Campbell Street

The Campbell Block has been one of the most recognizable buildings in Cleveland's West Side Old Corner neighborhood for many years. It actually used to be two separate buildings, located east of Pearl Street (W. 25th), between the Vermont and elevated roads. Both bridges were built by Alexander Campbell and were the result of the opening of Cleveland's first high-grade bridge, the Superior Viaduct, in 1878. During planning for the west approach to the viaduct, the city purchased an 80-foot-wide parcel of land (part of the Alonzo-Carter parcel) east of the intersection of Pearl Street and Vermont Avenue. The acquisition divided many parcels and, among other things, created a triangular strip of frontage on Pearl Street, Vermont Avenue and the new elevated avenue. Between 1877 and 1882, Campbell, a Scottish immigrant who settled in Cleveland in 1867 and became a prominent paving contractor in the city, purchased all land interests, including the Triangle, with the intention of constructing a commercial building and hotel on the land.

Campbell's first building, identified on early maps as "Campbell's Block," was a three-story brick and wood building on the east side of the Triangle. It was completed in 1880. The upper two floors are occupied by apartment suites, while the ground floor is divided into storefronts for seven retail merchants, which over the years have included butchers, confectioners, cigar makers, barbers, publicans, and others. One of the storefronts houses the offices of the Cleveland Graphic, a weekly Democratic newspaper. In 1886, according to the Plains Merchant magazine, this was where the illustrated Democratic leader Charles Salen organized Cleveland's first amateur baseball league at Baylor Park (later known as Forest City Park) The southeast side of the building was contested for several years before being moved to Brookside Park on the west side.

It was the second Campbell Block building that many Clevelanders still remember, built in 1892. To the west of the first building. It is a five-story red brick building that was originally planned to be a hotel but was later converted into an apartment building with retail frontage on the first floor. The building fronts the High Line and Pearl Street. In 1897, the building was praised for its innovative fire escape system, known as the "burdened" fire escape system, which enabled firefighters to use a fire escape system hauled along rails attached to the roof and exterior projections. Wire baskets rescue people from burning buildings. Isaac Kidd, son-in-law of Alexander Campbell and father of the future famous World War II hero General Isaac Kidd, promoted and installed the new fire escape on the building. Like the first building, this one has a variety of retail tenants on the first floor. In the post-World War II era, the most famous of these in the neighborhood were J&L Seafood, Green's Cafe, and the Old Angle Gym.

By World War II, Alexander Campbell's heirs now owned and managed two Campbell Block buildings. In 1948, the first building, which one county government official called "very bad," was demolished, and the same year the family moved out of the second building. Gradually, as the surviving building aged and deteriorated, it emptied out its apartment dwellers and, from an income perspective, was primarily a billboard location. It was three well-known local first-floor tenants - J&L Seafood, Green's Cafe and Old Angel's Gym - who, however, remained in business until the end.

In late December 1975, a wrecking ball knocked down the building, destroying the Superior Viaduct and the block Alexander Campbell had built 100 years earlier