GRAPHIC COURTESY OF THE NATIONAL PARK SERVICE

A map of the South Brooklyn Commercial Historic District from the United States Department of Interior National Park Service’s National Register of Historic Places.

by Lynette Filips

     (Plain Press November 2024) This month we continue to look at the history of the northwest corner of Pearl Rd. and Memphis Ave. which the Old Brooklyn Community Development Corporation (OBCDC) is seeking to “revitalize” with a $31 million new construction project. It is the most historic section of Cleveland’s Old Brooklyn neighborhood and has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 2005. A picture of St. Luke’s United Church of Christ, one of the numerous commercial and institutional buildings on Pearl Rd. (and also on Memphis Ave. and Broadview Rd.) included in the Historic District designation, accompanies the online listing of the South Brooklyn Commercial District.

     While OBCDC pursues funding for a plan to tear down the major portion of this corner to erect a four-story building with commercial space on the first floor, residential space on the upper floors, and a brewery in the church proper portion of the former St. Luke’s, another group of people in the Old Brooklyn neighborhood is still hoping to Save Our Historic District.

     The National Register of Historic Places is a relatively new designation, authorized by the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966. It is part of the Department of the Interior and is administered by the National Park Service; its records can be accessed on the National Archives website. According to its website, the Register is “…the official list of the Nation’s historic places worthy of preservation.” The national program aims “to coordinate and support public and private efforts to identify, evaluate and protect America’s historic and archeological resources.”

     Old Brooklyn has had a place on the National Register since 2005 when the South Brooklyn Commercial District was approved. Much of the information in this article comes from the 140-page document which contains the application pertaining to establishing the District. A map which centers around the intersections of Pearl Rd., Broadview Rd. and Memphis Ave., (all thoroughfares south of the Big Creek valley) accompanies this article.

     The major reason that Jeff Lennartz, Tom Yablonsky and Mike Giangrande, the founding board members of a non-profit organization called North Cuyahoga Valley, Inc. (now known as Canalway) wanted to secure a National Register designation is that they knew it would help them get historic tax credits from the Federal and Ohio governments for their projects. The Old Brooklyn neighborhood was quite central to their mission – Pearl Rd. and Broadview Rd. (as well as W. Schaaf Rd.) had been designated as part of one of Ohio’s routes on America’s Scenic Byways, the Towpath Trail along the Ohio and Erie Canal was nearby, and construction of the Treadway Creek Trail was underway. North Cuyahoga Valley’s Board meetings were held in the former Glenn Restaurant at the corner of Pearl Rd. and Memphis Ave.

     There are 30 buildings within the designated area of the South Brooklyn Commercial District; twenty-three of them are considered ‘contributing’ and seven of them are considered to be ‘non-contributing’ because of significant alterations or the recent years of their construction. None of them had been previously listed individually on the National Register and none of them are listed as Cleveland Landmarks either. They were all part of downtown South Brooklyn, historically one’s of Cleveland’s most important neighborhood ‘downtown’ areas.

     Henninger Rd. is the northern border of the Historic District and Memphis Ave. is the southern border on the west side of Pearl Rd.; before MetroHealth (the former Evangelical Deaconess/Deaconess Hospital buildings) is the southern border on the east side. That is not to say that there are no historically and architecturally significant commercial buildings on the southwest side of Memphis Ave. The Commercial District ends where it does because of the mega parking lot and modern structure which CVS erected after the Glenn Restaurant and numerous other commercial buildings on Memphis Ave. and Pearl Rd. were torn down in the mid-1990s. The seven other ‘non-contributing’ buildings within the District were not considered to be as intrusive as the (now vacated) CVS property.

     In addition to being on the National Archives website, the same documents and photos which accompanied the National Register application are available, thanks to Mary Ellen Stasek posting them, on the Historical Society of Old Brooklyn’s website, oldbrooklynhistory.org. They are located immediately after links to earlier articles in this “Save Our Historic District” series. As well as a quite detailed summary of each building, they contain a quite detailed, well-documented history of Old Brooklyn’s beginnings. Some of the footnotes to the history reference articles I wrote for the Old Brooklyn News during approximately the first decade of my historical writing!

     I will be referring to the information about each building when I write next month’s article listing each of the 30 buildings. In the meantime, history buffs may enjoy looking up the application themselves, or referring to past articles on the Plain Press website, as well as at oldbrooklynhistory.org.