Cleveland Skyscrapers

This is a neat site on Cleveland skyscrapers, containing a lot of photographs, a bit of Cleveland’s architectural history and interesting facts. For example, the paucity of downtown skyscrapers — compared to Chicago and New York — is due as much to geology as well as smaller populations. Cleveland doesn’t have bedrock just below the surface, like Midtown Manhattan, so it’s relatively costly to sink piers that far beneath the surface.

The site is handier to use than this book I picked up shortly after moving here, Cleveland’s Downtown Architecture, by Shawn Patrick Hoefler. The book is informative, with a variety of good architectural photos, but, inexplicably, doesn’t give the street addresses of all the buildings, nor does it have an index. For a newcomer, who doesn’t know where anything in the city is, this was frustrating.

The Terminal Tower’s observation deck was open on weekends for the first time since, I think, 9/11, to mark the Tower’s 75th anniversary. We went up there to take some photos a few weeks ago, but no one had seen to cleaning the windows before the deck opened. It also didn’t help that the sky was hazy, so we didn’t have any good shots. The observation deck is tiny — a dozen people would be sufficient to crowd out all the windows — and appointed like a musty mid-century lounge, though with a few cheap late-century folding tables scattered around. Not nearly as nice as the Empire State Building’s deck. Oh, well.

Yesterday, Grace and I were down near the Science Center to throw around a frisbee for a little while before dinner. I wandered over to the grassy plaza just west of the Center, where I noticed a number of educational signs at the far end, near the lake. A couple of these were devoted to Lake Erie birds and fish in the typical science center way. A couple were more interesting: there’s apparently a giant salt mine underneath Cleveland’s lakeshore. There was also a bit about the bulk carriers that ply the Great Lakes and another piece about the relative sizes of the Lakes.

One Response to “Cleveland Skyscrapers”

  1. Shawn Hoefler Says:

    I’m glad you enjoyed clevelandskyscrapers.com (I’m the owner and webmaster) and thank you for your interest in the book that I authored, ‘Cleveland’s Downtown Architecture.’

    I understand and agree with your concerns regarding the book and the lack of street addresses in the book. One of the major factors for that was the constraints of the book’s format presented to me by the publisher. Another was the time constraint and deadline that I was given to work with. Hopefully with the next printing, I’ll be able to expound on that as well as other updates to the information in the book. In the meantime, feel free to contact me with any questions you may have.

    Thanks again and best regards,

    Shawn
    clevelandskyscrapers.com