Showplace of America: Cleveland's Euclid Avenue, 1850-1910 by Jan Cigliano

Abstract

This lavishly illustrated, beautifully produced book on the history of Cleveland’s Euclid Avenue between 1850 and 1910 will delight and inform a wide variety of readers because it combines the best qualities of both the coffee table extravaganza and the solid scholarly monograph. Like the Terminal Tower complex in the early twentieth century, Euclid Avenue, connecting Public Square with University Circle, was to symbolize the power and wealth of industrial Cleveland and the leading men, indeed the leading families, who had created it. Conscious that their fortunes had been made only recently, they sought to build an environment which, based on the grand boulevards of Europe, would drape what they perhaps feared was the evidence of crude money- grubbing by raw "nouveaux riches” with the elegance, grandeur and sophistication of the European and, also the American aristocracy of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. Relying on prominent architects and filling their interiors with furnishings and art appropriate to their newly-earned wealth and status, these Clevelanders were clearly making a statement. ■Ironically, the very prosperity that prompted and, indeed, permitted Euclid Avenue’s creation also laid the foundation for its decline and eventual disappearance. Distressed by the industrial soot and smoke that intruded on their neighborhood and tempted by the steadily higher prices their property would fetch for commercial development, the residents of "millionaires row” began to sell and to move to the country- like suburbs farther east from the city’s core. Their magnificent houses were soon levelled and replaced, all in an uncoordinated fashion, with ugly commercial structures.