You can read a lot about Downtown Cleveland in its architecture.
But sometimes, there are interesting messages in what you don’t see.
Take a listen to three experts on our local cityscape.
Click on the image to see a larger still from the documentary.

One of the ways a city grows can be seen in the naming of streets. In the beginning, those names reflect the land itself: the road running next to a river is often called “Water Street”; the path running through the middle of town is known as “Center Street”; the thoroughfare that leads you to Detroit, is called “Detroit Street”. After the basic directions have been set, then come the names of geographic features, like “Elm” and “Orchard”. In Cleveland, and many other cities, numbers have replaced some of these original names, but you can still see traces of the past in places like Erie Street Cemetery, on East Ninth Street, across from Jacobs Field, and the Water Street Apartments, on West Ninth Street, in the Warehouse District. Architect Robert Gaede has seen eight decades of change in his hometown of Cleveland, and he has some thoughts on these changing names and numbers.

A booming economy at the turn of the 20th Century left Cleveland with some of its most impressive buildings. That building boom lasted up through the completion of the Terminal Tower in 1930. Then the Great Depression put the brakes on the city’s architectural ambitions. It wasn’t until the 1950s that new downtown structures started sprouting from the soil. But by the 1970s, Plain Dealer Architecture writer Steven Litt says it seemed like city officials had little say in the design of those structures.

The skyline of downtown Cleveland seems strong and permanent, and yet it has changed many times over the years. Historian John Grabowski reflects on that change from the balcony of the Garfield Memorial in Lakeview Cemetery on the east side.