Millionaires' Row and Its End

In the eighteen eighties, Baedeker's travel guide called Euclid Avenue the Showplace of America. The German guidebook company was not given to superlatives. They meant it. For a long stretch east of Public Square, the elm-lined avenue held the mansions of men whose names were synonymous with American industry: Rockefeller, Charles Brush who invented the arc light that first lit American streets, Marcus Hanna who was the political architect of the McKinley presidency, Jeptha Wade who founded Western Union, and John Hay who had been Lincoln's private secretary and would become Secretary of State under two presidents.

The houses were immense and elaborate. The avenue was compared to the Champs-Élysées in Paris. Visitors came specifically to walk it. It was, briefly, the most valuable residential address in the United States.

The men who built it destroyed it. The commercial and industrial success that their fortunes created made Cleveland's inner core more valuable as commercial land than as residential land. Taxes rose. The families who could afford to move east to the new suburbs in Shaker Heights and Cleveland Heights did so. The mansions were converted to rooming houses during the Depression, then to offices, then to nothing in particular.

The Innerbelt Freeway cut through the neighborhood in the nineteen fifties. By the nineteen sixties, the street that had rivaled Fifth Avenue was a corridor of parking lots and substandard commercial buildings. Of the mansions that once lined it, only a handful survived.

The story of Millionaires' Row is not a story of decline. It is a story of what industrial capitalism does to the places it makes famous. It eats them.