The 1890s will be remembered in Cleveland, as in so many other northern industrial cities in America, as the Gilded Age.
Electricity, petroleum, telegraphs, railroads, mass-produced steel and other building blocks of the Industrial Age, newly introduced into the economy, were beginning to yield previously unimaginable wealth. Everywhere, it was being converted into grand commercial buildings, stylish homes to rival the best of the Old World and museums and other baubles of success.
Throughout history, great wealth has often prompted cycles of edifice complex, a vague yearning among the rich and influential to build something that might outlast their mortal shells. And 1890s Cleveland was clotted with such showy bids for eternity.
Along upper Euclid Avenue, palatial Millionaire’s Row — then near the peak of its storied career as perhaps the world’s leading boulevard — stretched for blocks. Along lower Euclid, the grand fortress of the Old Arcade went up in 1890. And on the east side, along the streetcar lines, baseball fans had a new pleasure palace, League Park.
On Public Square, the city’s first “skyscraper,” the 10-story Society for Savings Building, was erected in 1890 (it still stands, right next to its 20th-century successor, Key Tower). And Jeptha Wade, heir to a telegraph fortune, donated the land at University Circle that 25 years later would house the grand Cleveland Museum of Art.
In short, the Cleveland of the 1890s was booming like few other places on Earth. Still landlocked (as it would be until the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1959), it nevertheless led the nation in shipbuilding, easily besting its oceanfront rivals Philadelphia and Bath, Maine.
While John D. Rockefeller had moved the headquarters of his Standard Oil to New York in 1885, the city didn’t lose most of the subsidiary benefits accruing from the unprecedented concentration of capital, professionals and related infrastructure that had formed to service his petroempire.
The chemical industry, which first relocated here to serve Standard, arrived first. That, in turn, led to a huge, locally based paint and varnish industry (Sherwin-Williams and Glidden were both established in the 1890s). East Ohio Gas grew up as a subsidiary of Standard Oil, its main product being a once-useless but now-valuable byproduct of drilling for oil.
Even the future home of the Cleveland Orchestra, Severance Hall, can be traced to Standard Oil wealth, since its major benefactor, John L. Severance, made his fortune as a Standard executive.
Yes, 1890s Cleveland was in many regards a rough, even uncouth, frontier town, scarred by predatory capitalism. Hogs and cattle still wandered downtown streets and dozens of people at a time died from typhoid fever traced to bad well water. So dense were its saloons that the infamous Women’s Christian Temperance Union got its start here, and so teeming with ‘uncouth’ immigrants from southern Europe was the city that a local chapter of the WASPy Daughters of the American Revolution was formed in 1892 to “Americanize” the brutes.
But the seeds were being sown for an even larger, more refined local economy in the coming century. Cleveland Trust was established in 1894 with just a half-million dollars in capital. Before long, it became the repository for unimaginable gobs of money that would build the town’s economic and social infrastructure for years. And law firms such as Squires, Sanders & Dempsey, first established in the decade, would form the other part of the underpinnings for a major regional economy.
As one eyewitness recorded in 1899, surveying the town from a bluff overlooking the Cuyahoga River: “The old pasture grounds of the cows of 1850 are now completely occupied by oil refineries and manufacturing establishments; and the river, which but a generation ago flowed peaceful and placid through green fields, is now almost choked with barges, tugs and immense rafts … There are copper smelting, iron rolling, and iron mills, breweries, flour mills, nail works, pork-packing establishments and the multitudinous industries of a great manufacturing city.”
Indeed, as the 19th century came to a close, Cleveland was on its way to becoming the sixth-largest city in the United States, having grown from a population of 261,000 in 1890 to 382,000 just 10 years later. The unspoken assumption was that it might not stop until it got to No. 2, behind only New York.
To glimpse the scale of the town’s ambitions as late as the 1920s, one has only to reflect on the astonishing size of the Huntington Building at East 9th Street and Euclid Avenue. A building of such grandiose heft is still rarely seen in this country outside of New York and Chicago.
And yet, in another regard, there are striking similarities between the economy of Cleveland then and now.
As in so many periods of financial success, the 1890s gave rise to perhaps the first great merger wave. The giant American Rolling Mills in the Flats was bought and soon merged into Andrew Carnegie’s massive U.S. Steel. Inventor Charles Brush’s innovative electrical works was swallowed up by the newly formed General Electric.
In the 1890s, wrote one historian, “hundreds of locally owned proprietorships and partnerships disappeared into the gaping, insatiable maw of Wall Street merger artists and investment bankers.” (Sound familiar?) All of that activity led to the landmark Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, whose main sponsor was Ohio Senator John Sherman.
Merger trends are cyclical. After World War II, thousands of returning veterans began small companies, which by late in this century had grown to sizable enterprises, many swallowed by larger out-of-town entities. McDonald & Co.’s mergers and acquisitions chief recently called the current environment the best M&A era of the century. If he’d been around a century earlier, he’d likely have dubbed the 1890s the same for its century.
But as you survey the two Gilded Age decades a century apart, you’re left with a tremendous sense of missed opportunity, a failure to bridge the gap between the two eras. It’s not just Cleveland’s sporting failures that leave locals with a wistful sense of might-have-been. The town’s economic fortunes, too, can leave you muttering about how we coulda been a contender.
With just a few breaks — like, say, the availability of a strong figure such as Henry Ford to hammer the promising pieces into a cohesive industry — Cleveland might well have snatched the crown of Motor City from Detroit. The first gas-powered American passenger car was built in Cleveland by Alexander Winton in the 1890s, and 15 years, later the city was still vying with Detroit for the top spot.
Even more damaging to the city’s ability to use the proceeds of one golden era to invest in its ability to spark later booms, a less-well-known near-miss happened in higher education and philanthropy. By some readings of history, the golden opportunity was missed simply because of a nasty case of municipal snobbery.
The two greatest figures of late 19th century Cleveland business were John D. Rockefeller and Samuel Mather. They were as different as two men can be. The aristocratic Mather, an iron ore titan, was descended from Puritan figure Cotton Mather, while Rockefeller was the son of an itinerant con man from upstate New York. Mather had an impeccable business reputation, while Rockefeller, as early as the 1880s, was being savaged by muckrakers for his ruthless competitive tactics. For all his wealth and success, Rockefeller never really was accepted into the inner circle of Cleveland’s establishment.
By one account, the oil man made overtures about donating millions of dollars to the then fledgling Case Institute of Technology. But he was told in no uncertain terms by trustees — at a time when Mather served as chairman of the board — that “Cleveland will take care of its own.” Thus scorned, the world’s richest man went on to sink $35 million into the new University of Chicago.
At a time when every thriving economic region — from Boston to Austin to Silicon Valley — is powered by a world-class, well-endowed research university, one wonders how much of a difference that foundational $35 million, worth hundreds of millions in today’s dollars, might have meant to this community in spin-off benefits? How much additional brainpower, how many new companies and inventions and processes might it have leveraged?
We’ll never know, of course. Like Red Right 88, John Elway’s Drive and Michael Jordan’s daggers in the heart at the buzzer, we’re simply left to ponder what might have been if Cleveland had just once caught a break. John Ettorre ([email protected]) is a contributing editor at SBN.
