The Old West End: Where the Glass Barons Built Their Houses
Near Toledo, Ohio
If you drive west from downtown Toledo along Collingwood Boulevard, the city shifts. The blocks open up, the trees get older and taller, and you find yourself moving through one of the largest intact collections of Victorian, Edwardian, and Arts and Crafts architecture in the United States east of the Mississippi River.
This is the Old West End. It was laid out in the nineteenth century, and most of its construction happened between eighteen seventy-five and nineteen fifteen, the exact years when Toledo's glass and railroad industries were minting new fortunes as fast as the factories could run.
The neighborhood was Toledo's answer to the question every boom town faces: where do the newly rich build? Glassmakers, railroad executives, and industrialists commissioned Colonial Revival, Queen Anne, Georgian, French Second Empire, and Dutch Colonial mansions that went up block by block as the city's wealth accumulated.
Edward Drummond Libbey and his wife Florence made their home in the Old West End, and the Toledo Museum of Art, which they helped build into a major institution, sits in the neighborhood, open to the neighbors and to anyone in the city.
The neighborhood survived the Depression, though many of the great houses were converted to apartments and rooming houses during lean years. Historic preservation efforts in the nineteen seventies listed parts of the district on the National Register of Historic Places; the district expanded in nineteen eighty-four.
Today the Old West End holds its character. Restoration projects are ongoing. The neighborhood throws one of the largest annual house tours in Ohio, drawing tens of thousands of visitors each summer who walk through parlors and up staircases that have been standing since before the automobile changed everything.
