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    Fairview Park
    Fairview Park
    Fairview Park
    Ebook167 pages44 minutes

    Fairview Park

    By Frank Barnett

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    About this ebook

    Fairview Park is truly a postwar community. Before World War II, it was mainly rural countryside just beginning to see some development. The Rocky River valley had been enough of a barrier to keep Fairview that much more rural until high-level bridges were built in the 1920s. A brochure at the time for the newly developed Coffinberry Estates in northeast Fairview Park refers to quick access to downtown Cleveland via Hilliard Road, Detroit Avenue, or Lorain Avenue bridges. The bridges residents now take for granted were then a major selling point. The farmland started to evolve into suburbia as spaces between houses were filled with more houses. Fairview Village became Fairview Park in 1948, and the year before, Cuyahoga County s first shopping center was built here.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateDec 15, 2008
    ISBN9781439619179
    Fairview Park
    Author

    Frank Barnett

    Frank Barnett grew up in Fairview Park in the 1960s and 1970s. Barnett sketches out the evolution of Fairview Park, a city of some 20,000 people, using historic photographs mostly from the Fairview Park Historical Society and the Cleveland Press Archives at Cleveland State University.

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      Book preview

      Fairview Park - Frank Barnett

      are.

      INTRODUCTION

      A book about Fairview Park cannot just start in 1948 when it got that name. The area had been evolving for a number of years, from township government through the establishment of Fairview Village in 1910, the name change in 1948 (because there was another Fairview in Ohio), and becoming a city in 1951. Although this book focuses mostly on what is called Fairview Park, a little sense of what was already established when it got a new label is needed. In fact, labels like city and village can get kind of fuzzy. When does a village become a city? And when is the oldest designation, the township, no longer a township?

      Fairview Park was originally part of the much-larger Rockport Township. Although townships still exist in Ohio, in the early days when it was all wilderness, the land was first divided into counties then further divided into equal-sized townships. Early Ohio was so thick and indistinguishable with endless wilderness that the earliest settlers most likely came by boat from the north off Lake Erie and from the south off the Ohio River. The land that the first white settlers saw in the mid-18th century was so thickly forested that, according to Ralph Pfingsten’s From Rockport to West Park, Realistic estimates indicate that as much as 95% of the land area was covered with trees. It took the almost incomprehensible task of digging the two Ohio canal systems by hand across the entire state to start opening up the wilderness in between, an easier-said-than-done connecting of these two very different bodies of water. The Ohio River in turn connected to the Mississippi River, while Lake Erie connected to the St. Lawrence River and eventually the Atlantic Ocean. So the state became a major link. With the canals and later the railroads, the state started to evolve like some biological form, with borders expanding and contracting as people settled in and interacted with the land, some becoming urban, and some becoming rural.

      Borders evolved with technology. Trains and later trucks and cars on paved roads may have replaced the canals, but even they had to evolve. Before railroad tracks spread throughout the vanishing wilderness of Ohio, wagons and stagecoaches rumbled across plank roads, parallel strips of lumber just wide enough apart to support wagon wheels. These were toll roads, with the tolls paying for the upkeep. What is now Lorain Road had a tollbooth at Wooster Road where people had to pay. Obviously it was a lot of work to lay the roads and keep replacing rotted and broken lumber. This also created a big market for lumber from all the trees that were cleared as cities grew. But railroad tracks were eventually an improvement over plank roads, and electric trains called the interurban were an improvement over steam trains. People too young to remember the streetcars throughout Cleveland have an even harder time imagining the interurban, which were essentially long-distance streetcars. People started traveling, commuting for fun or business between Cleveland and Rockport to Oberlin or Sandusky or further out. People simply take for granted today that roads are paved.

      And then there is the technology of bridges. One thing about Rockport was its beautiful river, the Rocky, running right through the middle of the township. Any area with a major river valley has an obstacle to contend with until bridges can be built. In Rockport’s case, west of the river was that much more isolated, so east of the river saw the earliest development. The northeast part of Rockport Township evolved into the city of Lakewood. South of Lakewood became the city of West Park, which annexed to Cleveland in 1923. The entire township west of the Rocky River was originally the hamlet and later the village of Rocky River. Eventually, the land south of Center Ridge Road took on the name Goldwood Township, which became Fairview. The first bridges were always at the valley level. As engineering improved and the population grew, high-level bridges were stretched across the valley at several points, including the three interstates that came through in the 1960s and 1970s.

      And yet, other than needing high-level bridges to overcome crossing the river valley, people are not complaining of the obstacle. Everyone refers to the section of Cleveland Metroparks that rub up against Fairview Park as, simply, the valley. It has always been good for the soul to go down in the valley to enjoy nature. The valley cuts a long diagonal edge across Fairview Park, and realtors have developed some very dynamic properties along the

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