Since the city's founding more than 230 years ago, Public Square has always been the crown of Cleveland. Granted, in its earliest days, it merely served as pasturage for the livestock of the original farming settlers. But it soon became the growing City's 'front lawn', and still serves that function today.
Public Square actually consists of four square blocks of greensward, located at the cross-hairs of the City's center, where north-south Ontario Street intersects with east-west Superior Avenue. Throughout the centuries, Public Square has been protected and preserved as the common ground of the citizenry, and as a venue for public celebrations. And like any respectable crown, Public Square has been ringed by gems of architectural history, style and tradition.
As early as 1819, a religious congregation was housed in a modest structure on the northern flank of Public Square. Through successive destructions and reconstructions, the edifice of Old Stone Church eventually arose, and since 1884 has stood sentinel over the Square. Such notables as glass designers Louis C. Tiffany and John LaFarge, architect Charles Schweinfurth and his sibling fresco artist Julius Schweinfurth contributed to this landmark structure.
Opposite Old Stone Church, across Ontario Street, was soon to stand the Society for Savings Building of architects Burnham & Root. The red stone Richardsonian 'high-rise' featured a nine-story skylit inner court to illumine its rings of banking offices. Today, the Romanesque-Gothic-Renaissance composition anchors one corner of the Key Center complex.
By 1894 there had arisen, several blocks south of the previous two structures, the Soldiers and Sailors Monument, dedicated to local defenders of the Union during the Civil War. The four divisions of the military are each commemorated in striking bas-relief sculpted metal panels, accompanied by stone carvings, stained glass, war memorabilia and testaments to their actions in the conflict. A statue of the Goddess of Liberty caps the monument's spire-like banded stone column.
Cleveland was ushered through the Great Depression by the arrival of perhaps its best known Public Square gem, the Terminal Tower, completed in 1930-31. Created by the wealthy siblings Oris Paxton and Mantis James Van Sweringen (who also created the garden suburb of Shaker Heights), the Terminal Tower complex included not only the city's central rail station and a grand public lobby and concourse, but also a hotel, department store and vast office spaces apportioned among four separate structures. In its prime, the complex rivaled New York City's Rockefeller Center in significance as a mixed-use urban development.
John D. Rockefeller, founder of Standard Oil and one of the nation's wealthiest men, was an early investor in Cleveland real estate and development. (A downtown office structure still bears his name, and he donated to the City all of the land along Doan Brook that became Rockefeller Park, site of the cultural memorial gardens.) After his Standard Oil of Ohio had transitioned to Sohio, and then later acquired British Petroleum to become the global oil giant BP, it developed a new 45-story headquarters structure to occupy the eastern flank of Public Square at Euclid Avenue. This faceted red stone monolith of a slab, with its distinctive ziggurat-stepped cap, was designed by the architects Hellmuth, Obata & Kassabaum, and was completed in 1985. BP has since vacated the structure, which is now known as The Huntington Building, for its prime banking tenant.
The newest gem in Cleveland's crown arrived in 1991, in the form of Key Tower. This serrated rocket of a tower, 57 stories in height, with a shimmering faceted pyramidal cap, was designed by the firm of César Pelli. At its base, the Tower embraces the adjacent historic Society for Savings Building as an interconnected banking lobby, as well as the Marriott at Key Center, a hotel structure at its northwesterly corner.
From any of the many tree-shaded park benches throughout the greens of Public Square, visitors and citizens alike can enjoy a 360-degree panoramic tale of Cleveland's history, style and architecture, told through these gems of the City's crown.
Comments