Local artist and urban design guru Don Harvey will discuss the natural history of the Irishtown Bend area of the Flats in Cleveland. Irishtown Bend site will be the focus of the first annual Cleveland Design Competition.

Free and open to the public. For more information, call 216-357-3434.

Introduction

    Irishtown Bend, the hillside flanking the Cuyahoga River’s west bank in Cleveland’s Industrial Valley, lies unused, overgrown, and largely inaccessible after storied histories as an Irish shanty settlement, river’s edge distribution site, immigrant neighborhood, and post-war housing complex. From the site’s vantage along the edge of Cleveland’s Industrial Flats, photographer Margaret Bourke-White captured the dominance of industry over a rapidly rising American city. Today, the same perspective reveals a complex urban history of unparalleled industrial growth, rapid abandonment, evolving patterns of immigration, wealth, poverty, and the rise of a rich rust-belt city follow by decades of decline and urban decay.

    Beginning in the 1830’s, Irish immigrants settled the Irishtown Bend site to take jobs as dockworkers and diggers of the Ohio and Erie Canal. Through the next two decades, the Irish community grew with refugees of the Irish Potato Famine. At Irishtown Bend, tiny hovels and shanties housed poverty-stricken Irish families on several roads on the hillside along the river. In time, the “Shanty” Irish grew prosperous and moved out of the industrial valley and west into the Ohio City neighborhood. Immigrant groups continued to inhabit the deteriorating neighborhood until the early 1900’s when most of the housing had either been abandoned or demolished. As residents migrated away from the unhealthy river valley, industry claimed much of the Cuyahoga River banks. The site became home to several warehouses, railroads, and shipping docks; the remains of a few are still visible today.

Location