 More 2019 Adventures |
Cleveland → Cuyahoga Valley National Park 71 mi (114.3 km) |
 Next Day |
Oh-hi-o, everyone!
My good friend, Danielle, has moved to Ohio from Canada and invited me to visit her in Cleveland! I know very little about Cleveland except that Ian Hunter says it rocks, so I’m really curious what awaits in the Rock and Roll Capital of the World!
 |
After landing bright and early, I started off on the Hope Memorial Bridge to get a look at the skyline! The bridge itself has been here since 1932 with its huge, sculpted Guardians of Traffic lining the sides. Originally called the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge, Its name changed in the 190s to honor the father of Bob Hope, who was a stonemason!
 |
After meeting up with Danielle and her hubby, Sam, and grabbing some breakfast, we started our explorations of what turned out to be an architecturally awesome city! We started in Playhouse Square, the largest performing arts district outside of New York City! Though it was awfully early to catch a play, there was at least one marvel to discover at its heart!
 |
At Euclid and 14th Street hangs the world’s largest outdoor chandelier! 20 feet tall and 17 feet across, this enormous display weighs in at over 6,000 pounds! Though slightly smaller than the 8.5-ton indoor chandelier in Oman, this is by far the largest to hang in open air!
 |
We wandered west to one of the nation’s most beautiful grocery stores: Heinen’s, formerly the Cleveland Trust Rotunda Building, which was designed in 1903 by George Browne Post, already famous for designing the New York Stock Exchange building!
 |
Nowadays, there are three levels of groceries in here, housed under the 85-foot stained glass dome designed by Italian immigrant, Nicolas D’Ascenzo, and murals depicting stages of US History painted by Francis Davis Millet!
 |
From here, we wandered to a different type of shopping center, in fact, America’s very first indoor shopping center: The Arcade! Built in 1890, it was modeled after the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan and designed by John M. Eisenmann and George H. Smith! Formerly called Cleveland’s Crystal Palace, the Arcade is actually a covered pathway between two nine-story towers, lit by a 300-foot skylight!
 |
Next up on our itinerary was the 52-story Terminal Tower, designed by the reclusive Van Sweringen brothers, Oris and Mantis! It was meant to be Cleveland’s central railroad hub, so over a thousand buildings had to be demolished to make room for the tracks! When the tower opened its doors in 1927, it was the tallest building in the world after the Empire State Building until 1967!
 |
Train travel continued here until 1977 when it became an office building, then a shopping center in 1982, which it remains today! It was eerily quiet in here today, maybe because there was an air show happening outside later, or, as Danielle explained, most locals just don’t spend much time downtown on the weekends!
 |
We headed down toward the waterfront, stopping to puzzle over the World’s Largest Stamp, which honored the freeing of slaves during the Civil War with the word “Free!” It was designed by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen in 1985 and is 49 feet tall!
 |
We kept on wandering toward the lakefront as the crowds for the air show started to grow. We caught a glimpse of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, though going inside would have to wait for a future visit. Cleveland, while not exactly the birthplace of the music itself, was the first place where rock and roll got its name from DJ, Alan Freed, in 1951! It actually grew out of rhythm and blues, which was developed by African-American musicians and evolved as more and more folks moved into urban centers in the 1940s!
 |
 |
It was really amazing just how much we were able to see and do in just a few hours walking around downtown Cleveland! Since the crowds were building up on the waterfront, we decided it was time to head a little further out of the city center to some other unique Cleveland-area spots!
 |
Our first stop was the Christmas Story House, the actual house where the classic holiday movie was (mostly) filmed! I say mostly, because most of the outdoor scenes had to be filmed in Canada on account of Cleveland getting very little snow in winter!
 |
The story here is that the movie’s director, Bob Clark, connected with author, Jean Shepherd, for a passion project based on Mr. Shepherd’s childhood. Unfortunately, the neighborhood where Mr. Shepherd had grown up in Indiana no longer looked the way he remembered, and it was by pure chance that they found an almost identical location in Cleveland with a steel mill in the background and everything!
 |
 |
Today, it’s a museum dedicated to the movie, which was originally a flop but became a classic when TBS bought it in 1997 and started running 24-hour marathons of it on Christmas Eve and Day, giving us such classic lines as “Fragilé,” “Notafinga,” and “You’ll shoot your eye out!”
 |
Even after taking a tour of the Christmas Story House, there was still more to see in the Cleveland area, because, as I learned from a display at the airport, Cleveland is the birthplace of Superman! Here, in a little home in East Cleveland, Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster concocted a red-caped alien in 1938, who became the prototype for all future superheroes!
 |
 |
Even though Superman was an alien, his creators gave him very human problems! He liked Lois Lane, but she didn’t like him! He had to hide his identity to protect the ones he loved! Beyond that, as the Depression and later World War II gave people a lot of terrible things to think about, Superman not only gave young readers a form of escape but also courage. After all, he was an alien on Earth, and even then, he was able to make it both as a human and a hero! Unfortunately, the creators didn’t have a Superman story. They’d undersold their first story for $130, and by 1947, after Mr. Siegel’s eyesight was failing and Mr. Schuster was drafted into the war, they lost their creative rights for the Man of Steel to DC Comics and were no longer credited in future Superman stories!
 |
It was a dark end to a bright creative story, which matched the darkening sky as a storm approached! In need of a more encouraging story to wrap up the day, we headed south to Cuyahoga Valley National Park!
 |
At the park’s south end, there is a Beaver Marsh! Along its walkway, there is a story of rebirth that sure did cheer me up when I learned it!
 |
 |
Cuyahoga Valley National Park is centered around the Ohio and Erie Canal, which was modeled after New York’s Erie Canal and built between 1825 and 1832 to connect Lake Erie with the Ohio River at Cincinnati! Cities sprung up along this canal, and civilization ate up the natural wetlands along its route, dumping so much pollution into the Cuyahoga River that the river actually caught fire ten times, as recently as 1969!
 |
 |
This site used to be a salvage yard until the 1980s when folks from the Sierra Club and a few reintroduced beavers got to work removing the automotive junk and flooding the area to start a new wetland! They’ve done such a good job that after almost 40 years, there’s really no evidence to speak of that this was ever a polluted, industrial area! That gives me hope for the future!
 |
 |
Cuyahoga Valley National Park doesn’t boast the huge mountains and natural oddities of some parks, but it has its own highlights, mainly Brandywine Falls, which was our next stop down a short, steep trail!
 |
 |
At 65 feet in height, it’s not quite as impressive as the last waterfall I visited with Danielle, it did fuel a sawmill that sprouted the town of Brandywine in 1814! I was a little disappointed that we couldn’t go down to its base, but I got a sense from the signs that too many people had gotten hurt trying to climb the falls.
 |
We wrapped up our visit to Cuyahoga Valley National Park by visiting the neat Station Road Bridge, built in 1882 and enjoying the calmness of the Cuyahoga River as it passed under its arches. It’s been a whirlwind day of history and architecture, so it was nice to wrap up with a moment of quiet.
 |
Before too long, we were chased back into the car by mosquitoes and headed back north to get some dinner and get ready for Phase 2 of a Labor Day Weekend adventure. There are more parks and historical sites to see tomorrow, so I’m glad to be traveling with some high-endurance chums!
O-bye-o!
More 2019 Adventures |
Total Ground Covered: 71 mi (114.3 km) |
More 2019 Adventures |