Coventry Village, Part One

Sarah Nemeth [00:00:20] [Musical intro by This Moment in Black History] From the Center for Public History + Digital Humanities at Cleveland State University, this is Cleveland Voices, a podcast about the history of Cleveland neighborhoods as told through the voices of Clevelanders. My name is Sarah Nemeth, a research associate at Cleveland State University. Thank you for joining us as we explore Clevelanders' sense of place. The audio clips used in this episode are drawn from oral histories conducted since 2002. Project staff have also narrated some quoted material that was not originally recorded, including poems by d.a. levy, Kate and Daniel Thompson, as well as excerpts from interviews conducted by the Heights Heritage Tour Committee in the 1970s. The showcase clips offer a diverse set of memories and perspectives on different segments of Cleveland's history. Enjoy.

Sara Sprouse [00:01:14] [Reading a d.a. levy poem] If you want a revolution, return to your childhood and kick out the bottom. This is what I've been trying to say. If you attack the structure, the system, the establishment, you attack yourself, know this and attack. If you must challenge yourself externally, walk down the street and flash lights in your head at children. This is not a game. Your childhood is the foundation of the system. Walk down the street. Flashlights in your head at children. But be wary if anyone old enough to kill. If you want a revolution, do it together. But don't get trapped in the words or systems. People are people no matter what politics, color or words they use. And they all have children buried in their head. If you want a revolution, grow a new mind and do it quietly if you can. Learn how to change your internal chemistry, then go beyond that. Walk down the streets and flash light at yourself.

Sarah Nemeth [00:02:06] So what was happening in Cleveland Heights and the rest of the United States to drive poet d.a. levy to write these excerpts taken from Tombstone as a Lonely Charm, Part 3. What happened in 1968 that pushed the baby boomer youth to the edges of mainstream society and led them to question its very structure? What forced them to embrace an alternative lifestyle that was completely alien to the generation before? d.a. levy posited that some in the neighborhood aimed to control and ultimately stop what the youth believed to be inevitable and necessary societal change. levy was not the only one who believed there was a coalition of Americans that aim to thwart the youth's ambitions. Although speaking about the end of the counterculture movement, Dave Woldman, a lifelong resident of the Heights, remarks that...

Dave Woldman [00:03:03] There were some people that did not like the area and they wanted to see a change. They didn't like hippies. They didn't like counterculture. They didn't like people smiling. You know, it is just weird times.

Sarah Nemeth [00:03:18] levy and Waldman may have been on to something there. Nevertheless, in levy's disillusionment and Woldman's suspicion, we can begin to understand why many youth in the 1960s and 1970s sought refuge in concentrated masses. Those opposed to the prevailing social norms converged, transforming everyday spaces into counterculture places. One such haven for the unconventional, nestled in Cleveland Heights, highlights a different perspective on the history of Greater Cleveland. Together, we will explore how one of Cleveland's most rebellious, civic-minded and activist-inclined places was subdued by the advances of late 20th century consumerism and now struggles to find itself under the weight of commercial storerooms, sports bars and chicken wings. On the east side of Cleveland in the inner-ring suburb of Cleveland Heights, there is a three-block strip that starts at Euclid Heights Boulevard and ends at Mayfield Road. This commercial node and surrounding residential districts are Cleveland's sanctuary for the unique, eccentric, and the extraordinarily different. Former mayor of Cleveland Heights Alan Rapoport comments.

Alan Rapoport [00:04:39] These kind of stories, maybe they occurred in other parts of the community, I wouldn't know one way or the other, but they certainly did seem to be common enough stories. In Coventry we hear these kind of crazy stories all the time and it got to be kind of amusing.

Sarah Nemeth [00:04:56] Of course, I am talking about Coventry Village. Again, we hear from longtime resident Dave Woldman, who explains how Coventry gave people a constructive space to work out the counterculture's abstract ideals.

Dave Woldman [00:05:10] You know, I think that's a lot of what Coventry had to do in my mind state was it gave a generation a place to not only conceive of ideas but start working them out.

Sarah Nemeth [00:05:24] If you're standing near the top of the hill at Euclid Heights Boulevard and Coventry Road, looking down the street, Coventry's commercial strip looks a little different from many other Cleveland thoroughfares. It is not a particularly flashy place and to the untrained or uninformed eye is quite ubiquitous. But for those of us who know, the second someone mentions this road turned village, a certain response is likely. Current resident Frank Gerlak explains.

Frank Gerlak [00:05:53] I don't think that the term "live in Coventry" sells much these days. But yet when you say, they ask you where you live, and I say, oh, I live in Coventry. They usually go, hmm. That's not just I live in Westlake. Oh. It's kind of like. Because it's a place that has some appeal to it. It's a place. It's a place that is identified by what's here, and you can still identify it. Identify Westlake for me, please.

Sarah Nemeth [00:06:34] Coventry Village, as it is called today, is a place with a historically unconventional voice. So without further ado, let's explore what really happened and is happening in Cleveland Heights' Coventry Village. [Train sounds] In 1890, Patrick Calhoun, grandson of United States Vice President John C. Calhoun, arrived in Cleveland to consider the expansion of the Southern Railroad Company. During his visit, an acquaintance took him to pay homage to our befallen President James A. Garfield at his ornate monument in Lake View Cemetery. From atop the monument, Calhoun took in the bountiful land that lay before him. He determined there, in an epiphany of sorts, to reap the land's potential. The degree of urban lore in Calhoun's revelation is debatable. Nonetheless, over the ensuing decade, Calhoun struggled to develop his intended garden suburb of Euclid Heights. Betty Moore reported in an oral history collected by the Heights Heritage Tour Committee in the 1970s that...

Toni Berry [00:07:48] [Reading an excerpt from Moore interview] Hampshire was a dirt road when my family moved in. Nothing much was developed in the area.

Sarah Nemeth [00:07:53] By 1981, the hamlet of Cleveland Heights was officially chartered. Two short years later, the village of Cleveland Heights, along with its fifteen hundred residents, was incorporated. Finally, in 1921, Cleveland Heights was made a city. From the inception of Cleveland Heights in 1890, suburban home seekers slowly started to move into the Heights. Clay Herrick, a lifelong resident of Cleveland Heights, during an oral history session with the Heights Heritage Tour Committee member, spoke to the compact and close-knit community atmosphere of Cleveland Heights in 1915. Let us listen to this reading of his descriptive vignette.

Cory Sprouse [00:08:37] [Reading an excerpt from Herrick interview] The big excitement in my young life when I was four years old was being locked in the tool shed across the street. I'd been playing house with my girlfriend Alice and she got angry with me and slammed the door shut. After I was reported lost, little Alice announced she had seen me carried off by the boogie man. So, of course, since it was known that I didn't playing with her, everyone thought I'd been kidnapped. Cleveland Heights in 1915 was a small village, and everyone knew everyone else, so the whole population turned out.

Sarah Nemeth [00:09:05] It seems that the early suburb of Cleveland Heights developed a neighborly character prior to World War II, which in 2013 lifelong resident Joanne Lewis proposed was uncommon.

Joanne Lewis [00:09:19] After the war, people, the soldiers who returned. The G.I. Bill changed the world, and so you could afford to get a little house in the suburbs, so to speak. So there was a whole turning away from downtown. It wasn't immediate or drastic, but it was a definite drift where your goal was not to stay where you were, but to have your own little house because you could maybe afford it for the first time in your life. And that's when all those communities began to develop.

Sarah Nemeth [00:09:53] As Lewis further commented, Cleveland Heights was different.

Joanne Lewis [00:09:58] Cleveland Heights is a unique place and it has a history of its own. So it wasn't a new development at all. Cleveland Heights was probably as old as the city of Cleveland.

Sarah Nemeth [00:10:10] The city of Cleveland Heights was also distinctive in comparison to most other east side suburbs because it lacked a singular downtown or public space. Rather, commercial districts popped up in scattered fashion around the city. Concentrations of commercial activity flourished at the intersections of Cedar-Lee, Fairmont and Cedar, and of course, at Mayfield and Coventry Roads. Although the Coventry strip today looks like a planned commercial quarter, originally it was only a marginal space between two neighborhoods. Clara Rankin recalled in 2011...

Clara Rankin [00:10:48] I don't remember that there was ever much of a commercial district the way it is now, at all, but my grandmother lived west of Coventry on Euclid Heights Boulevard, so we would go to her apartment when we were youngsters after church.

Sarah Nemeth [00:11:07] Over time, the strip grew to serve the nearby residents, as Coventry Village newcomer Frank Gerlak comments.

Frank Gerlak [00:11:16] Back then, when most people were riding streetcars, the streetcar line kind of created their own nodes and it's making this big sharp turn. We can't go through here at 40 miles an hour. We're going to go through here at five miles an hour. People get off. There was, I believe, for a few years an interchange and there was a one-track line that ran down from Washington. So that was an interchange there. People would get off one and get on the other. So when, you know, there's a break in transportation, things tend to grow.

Sarah Nemeth [00:11:56] A good deal of that growth can be attributed to the installation of Coventry Road streetcar line in 1987, as well as to Patrick Calhoun's financial collapse, which ended his vision for a Millionaires' Row in the Heights. By 1914 the streetcar line and the building of multi-family dwellings provided the necessary ingredients for a business district. Frank Gerlak further speculates on the opening of the streetcar line and the resulting commercial growth on the road.

Frank Gerlak [00:12:30] The Coventry area developed because there was in the streetcar came up from downtown and came out probably out Cedar or maybe Euclid, and then there was a lot of tracks down in University Circle on Stearns Road. And there was a streetcar ramp that came up Cedar Hill on the right side. That's where that bike thing is now, and that's why that is so wide, is because there was two streetcar tracks going up there, and one branched and went out Cedar. One went kind of straight and went up euclid Heights Boulevard, and the Euclid Heights Boulevard, continued, went right past the place here and turned. It needed a wide turn. And it looks as though they had preplanned not such a wide turn. And then at the last minute said, Oh, geez, we've got to fix this they turn around and then it went to Mayfield and then it turned on Mayfield and went out. I think it went out about as far as Warrensville Center or thereabouts but before 1925, the Eastern Ohio Traction Company interurban line continued out, and that went all the way out to Burton and places like that. And those cars roll in right up the street here.

Sarah Nemeth [00:13:59] In a 2008 interview, Ruth Dancyger, a longtime Jewish resident of Cleveland Heights, recalled her family's first remembrances of the neighborhood.

Ruth Dancyger [00:14:11] When we first moved there in 1919, there was a trolley in the middle of the street. Washington Boulevard has a park in the middle. Those were tracks originally. And on those tracks was a streetcar that ran from Coventry Road to Lee Road. And the man that ran the trolley was named Tim, and he was the janitor for one of the apartments on Euclid Heights Boulevard. That's how primitive it was in those days, I mean, how how leisurely life was. I remember when the street lights on Washington Boulevard were lit by a lamp lighter that came by and lit those street lights every night. And I remember when our milk was delivered via wagon led by a horse, pulled by a horse.

Sarah Nemeth [00:15:00] By the 1920s, residents from all over the Heights would walk down to marvel at the electric streetcar. Clara Rankin remembered.

Clara Rankin [00:15:11] We walked all through the neighborhood all the time to see our grandparents, the Charles G. Taplins, on Stratford Road, and that was a lovely Sunday afternoon walk. And that was a place that we loved to go and see the electric car. And it would have been in the 1920s sometime. And I think there were family gatherings there. I have a picture of of all the three families. My father's sister lived across the street in a house. The second one west of Lee Road on the north side. Well, that was one of the houses that we'd walk to on a Sunday. And my father was a great walker, always carried a cane, and he often walked with his men friends on a Sunday morning. But occasionally I went with him as a little girl, trying hard to keep up with his long strides. But that was a precious time for me. I loved going on walks with my father, but in the afternoons we went visiting in the neighborhood.

Sarah Nemeth [00:16:17] On afternoon strolls with her father, Rankin surely watched the street morph into a bustling epicenter for upper middle-class and conservative neighbors. A local school was built in 1919, and the community library was started in its basement, which served the growing populace. Ruth Dancyger commented on the importance of the country, school and library to the community's residents.

Ruth Dancyger [00:16:44] Coventry, the Coventry that you're referring to, is south of Mayfield between Mayfield and Cedar. The commercial part of Coventry Road, of course, had Coventry School, which I think was--except for the one-room schoolhouse that was on Superior and that I went to when I was in kindergarten--I think Coventry was the first full-fledged school building. It was an elementary school, and in the basement of that school was that was the Cleveland Heights Public Library. The Library was down there, and my mother used to go there all the time because she was a big reader. She would have been a school teacher and she used to go there and take me with her when I was a little girl to that library. I can't tell you how many times I went there in my childhood.

Sarah Nemeth [00:17:29] Stores and eateries catering to the local clientele and streetcar travelers sprouted up along the road, especially following the building of eighteen new commercial structures along the strip from 1921 to 1925. Much of the development can be attributed to two families. Tommy Fello, a Coventry restaurateur and community activist, recalled this in 2012.

Tommy Fello [00:17:57] Now, the Montlack family, there's two families that owned almost all of Coventry. The Ross family--and then there was the William Ross family--and then there was the Montlack members. I can't remember what his dad was named, but both William Ross passed away, passed it down to his kids, and then Michael and Ken's dad passed away and passed it to his kids. Right now, the Montlacks own about 40 percent of the street, and he knows the neighborhood backwards and forwards since when he was a little kid.

Sarah Nemeth [00:18:30] Again, we hear from Ruth Dancyger, who describes what the Coventry shopping district looked like in the 1920s and 1930s.

Ruth Dancyger [00:18:40] It had several drug stores on that street, several, and I can give you the names of two of them. One was the Standard Drug store and the other was called Marshall Drug store. And it had a movie which was called the Heights Picture Show. And it had a beauty parlor there called... There were two that I can think of. One was called Pointers--P-O-I-N-T-E-R-S--Pointers, and the other was called Dabney's. And Dabney's was run by a mulatto lady and all her help was black. And that's where I used to go. They used to give the... I had long curls and my mother couldn't wash my hair. It was too thick and wild, so I went to a beauty parlor very young, and Mrs. Dabney used to do my hair.

Sarah Nemeth [00:19:25] Former Coventry merchant Steve Presser expanded on Dancyger's remembrances.

Steve Presser [00:19:32] People ask me, why did you choose Coventry? It was so obvious that Coventry was the place I wanted to be. Not just geographically because it's walking distance from my house, but it is a very unique neighborhood. It was a neighborhood in which, believe or not, my wife's grandparents had... they were caterers. They had their business on Coventry. It was a catering business and it was over by where Huntington Bank is now, by the corner of Euclid Heights. Back in the day, it was a very ethnic and very Eastern European-influenced neighborhood. So you had a poultry store. They had a fish store. They had an egg store. They had a beef store. And these were all people... most of them were Eastern European immigrants that had their businesses on the first floor and they lived above in their apartments. And it's been eclectic since that. It's a wonderful... You know, we've gone through all these different incarnations or changes, but we've always retained our identity as being a predominantly family-run place. Most of the businesses are still family owned and operated.

Sarah Nemeth [00:20:36] The Eastern European conclave that emerged near Coventry Road continued to build and strengthen the identity of these provisional grounds. In their huddled masses, the residents near Coventry's commercial district struggled through the Great Depression. From out of the financial ruin of the 1930s, the country entered World War II. Thereafter, postwar prosperity gave certain groups in Cleveland the chance to migrate out from the center city into eastern suburbs like Cleveland Heights. Cleveland Jews were one such group that found a new home in these parts. Lawyer and longtime Heights resident Russell Baron remembered in 2013.

Russell Baron [00:21:21] The Jewish people settled on the east side. So you had Glenville and you had Kinsman, two different areas basically. And then as the Jewish families got some bucks together and a war ended, they moved to Cleveland Heights, which was close. University Heights, really in those days, I'm talking about the '40s and early the '50s, university Heights was nothing but country.

Sarah Nemeth [00:21:45] In Coventry, from the mid 1940s through the 1950s, the Jewish population prospered. Baron continued later to recall the settlement of Cleveland Jews in the Heights.

Russell Baron [00:21:58] Cleveland Heights was a very comfortable older suburb of Greater Cleveland. It was mostly white. There was no question about that. It was, I think a great deal of it, was Jewish population. There were many small synagogues along Taylor Road. Park Synagogue, which still exists on Euclid Heights Boulevard, was built in the '50s. [Musical interlude]

David Nicolai [00:22:30] [Reading a d.a. levy poem] Fast as Molasses Seymour works at Coventry Welfare. Lives alone in his rooms, books, a tape recorder temporarily out of order. While around the corner are wife and daughter in their genteel squalor, living better through electricity, color TV, a new dryer. Watch the trash get higher. Watch the dust gather around the broom, beard, ash and glasses Seymour.

Sarah Nemeth [00:23:02] For much of the country, the 1950s ushered in an era of economic prosperity and conservatism. Coventry was no exception. In the 1950s, many families like Seymour's tried to reestablish their lives after the war by indulging in modern conveniences and technologies that the mid century offered. Coventry families purchased televisions and new clothes dryers. This generation attempted to weave the strings of humanity into a tight skein. George Fitzpatrick, former manager of the Heights Arts Theater, retold in a 2011 interview the infamous story of the theater showing the film The Lovers, which highlights the conservative atmosphere of Coventry.

George Fitzpatrick [00:23:50] The manager was a guy named Nico Jacobellis, and there was a film called The Lovers, the director Louis Malle did it. M-A-L-L-E. And the place didn't want it shown. The guy who was the pastor up at St. Ann's Church just railed against it. The people at St. Ann's weren't allowed to come here. And so there were just... so Nico, at the time, who... this was the guy before the man who I had to fire. Okay. This guy was like Mr. Sophistication. He was the total opposite of the guy from Youngstown, Ben Brody, and so Nico went ahead and showed the film and he refused to walk out of the theater. The police picked him up and carried him. And I wasn't there but that's really what happened. They carried him out of the theater. He was in jail for five days. He couldn't get out. And it went to the local court, and of course, he gets convicted in the local court. It goes all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States and the theater chain won it.

Sarah Nemeth [00:24:48] The generation before the baby boomers, through unquestioning conformity, believed they could overcome the struggles that scarred them in the previous decade. Anything alternative prompted fear and overreaction. Meanwhile, on Coventry is commercial strip, the stores in eateries shifted from serving Eastern European residents and streetcar journey men and women to new Jewish neighbors. Ruth Dancyger expressed in 2008...

Ruth Dancyger [00:25:18] I must tell you that Coventry Road really did in my childhood, during my childhood, did become a Jewish area.

Sarah Nemeth [00:25:27] In 2012, Tommy Fello of the infamous Coventry fixture recollected this time on the strip.

Tommy Fello [00:25:35] Back in those days when I was just a kid working at the drugstore, there was a lot of, oh I would say older people, ethnic, really ethnic Jewish, Russian Jews. And people were catering to that sort of clientele. That's where all the egg stores and the fish stores and the poultry market and the kosher chicken market was back behind where Panini's is now. Up in front was ABC Construction. You'd go there if you want to get something built, and sometimes there was rumors that it was sort of mafia stuff back in the late '60s, early '70s. But if you want to get something done, they would contract them to do it. And behind them was the poultry store for as long as I could ever remember.

Sarah Nemeth [00:26:23] Fello further listed some businesses Jewish families established on Coventry Road.

Tommy Fello [00:26:29] Back in those days, there was a lot of jewish delicatessens, or Jewish egg and fish stores. And then there was two delicatessens, Leo's and Irv's, and then there was no other restaurants on the street exceprt for we had a soda fountain counter. And there was antique stores. Lots of those. There was about five or six beauty shops, like for, you know, when people would come and they put the little thing on their head, the women in their 40s or 50s who get their hair done. There was like a few those, there was a furrier, and there was a upholstery place. There was actually some wholesalers. One wholesaler was called Haisley Waller. And they sold like if you have had a school, you represent the school, you come buy your auditorium furniture from them. And then there another wholesaler down the street called Bickhart Drugs. And our little drugstore would buy our toys and school supplies from them to mark up to sell. So that was all that was down here.

Allen Peskin [00:27:28] In 2016, Allen Peskin offered a few asides about his experiences in Coventry in the late 1940s and 1950s.

Allen Peskin [00:27:39] It was just Coventry. It was the shopping center. I was sent there regularly to shop and bring back the groceries. Sometimes they're delivered. There were three Jewish bakeries on that one street. There was a Pick 'n Pay which is now turned into a CVS drugstore, which was the largest grocery store I had ever seen in my life. I was awed by it because I came from a small town. And of course, there was the movie theater, the Heights--not then called the Heights Art Theater, just the Heights--and we went there mostly on Saturdays for the Westerns and the serials, bringing with us popcorn from Mitchell's next door.

Sarah Nemeth [00:28:29] Cleveland Heights Jewish population started to establish roots, making Coventry into a place of their own. Many of the first Jewish migrants to Coventry had young families or started them soon after settling in the area. Within a few years, the children of those families started attending the local schools, along with other kids from the neighborhood. The demographic character of the new students signified that Coventry was in a period of transition. It was changing from a place that was home to a predominantly Catholic and Protestant community to one that was heavily Jewish. Chris Roy, longtime resident of Cleveland Heights and former president of the Cleveland Heights Historical Society, remembered in 2015 one of his experiences at Coventry School.

Chris Roy [00:29:22] Cleveland Heights was and continues to be a fantastic walking community, so there was never a sight of a school bus. In fact, the only school buses I think I ever saw, were the ones that picked up the Jewish kids after school to take them off to Hebrew school for another two hours of in-class agony. And I remember many, many years feeling so desperately sorry for all the kids that had to go to Hebrew school when we were finally released from elementary at about 3:30 in the afternoon and they had two more hours. I decided then and there that I would never be Jewish.

Sarah Nemeth [00:29:56] Again, we hear from former mayor of Cleveland Heights, Alan Rapoport, who offers his childhood reminiscence of when Coventry was a Jewish enclave.

Alan Rapoport [00:30:07] Yeah, it was. There was a very large Jewish population when I was at Heights High School. When there was a Jewish high holy days came out, they literally closed the school. They kept it open and then there were no classes if the kids who were not Jewish elected to go, and I don't know if they werew required to, but the school was largely depopulated at that point when the holidays came along.

Sarah Nemeth [00:30:36] Regardless of the very real differences between the Coventry neighbors, they came to know one another as well as learn to compromise and exhibit a degree of tolerance, as Rapoport asserts.

Alan Rapoport [00:30:51] What it taught me personally was a lot about the nature of tolerance. Tolerance is a very, very difficult thing to develop. People do not instinctively feel comfortable with other people who are different from them. I don't care whether you're talking about political differences, cultural differences, racial differences. Anybody who's different than you challenges what you are in some way, shape, or form. When you live in a neighborhood like Coventry, where you have such an incredible variety of people, you begin to develop a thick skin about it. You still begin to develop very strong feelings of what your preferences are for, but you begin to develop a lot of ability to defer to other people's opinions, to not get overly worked up about them, to enjoy the interchange of argument that you had from time to time. It made it a very interesting cultural mix that I thought was kind of a unique phenomenon at a certain point in time.

Sarah Nemeth [00:31:56] Coventry was more than a place of staid conservatism and kosher food. It was dynamic. There was a midnight poultry bandit, as Steve Presser, owner of the former Big Fun shop, told in 2012.

Steve Presser [00:32:10] It was kind of cool to be next to a kosher poultry place, a slaughterhouse, in the city of Cleveland Heights. It was unusual to have somebody slaughtering chickens. Tommy will tell you great stories about a guy that used to break in and open the cages at night when they would deliver them at 2 or 3 in the morning and set the chickens free. I mean, it's kind of funny.

Sarah Nemeth [00:32:31] Also in 2012, Tommy Fello shared a pleasant memory of Coventry from his childhood.

Tommy Fello [00:32:38] I mean, when I was a kid, I went to St. Ann's for school and then after after church sometimes would come down because there was Newmark's Bakery and there was another bakery--we'd love the bakery down here, but so far, no luck--there's Newmark Bakeries which made these delicious donuts. They were so heavy and so good that they weighed a pound. If you eat one, it just felt like you you just ate a brick but there are so good going down. You know how, when some tastes real good, you just eat it real fast when you're a kid? These things were so delicious and they are always so busy after church because everyone would go down there to get stuff.

Sarah Nemeth [00:33:14] Violet Frayne, longtime resident, recalled an amusing butcher shop experience in 2011.

Violet Frayne [00:33:23] Well, my husband convinced me that going to Pick 'n' Pay was very American, even though he was American, and that I was hopelessly suburban and that only fresh chicken was fresh. So I took my children to the chicken market and their first reaction was, ew, it smells funny and I just said, "Well wait outside." And there were all these poor little chickens in cages, and the guy says, "Which one, lady?" And I couldn't look them in the eye. I was like, I'm against the death penalty, and I went, finally, "That one". And he wrapped it up and handed it to me, and I was appalled that the package was warm. I know I prayed that he wouldn't kill the chicken in front of me, which thankfully he didn't. And then I took it and held it by the string because I didn't touch the warm paper. Kept it in the refrigerator for five days. And when I opened it and found that there were chicken feet, which I was not used to, and then finally cooked the chicken, I said to my husband very smugly, "See, it doesn't taste any different." He's said, "But it's five days old."

Sarah Nemeth [00:34:36] In addition to these lighter tales, Coventry faced real problems again. We hear from neighborhood newcomer Frank Gerlak, who reminds us of the borderline inaccessibility of Coventry's commercial hub for those traveling by car.

Frank Gerlak [00:34:53] Want to go to Coventry? Better bring your car. There's no place to put it. And then when they started building parking garages behind it, they provided places to park but they look terrible. So unfortunately, transit, once it left, it went a different direction. As opposed to in 1915, when everybody who's coming and bringing in our green oilskin shopping bags with their stuff that they had bought.

Sarah Nemeth [00:35:24] In 2011, Larry Beam, former Cleveland Heights city planner and former president of Coventry Neighbors Inc., invoked images of rampant Jewish organized crime.

Larry Beam [00:35:37] What's now recognized and what now is the Unitarian Society building on Lancashire Road here was--I don't know what it was built, but for many, many years of its existence ending before I got here, ending well before 1975--was an Orthodox shul, where among others, Shondor Burns. Shondor Burns, I don't know if the name;s familiar to you. It's hard to think of organized crime as a Jewish thing, but it was, at least in this neighborhood. The drugs and gambling and loan sharking and prostitution and the whole role of traditional organized crime things where these guys got together, what's recongized as the Unitarian Society and did their morning worship and went about their business, and it's inconceivable, but that's what happened.

Sarah Nemeth [00:36:27] Furthermore, in 2012, lifelong Cleveland Heights resident Dennis Coughlin speculated as to why longtime businesses chose to leave Coventry by the 1960s.

Dennis Coughlin [00:36:41] I mean, I could surmise that it had to do with the changing mix of people in the Coventry area, plus the lack of parking in Coventry. People in the apartment buildings started having more than one car per apartment and which created a lot of stress on the amount of parking there, whereas on Lee Road they had parking lots, which they did not have down there. I would guess it was probably more the the people who were walking in the community at that time. In the '60s, it started running downhill.

Sarah Nemeth [00:37:17] Slowly, the Jewish community, so vibrant throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s, started to migrate out of the residential sectors that encircled Coventry on the strip. The empty storefronts, however, provided others opportunity. African American families migrated into east side suburbs. In 1964, Doris Allen and her family moved to the heights. She recalled in 2013 the lack of racial diversity in the area a half a century earlier.

Doris Allen [00:37:51] When we moved in Cleveland Heights, it was less than 1 percent minority population. That's all minority, including, you know, Asians and East Indians. There were less than 1 percent of us.

Sarah Nemeth [00:38:09] The new neighbors were not always greeted with open arms. Again, we hear from Russell Baron, who recounted an atrocious act of discrimination directed against a new African American family in the neighborhood.

Russell Baron [00:38:25] Our first realization that there was a problem in Cleveland Heights that there would be a problem is went on house around the corner, which had been purchased by a professional black family that was damn near blown up. Nobody was killed. What the hell happened? What's going on? There was a black family living there. Somebody didn't want them there.

Sarah Nemeth [00:38:51] The proliferation of racial discrimination, increased mobility, and the development of a farther removed suburbia opened Coventry up to the possibility of embarking on yet another change of identity. [Musical interlude]

Natalie Neale [00:39:17] [Reading an excerpt from d.a. levy poem] Sunday in Coventry means you don't get any hot water because people are at home taking baths, smoking dope, and making love.

Sarah Nemeth [00:39:25] You may be thinking, wait, I thought Coventry was on its way to becoming a ghost town like many other Cleveland neighborhood districts in the late 1960s and 1970s. Well, Coventry got lucky. A series of loosely connected circumstances and events left space open for inhabitation and caused a new group to need a place to congregate. Longtime area residents, Sura Sevastopoulos, remembered in 2012 the suddenness of this change.

Sura Sevastopoulos [00:39:58] I don't remember much about transition. I just remember this--bam, it was all hippies.

Sarah Nemeth [00:40:06] Once the Summer of Love started, the hippies arrived in Coventry. Please join us next time as we continue our exploration into Greater Cleveland's unique Coventry Village. We will venture to understand how this place, molded by conservatism and accented with orthodox Jewish traditions, developed into a manufacturing capital's counterculture haven. In doing so, we will ponder how a place with such youthful exceptionality transitioned into a place of tired monotony. Although some veterans of the counterculture and various subcultures still linger on Coventry Road today, it is hard not to wonder if 21st century consumerism has killed the real 1960s through 1990s alternative lifestyle. In the end, we anticipate that you will have a greater understanding of the dynamic nature of urban neighborhoods, and we hope that you will be able to critically evaluate your own relationship to place and space. The views expressed in this podcast do not necessarily reflect those of Cleveland State University. To listen to the full interviews with the Clevelanders we heard today, please visit clevelandvoices.org. [Musical outro by This Moment in Black History] For more general information about the Center for Public History + Digital Humanities and our other projects, please visit us at csudigitalhumanities.org. [music fades out]