The Overlook Of Cleveland And Cleveland Heights

Railroad tycoon turned real estate developer Patrick Calhoun named the premier residential boulevard of his Euclid Heights allotment the Overlook because of its location high on a bluff overlooking Case School of Applied Science, Western Reserve College, Lake Erie, and the city of Cleveland. By 1910, the boulevard was lined with the mansions of Cleveland's wealthy and powerful. Today, although traces of the Overlook's glory days remain, most of its great mansions are gone, replaced by apartment houses and the dormitories and fraternity houses of Case Western Reserve University. This is the story of that transformation.

During its more than a century as a Cleveland suburb, Cleveland Heights has been shaped by the natural topography, technology, enterprising developers, elected officials, and its residents of many backgrounds. The result has been a rich mosaic of places and people. In the 1890s, wealthy Clevelanders began to leave the city's smoky factories and congested neighborhoods for the "heights" in East Cleveland Township. In 1901, the heights became the hamlet of Cleveland Heights. As its population changed, so did the suburb's homes, shops, schools, parks, and places of worship. Today, Cleveland Heights is as diversified as its citizens, its eclectic architecture and neighborhoods, and its unique history.

Since the last quarter of the 19th century, dozens of religious congregations have made their homes in Cleveland Heights. They have been Presbyterian, United Methodist, Evangelical, Roman Catholic, Jewish (Conservative, Orthodox, and Egalitarian\traditional), Unitarian Universalist, Greek Orthodox, Baptist, Disciples of Christ, Church of Christ, Lutheran, Christian Science, Episcopalian, African Methodist Episcopal, and Congregational and now also include a wide array of community and nondenominational churches. Sponsored by established congregations, encouraged by real estate developers and public officials, and usually welcomed by residents, churches, synagogues, and temples have fostered the suburb's growth, sometimes maintaining and sometimes changing Cleveland Heights neighborhoods. Their houses of worship, ranging from modest renovated storefronts to stately cathedrals, have enriched the city's landscape; their religious pluralism has nurtured ethnic, economic, and racial diversity, as well as controversy and conflict; their calls to action have sometimes aroused the community's conscience. Religious congregations, in short, have helped to sustain the vitality of Cleveland Heights.