Joanne Siegel (born Jolan Kovacs) was born in Cleveland in 1917. She wanted to be a model and placed an ad in the paper looking for modeling work. Joe Shuster and his partner, Joel Siegel hired Joanne to model for sketches for a character in a comic book they were creating. That character would be […]
Margaret Bourke-White is known as a pioneer in industrial photography. She was born in New York City in 1904 and graduated from Cornell in 1927. She moved to Cleveland to be near her mother and this is where her interest in industrial photography began. Cleveland Years She went to the owner of the Otis Steel […]
George A. Myers is often referred to as Cleveland’s best barber. But his influence extended beyond the chair and the shop. Myers was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1859. He graduated high school but was denied entrance into the city college because of his race. He would learn to become a barber and move to […]
Jane Edna (Harris) Hunter was born in South Carolina in 1882, the daughter of sharecroppers. She trained to become a nurse and eventually moved to Cleveland where she attended the Marshall Law School and passed the Ohio Bar exam. Her Work In 1911, she organized the Working Girls Association, which later would become known as […]
John Patterson Green was born in North Carolina in 1845 but he and his family moved to Cleveland in 1857. He attended Central High School in downtown Cleveland in the late 1860’s. He studied law and was admitted to the Ohio Bar in 1870. John Patterson Green has the distinction of being the first African […]
Riverside Cemetery was created for the residents on the west side of Cleveland in 1875. Prior to this there were only small cemeteries in the area and the residents wanted to establish a larger cemetery that could accommodate future generations. Titus N. Brainard would sell around 100 acres his land to establish Riverside. It was […]
Moses Cleaveland We begin a look at some of the Public Square statues, past and present. We will start with the obvious choice, Moses Cleaveland, the founder of the city. Moses of course arrived here on July 22, 1796. Instead of talking about him, I’d like to focus on the statue itself. The statue was […]
Last February during Black History month, we looked Carl Stokes (former Mayor of Cleveland), this year we look at his brother Louis Stokes. Louis Stokes was born in 1925 and grew up in Cleveland in one of the first federally funded housing projects in the country. Louis served his country in the Army in the […]
February is Black History Month and once again we will look at some of Cleveland’s famous African-Americans. Most people know Jackie Robinson as the first African-American to play Major League Baseball (MLB) in the modern era and Frank Robinosn as the first African-American manager of a major league club. But it was Larry Doby who […]
Cora Holden was born in Alexandria, Virginia in 1895 but moved to Cleveland to attend the Cleveland School of Art (now Cleveland Institute of Art) where she earned her graduate degree in 1918. She would also teach at the school throughout her life. Locally she worked with architects Walker and Weeks. They would hire her […]
