The Suburban Ideal and Suburban Realities

In the mid-nineteenth century, dense woods covered this site except where property owners had dug quarries or cleared land for orchards and vineyards; from its highest points, there was a splendid view of Lake Erie. In the 1910s, this section of the new suburb of Cleveland Heights, about eight miles east of downtownCleveland, Ohio, became the home ofmembers of thewealthy Severance family. Today, where their distinguished mansions once stood are two Jewish social service agencies; a Lutheran high school; a municipal fire station; and Severance Town Center, which includes the city hall, a federal post office, three high-rise apartments, office buildings, medical facilities, and a strip mall. This changing landscape demonstrates the transformations of an American suburb and the ideal that inspired it. This site and this suburb were created to embody that suburban ideal: an exclusive and exclusively residential community of single-family homes, surrounded by green space, for an Anglo-American upper and upper-middle class: their refuge from urban ills such as commerce, industry, and persons unlike themselves. Part of an aspiring suburban community as early as the 1870s, Cleveland Heights became a suburb in its own right at the turn of the twentieth century. During the next decades, its suburban identity was created and sustained by developers, residents, and political leaders and expressed in distinguished public buildings, gracious homes, and graceful parks. Persistently undermined by its residents’desire to profit from the land, however, the suburb’s exclusivity and homogeneity were breached by people of varying class, ethnic, religious, and racial backgrounds, even as commerce eroded the suburb’s residential character. Out of the resulting tensions and conflicts emerged redefinitions of the ideal.