American Bungalow Magazine - The Magazine published in the interest of preserving and restoring the modest American 20th Century Home, the Bungalow, and the rich lifestyle that it affords.

This article was updated on 29 February 2012 to correct inaccuracies in the original posting.

In the last decades of the 20th century, the rustbelt cities of the industrial Midwest and Northeast endured severe economic hardship, as plants closed and legions of middle-class workers lost their jobs, their homes and their futures. More recently, bearing the brunt of recurring recessions, including the Great Recession of 2008, whose impact is still being felt, the region has seemed to be suffering a death spiral. In the midst of this desperate landscape, while the indications of past decline are undeniable, signs of incipient recovery have become unmistakable. For those of us who work and live in the cities or inner-suburbs of Toledo, Detroit, Cleveland, and Buffalo—and thus have an existential stake in the outcome—it is a cautiously exhilarating moment: Are we, at long last, on the cusp of a sustained recovery?

Since mid-2010, employment in the Cleveland area has come roaring back from devastating losses, driven by what the New York Times has called “the new urban market trends of the 21st century—health care, higher education, entertainment, good food, new housing and expanded mass transportation.” Some city neighborhoods, including Tremont and Ohio City, on the west side of the Cuyahoga River, are clearly reviving, thanks in part to new restaurants, art galleries, and artisanal businesses. Even east side neighborhoods, long in the doldrums, are showing signs of recovery, buoyed by the growth of the cultural and medical institutions in University Circle.

THE STORY OF CLEVELAND HEIGHTS

If the Cleveland metropolitan area is going to turn around, the city of Cleveland Heights can be expected to be front-and-center in the revival process. It offers superb early-modernist residential architecture, a lively and diverse cultural scene, and dense formal and informal social networks. These elements have combined, over the rocky urban history of the 20th century, to create an enduring and resilient community that has held itself together in the equally challenging first decade of the 21st and could serve as one of the crucibles from which the recovery of the metropolitan area, if and when it comes, will flow.
Cleveland Heights lies to the south and east of Cleveland’s University Circle area, which is home to institutions like the Cleveland Orchestra and the Cleveland Clinic that brought the city worldwide fame, on a plateau atop the first substantial ridge south of Lake Erie and the lowest of a series of foothills that reach across eastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania to the summits of the Appalachian Mountains. The Heights was sparsely inhabited until, beginning in the 1870s, a handful of wealthy Clevelanders built summer houses there with views to the lake and to the city. The first streetcar lines were built up the hill from University Circle in the late 1890s, and at that point the area began to develop rapidly. In 1903 it became a village, with a population of about 1,500; in 1921 it became a city, with a population above 15,000. By 1930 the city of Cleveland Heights was largely built out. It had 51,000 people, somewhat more than the 46,000 it has today.

In short, Cleveland Heights developed rapidly as a classic streetcar suburb during the heyday of the Arts and Crafts movement, and it has perhaps the finest patrimony of Arts and Crafts and Prairie-style houses in the Cleveland area. That makes it distinctive, especially because architecture in Cleveland generally was more conservative in the late 19th and early 20th centuries than it was in, say, Chicago.

In the early 20th century, Cleveland’s more daring architects produced some of their most innovative work in Cleveland Heights. William A. Bohnard and Raymond D. Parsson, for example, worked together in a successful partnership, building primarily residences, from 1905 to 1932. In 1905 they designed the George Holloway House, in suburban Ravenna, with outspoken Prairie features. This was too much for many of their Cleveland clients, and the duo learned to propose designs to them in a still modernist but somewhat less radical vein, influenced by English architects M. H. Baillie Scott and Charles Voysey. In 1909 in Cleveland Heights, however, they proposed a reworking of the radical features of the Holloway House in their design for the Charles H. and Marie R. Beardslee House, in the Ambler Heights Historic District, which represents perhaps their best work and is one of the finest Prairie houses in the Cleveland area.

Another Cleveland architect, George Kauffman, had built ornate houses in revival styles in the city and its suburbs in the first decade of the century. In the teens, however, he became entranced with the California bungalow and built a series of residences paying homage to it. One of the finest examples was built for A. C. Glasgow in Cleveland Heights in 1919.

Harlen Shimmin, another successful architect, built theaters, auditoriums, schools and apartments, in addition to homes. The extravagant 1916 Ambler Heights house for H. A. Adams, with its roof shingles that fold around the corners of the house and its theater-marquee eave above the front entry, suspended from steel cables, stands out from the tamer work he executed in Shaker Heights and elsewhere.

Finally, Frederick William Striebinger, who studied at Columbia and at the École de Beaux-Arts in Paris, is best known for his revivalist structures. But he, too, apparently became interested in the California bungalow before World War I. We infer that he is the architect of the striking bungalow built at 2927 Hampshire Rd. around 1911, in the Mayfield Heights neighborhood, because an ad in a local paper in December of that year promised the winner of a “Booklovers Contest” a similar bungalow, worth $6,000, to be built by Striebinger on nearby Somerton Rd.

A number of developers also joined in the local building boom, and their activities left Cleveland Heights with considerable diversity in the character of its neighborhoods and in the size and character of its residential structures. Some neighborhoods, including the Ambler Heights Historic District, consist of winding avenues with spacious lots and immense mansions. Others, including the Mayfield Heights neighborhood, contain more modestly sized houses, including bungalows and Arts and Craft foursquares.

Part Two