their community become a part of Cleveland. Corruption scandals and substandard village services stretched the patience of many residents who believed they would be better served by joining Cleveland. Many in Miles Heights, including a number of village officials, were not pleased with this prospect. After numerous court injunctions and meetings with Cuyahoga County commissioners, however, they lost their battle to remain a separate integrated suburb. In a last ditch effort, a number of Miles Heights officials blockaded themselves inside their town hall and were prepared to shoot it out to prevent annexation. Fortunately, serious violence was avoided, and Miles Heights Village officially became a part of Cleveland on March 30, 1932.

Today on the northeast corner of Lee and Miles Roads where the Miles Heights Town Hall once stood is an auto parts store. The site of the Beehive School to its north is a modern apartment building. However, Arthur Johnston's house still stands on East 147th Street just south of the park that now bears his name.

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The fight to desegregate schools in Cleveland in the post-World War II era led to a contentious and complicated debate in the city over the issues of race, freedom, and equality. Glenville's Stephen E. Howe Elementary School is central to the tale. On this site, in 1964, one man gave his life for his belief that all children should have equal access to a quality education.

Between 1950 and 1965, Cleveland's black population grew dramatically while the population of Cleveland as a whole decreased. This resulted in overcrowded schools on the city's predominantly black east side and under-enrollment in the predominantly white west side. By the early 1960s, black students were placed on waiting lists for kindergarten and subjected to half-day classes as white schools remained under-enrolled in full-day kindergarten. In response, parents formed the Relay Parents March to Fill Empty Classrooms and organized protests to challenge the inequities perpetuated by the School Board's policies.

School Board President Ralph McCallister agreed to bus some black children to under-enrolled schools in white areas, but to appease white voters his plan included stipulations that black students could not attend physical education classes, eat in the cafeteria, and could only use the bathroom once per day. As a result, African Americans looked to the Cleveland Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) and the United Freedom Movement (UFM) to take action and stand up to the school board.

When whites rioted in Little Italy in January 1964 to protest against black children being bused to schools in their neighborhood, it became clear that McCallister either would not or could not honor his September 1963 agreement to integrate the schools. The construction of new schools was seen as a less volatile alternative, especially as these schools would be built in black neighborhoods in order to maintain segregation in the district. The UFM demanded a stop to the construction of these new schools, arguing that any new schools should be built in racially mixed areas on the east side.

On April 6th, 1964, around 50 UFM protestors arrived at the construction site for the new Stephen E. Howe Elementary school, set to be built in a predominantly black area of the east side's Glenville neighborhood. On the following day, 27-year old Reverend Bruce Klunder - a founding member of the Cleveland CORE, father of two, and white - laid down behind a bulldozer as four protestors laid in front to prevent the construction from taking place. The operator, in his attempt to avoid the protestors in front, backed up the bulldozer without seeing Klunder, instantly crushing the reverend to death.

The following evening, over 2,000 people attended the memorial service for Klunder. Although these attempts to desegregate the schools were considered a failure and the new segregated schools were eventually built, Klunder's death helped to unify the black community to fight against injustice. The fight for equal schools continued, resulting in a 1976 federal court order to desegregate Cleveland's schools through the implementation of a comprehensive busing program.

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Land for the Cleveland Public School District's new commercial high school was originally acquired in 1907 along East 107th Street in University Circle. However, disputes and discussions about the nature and design of the new high school in the Cleveland district would ensue for nearly twenty years. By 1926 a Cleveland Press clipping illustrated a labeled photograph of the district property along East 107th Street. Cathedral Latin School and the Normal School are labeled bordering the proposed placement of the new John Hay High School, named for the author, statesman, and political leader John Milton Hay. A Cleveland Plain Dealer article of September 14, 1929, cited the new school opening and dedication at that time. Taking its name from a great American statesman and Cleveland native, John Hay High School was like the school's predecessor, Longwood Commerce High School, focused on business training.

The school was ultimately created as a commercial school providing courses related to commerce, business, and office skills. As a result, enrollment at John Hay was predominantly female for many years to come and enjoyed much success graduating skilled office workers ready for employment. A May 14, 1954, article in the Cleveland Press was headlined "Men-Wanted Sign Out for 25 Years" and cited an 85% female graduate rate since the school's opening in 1929. A gradual redesign of John Hay's curriculum provided for a more comprehensive course of study that began to attract male students during the late 1950s and 1960s. The 'Bookeepers' changed to the 'Hornets' as male and female athletic programs were likewise designed to accommodate students seeking comprehensive studies and activities.

John Hay's reputation would change in time. With its transition to a comprehensive school, new challenges faced the administration, faculty, and students, not dissimilar to other schools in the district facing urban issues of racial and economic discord during the 1960s. The school became the site of student protests, lockouts, and other challenges in the next three decades. Disruptive students were responsible for a fire in the school in January 1968, resulting in 32 student suspensions. That November, students conducted a "wildcat strike" and held an assembly to protest a new discipline policy being imposed at the school. Several other items were on their agenda including lavatory conditions, cancellation of social events, classroom equipment complaints, and building access concerns. A cafeteria fight ensued the next day as school closed for the Thanksgiving holiday. By January 1969, parents, students, teachers, and administrators were disputing problems at the school, alleging drug trafficking, intoxicated teachers, and bad neighborhood influences. By February, more unrest was brewing as students called for "Black Unity." In late February and early March, John Hay was closed for more than six school days following student protests and grievances with the school district. Grievances were resolved and an orderly reopening of the school ensued on March 6.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s as the Cleveland Schools worked to implement a federal desegregation order, John Hay remained a center of action and protest within the district. John Hay was temporarily closed in 2008-09 for remodeling before reopening to serve students as a thematic health care education facility in partnership with the Cleveland Clinic.

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