NICKEL PLATE ROAD
One of the most distinctive features of East Cleveland when I
was growing up there during the 1940s and 1950s was the railroad which ran
through town just North of Euclid Avenue.
That railroad was the Nickel Plate Road.
The impact of the Nickel Plate Road was particularly great upon those of
us who lived near the embankment upon which the trains ran through town. The embankment and its bridges divided the
town into neighborhoods and elementary school districts. It was also an attraction to all of us
children, who lived near it.
I have a lifelong fondness for the Nickel Plate Road. To this day I am a member of the Nickel Plate
Road Historical and Technical Society, Inc.
Anyone who shares my interest in that great railroad can learn more
about it at their website: www.nkphts.org. The organization publishes a
wonderful magazine four times a year, which often includes articles and
pictures about the Nickel Plate Road impact upon Cleveland and East Cleveland.
I have already written about my adventures on and around the
Nickel Plate Road tracks, embankment and bridges in some of my posts about my
Shaw and Plymouth neighborhood. Those
adventures occurred while I lived there from 1940 until I moved to Nela View in
1953. I recently discovered that my
friend, Bruce Dzeda, shares my fond memories of the Nickel Plate Road. He has agreed to write an essay about those
memories, which I am publishing below. Enjoy!
Collamer, Collinwood and the Nickel Plate
Railroad
By Bruce Dzeda
\
Collinwood, once called Collinsville by some,
is a product of the Lake Shore & Michigan
Southern Railway, which built its locomotive and repair shops in that area
after the completion of the railroad in the early 1850's. By 1900 everyone
called it the New York Central Railroad, and today it is part of CSX
Transportation, whose facilities in Collinwood are but a faint shadow of the
glory days.
Just as Collinwood developed because of one
railroad, a case can be made that the East
Cleveland we inhabited after World War II was the child of the other railroad
that ran through Cleveland. I'm referring of course to the New York, Chicago
& St. Louis Railroad, always called the Nickel Plate Railroad, which was
constructed in 1881. The Nickel Plate (NKP) and the New York Central (NYC) were
built parallel between Buffalo and Cleveland, in some cases just yards apart
and in our area more like a mile apart. The NKP was an unimpressive single-track
railroad until Cleveland's Van Sweringen brothers bought it from the NYC in
1916.
The old road or street that connected East Cleveland to Collinwood was Collamer
Street,
which, after Cleveland's streets were numbered in 1907, became E. 152nd Street.
Collamer was the name pre-Civil War settlers had given to the neighborhood
along the Euclid road from about Lee Road to about Ivanhoe Road; St. Paul's
Episcopal Church on Euclid Avenue (circa 1850) was the heart of old
Collamer. Today's Terrace Road was originally named Collamer Terrace.
As a kid who couldn't drive, I only got to see
Collinwood when my parents would take us there to go shopping at Five Points,
where stores like Woolworth's, Western Auto, and Robert Hall, among many
others, made it a vibrant neighborhood, or maybe to a fish fry at St. Mary's
Church, or on our way to Euclid Beach Park. I always considered Collinwood a
little more blue collar or working class than East Cleveland. For example,
where Shaw High students looked to me like clean-cut, preppy kids heading off
to college and careers, Collinwood students, by contrast, always seemed to me
vaguely more threatening, more likely to wear a motorcycle jacket or a beehive
hairdo. Of course I'm generalizing and stereotyping, but to me as a youngster,
that's the way I saw Five Points. After all, they were the Railroaders at
Collinwood; by contrast, the Shaw kids were the Cardinals, a small
creature no one is particularly afraid of, right?
As we drove from East Cleveland across
Woodworth Avenue into Collinwood we would pass (on the left, or west side of E.
152nd) the Towmotor Corporation, the company that invented the fork-lift truck,
and where my dad was a highly skilled and well paid tool and die maker. Then on
the right GE's big factory that produced light bulbs and such. Then again on
the left the Clark Equipment company, which also made, among other things,
towmotors! Over the little railroad spur track and next on the right was the
factory of the Murray Ohio Manufacturing Company, which made those wonderful
Murray bicycles such as the snappy red and white model I was so proud of which
dad and mom bought for me a stone's throw away at Western Auto's Five Points store.
On some of the happiest days of my life we
would drive from our house on Northfield, next to the NKP tracks, to Euclid
Beach Park, passing directly through Collinwood, a neighborhood I always found
fascinating. The best part of the journey was the humpy bridge over the NYC because
on the left I could get a great view of the massive roundhouse, outside of
which you could see the turntable and some of the largest steam locomotives in
the eastern United States, and on the other side of the street were the diesel
repair shops. I didn't know what to look at first as we went by! I'm glad my
dad liked to slow down a bit to look too.
Continuing on through Collinwood and towards the lake, a few blocks later we
passed on the left Memorial School and the beautiful garden next to it. I'll
never forget hearing from my dad what the significance of the garden was and
what it commemorated. The worst school fire in American history had happened there
only fifty years earlier, but to me as a kid 1908 seemed a century past. Today
I realize that many people who were living nearby had themselves attended the
school, or seen, or were touched by the terrible fire.
Shaw and Collinwood high schools had a great
rivalry, of course, and on the Friday nights
when football games between them were played in a jam-packed Shaw Stadium, the
loud cheers could be clearly heard at our house some blocks away. In fact, one
season in the late 1950's I remember the thundering cheers for Shaw's star
kicker Mario Gerhardt "Mar-ee-o, Maree-o" the crowd of thousands
cheered again and again. Mario was rather small for a football player and he
would run out on the field to kick a field goal with a bare kicking foot. He learned that skill growing up in post war
Germany and playing soccer without shoes because most kids couldn’t afford to
buy shoes. Mario went on to be a teacher
at Chagrin Falls High School. His
younger brother, Dieter was our Cleveland Press carrier.
These days when I’m in Collinwood, it's always in the dead of night or
near dawn. That's the time Amtrak's Lake Shore Limited, the New York/Boston
to Chicago train, passes through on its journeys. As I look at the still
standing coaling tower or the old Electric Shops built in 1929 for the Terminal
Tower project, I sometimes wonder if anyone else on board knows that the name Lake
Shore Limited comes from the days when "the old Lake Shore"
Railway made Collinwood a true railroad town.
East Cleveland and the
Nickel Plate Road
Now
back to the Nickel Plate Railroad, for it was the NKP, in fact, that in 1951
brought my family to East Cleveland in the first place. My mother's sister
worked in the GE plant on E. 152nd Street and lived with her husband in an apartment
on Eddy Road next to the NKP embankment and tracks. Her husband was a daily habitué
at a nearby bar on Hayden Avenue, where one of his buddies was an officer
in the NKP real estate department downtown in the Terminal Tower. One day he
informed my uncle that the NKP was going to auction off a number of houses and
lots it owned in East Cleveland. My uncle knew our family was looking to buy a
house and asked his friend if my father could put in a bid
on one. The man proceeded to tell my uncle which houses were going to be
auctioned and what to bid, since he figured there would be very few bids. It
turned out there were no other bids and consequently my mom and dad became the
proud owners of their own first house for $4,000 cash (about $38,000 today, adjusted for
inflation).
The
house on Northfield Avenue was a neglected wreck of a rental when we moved there
in August of 1951. It took two or three
years for my parents to clean the place out, paint and wallpaper it inside and
out, and make the yard a pretty one filled with flowers. Because they never had
a mortgage, they never had a house payment. This, plus the fact that dad had a
good paying job at UAW-unionized Towmotor, meant that our family could live a
version of the idyllic American middle-class life of the 1950's. So the Nickel
Plate Road played a key role, maybe the
key role, in my family's history, and I remain grateful.
The
first night we were in our new house was a warm August evening, so our windows
were open and we had just gone to bed, when there came an enormous sound,
getting louder and closer, and sounding like a dragon, or so I thought. It
turned out it was a huge Nickel Plate 700-series Berkshire steam locomotive,
creeping its way towards the red signal just ahead. By the time it finally
hissed to a stop, we were gathered together at our upstairs hallway window, mesmerized
by the spectacle just fifty or sixty feet away from us. The engineer, as he
looked around, saw us and gave a friendly wave and we eagerly waved back. I
could see behind the locomotive some stock cars, filled with either cattle or
hogs, I can't recall, and we could hear them as well as smell them. I then
realized that I was now living right next door to the most amazing thing I ever
saw in my life...a mainline railroad with passenger trains and steam locomotives!
And just think, we now owned our own house, and we lived next to a railroad!
As Ira Gershwin once wrote, "Who could ask for anything more?”
We lived next door to the Nickel Plate for nine
years and I learned a lot from the wonderful
experience. For one thing, each passing
freight train brought a geography lesson to me. As a life-long compulsive
reader I couldn't help but look up and read the advertising on the cars as they
went by: "Burlington...Everywhere West," "B&O...Linking 13
Great States with the Nation," "Northern Pacific...Main Street of the
Northwest," "Lehigh Valley," "Fruit Growers Express,"
"Armour Star," "Hormel," "Delaware & Hudson,"
etc. When I was very young I'd ask my dad where those places were and he'd
explain their location or their nicknames; later on I would look them up or
figure out their meanings for myself.
Maybe the most important lesson the Nickel Plate taught me was never to take
anything for
granted. For example, I thought nothing could be more real or more alive than
an NKP steam locomotive. But then in May of 1958 the steam locomotives just...
disappeared, only to be replaced by new but prosaic-looking diesel locomotives
painted black with gold stripes. Although the trains still had all the usual
cars and a caboose, railroads suddenly became (only) a little less interesting.
At the same time, I learned how to take snapshots of things I liked. In all those
nine years of living next door to the Nickel Plate, our family took not a
single photograph of a steam locomotive. None. After all, we thought, why
bother? "They'll always be there." Until one day they weren't.
Before the Civil War, East Cleveland township was the name for everything
between the
Cleveland city line at Willson Avenue (today's E. 55th Street) and Euclid
Village (the area in Euclid Township where the eponymous road, Euclid Creek and
today's Chardon Road intersect. After the Civil War and the continuous
annexation of large tracts of township land by the city of Cleveland, rural
East Cleveland became ever smaller in size.
In
the 1870's a rich young John D. Rockefeller bought land in the township east of
Doan's
Corners (E. 105th Street) called Lakeview or Lake View, west of Collamer, and
helped to finance the building of the Lakeview & Collamer, an early
railroad which started at Becker Street and Superior Avenue in Glenville and
entered today's East Cleveland at Lakeview Street. It then proceeded northeast
for not quite seven miles to Euclid Village. Rockefeller's plan to use the little
railroad to bring paying customers to Forest Hill, which he hoped to convert
into a vacation resort or hotel, came to nothing. So when he was approached in
1879 to sell the Lakeview & Collamer to another railroad company (the NKP)
seeking an inexpensive right-of-way, he sold. Beginning in 1881 the NKP
operated trains on a single track from Chicago to Buffalo through today's East
Cleveland, where, over the years, the Nickel Plate was to prove to be a good corporate
citizen in a number of ways.
To
begin with, because of the many sidings it installed along its line, the NKP
served many
local businesses, which in turn, employed many East Clevelanders. Then in 1916,
in order to increase competition, the NYC was ordered by the Interstate Commerce
Commission to divest itself of the Nickel Plate, which it had owned and
operated since 1882. The NYC sold the NKP to two brothers, Oris P. and Mantis
J. Van Sweringen, local real estate developers in the Heights area and
subsequent builders of the Terminal Tower. Their long-range plans for Cleveland
included building several rapid transit lines, one of which became the Shaker
Heights Rapid Transit.
Another
rapid transit line was projected to run east from the Terminal Tower alongside
their NKP railroad to perhaps Euclid or Mentor. As part of the Terminal Tower
project, the NKP right of way through East Cleveland was double-tracked and
raised on a two-story earthen embankment, passing over all the city's streets
on steel bridges faced with cement. The effects of this embankment project on
East Cleveland were profound. In the first place, once the tracks were elevated
in 1928, NKP trains could pass through the city quickly and more-or-less
quietly, since the absence of grade crossings eliminated the need for
locomotives to slow down and blow their whistles as they crossed each street.
The city became safer, too, as the embankment, or "the hill," as we
called it, by itself discouraged, if not prevented, adults and kids from
trespassing on the dangerous right of way. To appreciate the beneficial effects
of this construction project, one has only to look to modern-day Lakewood,
another suburb the NKP passed through. The NKP never elevated its tracks in
Lakewood. Consequently, Lakewood residents to this day have their
neighborhoods bisected by slow-moving freight trains each blasting their horns
four times for every crossing. Each year the local news media feature a story
or two about cars or pedestrians in Lakewood being struck by trains, with the
predictably tragic results.
By
the early 1930's the Van Sweringens were bankrupt and the planned rapid transit
line
through East Cleveland alongside the NKP tracks was abandoned, although the
necessary
bridges, pylons, and graded right of way were already in place. After World War
II the idea was revived and the CTS Rapid Transit was eventually built on the
unused right of way from downtown to Windermere. East of Windermere the NKP
owned a wide strip of land on the south side of their right of way as far as
London Road.
When
the embankment was built the NKP became the landlord of the houses on its now widened
right of way, and it was one of these houses which my parents bought in 1951
after the plan to extend the rapid transit line east of Windermere was dropped.
Subsequently, the CTS Rapid Transit opened in 1955 from Windermere to downtown
and the West Side.
The
construction of the Nickel Plate's double-track, two-story railroad embankment
along the entire length or spine of East Cleveland resulted in a physical barrier
between the Euclid Avenue side neighborhoods on the south and those on the
north that tended to center on Hayden Avenue. These neighborhoods were
developed by different real estate companies and the very houses themselves
reflected this divide. On the south or Euclid side of the tracks, single-family
houses were the norm. Our house, built in 1912, was one of several such built
on that part of Northfield Avenue. The northern, or Hayden-side, of the NKP
embankment had primarily the ubiquitous two-story Cleveland-style double
houses, and therefore twice the population density. In my experience, kids from
north of the tracks and kids from the south side didn't mix very much, in part
because the embankment demarcated the Prospect kids from the Mayfair and Chambers
School kids. The infrequent times I met boys from the Hayden Avenue side was
when I went swimming at Shaw Pool, or played on the Jungle Gym and
Merry-go-round (with a hard asphalt surface to hit if you fell off!) at Mayfair
School, or at the Shaw-Hayden Theatre.
Generally our crowd played on the Euclid, or south side, of the embankment.
On
the south side of the embankment a series of footpaths linked Windermere on the
west to at least Shaw Avenue, and probably farther. I say probably because Shaw
Avenue marked the edge of my turf. Farther
east was to me, anyway, terra incognita. These footpaths connected the
various places that were of interest to boys in the neighborhood. Small animals
lived on the hill in the weeds and brush, and between Strathmore and Northfield
the path went behind the Ohio Bell garage, behind the Board of Education
warehouse with its sand piles to dig in and its concrete coal railroad trestle
(still standing in 2019) to play on, dangerous as it was with big nails sticking
up from the floorboards and large gaps in places. The path continued behind the
Lectroetch Company, then behind a long apartment garage, and finally down a
driveway to Strathmore Avenue. The path continued east of Strathmore alongside
a building of the East Cleveland Lumber Company, which fronted on Shaw Avenue.
West
of Northfield the path went behind another series of Elderwood Avenue apartment
garages until it reached Wymore Road. A tall poplar tree stood on the top of a
grass and weed covered hill. There before and below us, until about 1958 when
the A&P and a bowling alley were built, was a large piece of empty property
that we kids played on and considered our own.
This property was, in fact, all that remained of "Wymore," a
small estate at the turn of the century owned by Sophia Taylor, an important
early landowner. Wymore faced Euclid Avenue and extended back to the NKP
embankment. Although there was a small house at the rear of the property, the
main house was long gone. But! The carriage house at Wymore was still standing,
totally abandoned, without doors, and as frightening to me in its appearance as
any Hollywood set. I had heard from boys who dared to look inside that there
were carriages! This really isn't so surprising; only fifty years earlier
Wymore included, along with the house, a livery stable, no doubt the swains of
East Cleveland at the turn of the century could rent a horse and carriage to take
a girl out for a drive. It's also very likely that if the barn had carriages it
must have had a sleigh or two. In those days sleighs were a common winter sight
in Cleveland; west of Willson (E.55th) Avenue to Erie (E.9th) Street, Euclid
Avenue sleigh racing was a well known and well
attended daily sport. So Wymore was to me a bit of the East Cleveland of the
1890's, like the large Queen Anne style houses that anchored the corners of
Euclid Avenue at other Avenues such as Northfield and Strathmore.
The
property that had once been Wymore was one of the best places I knew to play.
Here we kids constructed forts, played cowboys & Indians, or re-enacted the
World War II battles we were learning about on TV. We made spears from sticks
and dried goatsbeard stalks. We brandished swords. We shot arrows from our
bows. We nearly put our eyes out! We ran with real knives. But we also flew
kites here and a few memorable times put hot dogs on sticks and held them over
a fire of twigs and small logs. In retrospect, one of the very best things
about playing at Wymore or anywhere else I went, was the absence of fear. It
never occurred to me that any adult would harm us. We might fear a big kid we
didn't know, and I might be too timid to look into the Wymore barn because a
ghost could get me, but I not only felt safe everywhere I went in East Cleveland,
I felt I owned the place.
The
footpath along the bottom of the NKP hill continued west to Eastham Avenue,
then west again down a one-block section of Elderwood Avenue, finally ending at
Doan Avenue. After 1955 the CTS Rapid Transit had a bridge here that carried a
turning track on top, but allowed a pedestrian to walk underneath and enter the
precincts of the Windermere Rapid Transit Station, another place of eternal
fascination to me as a kid.
Still
another impact the Nickel Plate Railroad had on East Cleveland was the large
and
handsome passenger station constructed of brick and stone that was opened in
1930 as part of the enormous Terminal Tower project. As a boy, I was drawn to
that station like a moth to a light. Unfortunately, I was forbidden by my mom
to ride my bike to the station ("too far"), probably because it
involved crossing busy Superior Avenue on the eastern edge of the station
parking lot. Nevertheless, I went there a number of evenings after dinner, in
order to watch Nickel Plate train #8, The New Yorker, arrive from the west
at 7:20. While it was stopped, I got as close as I could to this beautiful
train with its coaches, dining car and sleepers painted silver and blue, led by
two Alco "Bluebird" diesel locomotives, throbbing away at the head
end like impatient horses. After boarding the usual half dozen or so
passengers, the train sped away to the east, leaving me to watch the large red
light on the door of the last car fade away out of sight. I vowed to myself that
one day I would ride that and other trains.
The
Nickel Plate's first station for East Cleveland wasn't really in East
Cleveland, per se, but farther west on Euclid Avenue across from the
Cleveland Railway Company's Lake View Shops and the eponymous cemetery. This
station was demolished about 1929 as the new station near Superior Avenue was
nearing completion. The new station was designed by architects Graham, Anderson,
Probst, & White, the Chicago firm that designed Cleveland's Union Terminal
and its Tower. The Nickel Plate shared both stations with the New York Central,
the major tenant. From 1930 until 1953 powerful electric locomotives pulled NYC
passenger trains through East Cleveland on their way downtown and then west to
Linndale, which, like Collinwood on the east, was where the steam locomotives
took over.
East
Cleveland's station was striking in its size and appearance; it might well have
served a city two or three times the size. Inside the cavernous room was a
Union News stand, an imposing ticket counter, racks with timetables for every
railroad imaginable, a baggage room, large chandeliers, very comfortable dark
benches, restrooms, with floors of terrazzo and walls of marble. At the far
west end of the station a passage led underneath the railroad tracks to the stairways
and elevators to the two platforms and four tracks above.
It
was a busy station until the 1960's. When it opened in 1930, thirty passenger
trains called at East Cleveland every day. The NKP served the station with four
trains daily, the others belonged to the New York Central. After World War II
the number of trains began to diminish. In 1948, twenty-two trains called at
East Cleveland; in 1960 there sixteen trains. By 1963 the last two NKP trains
stopped using the station and the NYC did likewise by 1964.
It's
interesting to note that in 1936 when O.P. Van Sweringen died aboard his
private railroad car on his way to New York, his remains were returned to Ohio
via the Nickel Plate and brought though the East Cleveland station he and his
brother caused to be built, before being taken to Lake View Cemetery for
burial.
In
my opinion, the railroad station was one of the two finest buildings ever
constructed in East Cleveland, the other one being Kirk Junior High School.
Both were opened in 1930, and they perhaps mark East Cleveland's high water
mark as a prosperous suburb of middle and upper class people. Nothing quite as
substantial and beautiful was ever built again in the city, as evidenced by the
inexpensive and cheap-looking new City Hall building on Euclid Avenue that was
built about 1958 on what had been the front lawn of the modest and attractive
old City Hall, imposing the new facade onto the sidewalk.
The
beautiful and capacious East Cleveland passenger station was demolished in the
mid-1960's after only thirty-six or seven years of service, in order to provide
space for a Ford dealership, the business that helped to kill passenger train
travel in America.
Sic transit gloria mundi.
