My brother Mr. F is Cleveland’s Man about Town. During my May visit, he toured me around a number of sites and neighborhoods, including Shaker Square, downtown, Detroit Seaway, and Cleveland’s West Side Market. West Side Market. RL Fifield 2012. I knew zip about Cleveland, beyond its being the butt of many jokes – most of these, I found out, are told by people from Ohio. Sure, Cleveland suffered the same blight that most cities have suffered over the last 60 years of anti-urb

Ancestry.com, as a genealogical tool, is a start for many doing genealogy. I see it as a way to sketch and share only. There are a lot of problems with it, but it’s certainly quicker than cranking through all those census records on microfilm like we did in the past. It allows you to get through the basic stuff, and focus on the more difficult questions, and spend more time in the archives with wills, tax records, and the like. It’s also a sharing tool. A distant relative of

One of the unexpected gems is the artistic and scientific wonderment that is the first electric street lamp, invented by Charles F. Brush of Cleveland, Ohio, in 1879. You can see it today in Public Square. Heady with Victorian ornament, the lamp’s ornamentation is a glorification and worship of scientific discovery. I love how vines securing the lamp to the corner of the Key Bank building appear as if they threaten to engulf it, like ivy growing over the bricks. Read more abo

A train car to carry molten iron. RL Fifield 2012. I wasn’t sure what to feel about Steelyard Commons. It’s a rather run-of-the mill (pun, ha) shopping center created on lands once occupied by a Cleveland steel mill in 2007. Other steel mills are located nearby. It’s identifying characteristic is the fragments of the ground’s former past, with interpretive signage nearby. So above the Five Guys Burgers & Fries, there is a utilities bridge, that once carried resources over the

Last Tuesday, I was somewhere in eastern Ohio. I had access to a car, and nothing to do for eight hours. You got it – it was Lincoln Highway time. An early restored Texaco Station, now housing a Bail Bonds establishment. RL Fifield, 2012. When I last traveled this portion of the Lincoln in 2005, the road wasn’t as well marked as it is today. I was travelling east bound on the northern 1913 route. (as a side note, gas was .99 the last time I did the LH, Tuesday it was 3.52) To

Passing under the lift bridge serving the Norfolk & Southern Railroad at the mouth of the Cuyahoga River. RL Fifield, 2012. There’s a reason they call it the City of Bridges. The winding Cuyahoga River hems in the island on which Cleveland was founded. As the industrial mecca grew, so did the need to feed the city with rails and roads. All of these bridges had to give way to ships on the Cuyahoga. This has left the city with a large grouping of active vertical lift and turnta

Balyeat’s Coffee Shop. RL Fifield photo, 2005. Gas was 99 cents a gallon in the Midwest in May of 2005. Driving east across the Indiana state line, my friend Mrs. G and I entered Van Wert, Ohio. There, beckoning to us in hot neon: Balyeat’s Coffee Shop Young Fried Chicken Day and Night Balyeat’s counter, with the pie cabinet on the right. RL Fifield photo, 2005. It was around 10am and we’d had a rather unsatisfying diner breakfast in Fort Worth. But I went in to grab a cu

Balyeat’s Coffee Shop. RL Fifield photo, 2005. Gas was 99 cents a gallon in the Midwest in May of 2005. Driving east across the Indiana state line, my friend Mrs. G and I entered Van Wert, Ohio. There, beckoning to us in hot neon: Balyeat’s Coffee Shop Young Fried Chicken Day and Night Balyeat’s counter, with the pie cabinet on the right. RL Fifield photo, 2005. It was around 10am and we’d had a rather unsatisfying diner breakfast in Fort Worth. But I went in to grab a cu

A preserved section of the Lincoln Highway near Rochelle, Illinois, 2005. RL Fifield photo. In May of 2005, my friend Mrs G. (back then, Miss C.) and I struck out on a road trip: seven days, seven states, and 2100 miles. Our goal was to do as much of the Lincoln Highway in the seven days we had. Our fixed plans were few. We drove west from New Jersey on I-80 and I-90 for a day and a half, at which point we turned around and worked our way back east on the Lincoln Highway. At