West of the Cuyahoga (review)

Former Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist George E. Condon, known for his wry humor and colorful prose style, has spent most of his life on Greater Cleveland's West Side, amassing countless memories and fascinating stories. West of the Cuyahoga is Condon's attempt to relate the often-ignored history of the area once known as the City of Ohio, which merged with Cleveland in 1854 but which has maintained a distinctive flavor, setting it apart from the east side of the river. Unfortunately, the result of this effort is an inconsistent and disappointing hodgepodge of unconnected vignettes, random musings, and annoying digressions. Much of the book is unoriginal, and a great deal of the material is, at best, only tangentially related to the West Side.

West of the Cuyahoga stumbles out of the gate, as three of the first four chapters deal with the surveying of Cleveland by the Connecticut Land Company in the 1790s and the building of the Ohio & Erie Canal in the late 1820s. This portion of the book is little more than a rehash from older secondary works, such as The Cuyahoga, by William Ellis, Harlan Hatcher's The Western Reserve, and Condon's own Cleveland: The Best Kept Secret, and has little to do specifically with the West Side. There are some additional irrelevant chapters, while others include two, three, or more unrelated topics that do not correspond to the chapter headings. A chapter titled "That First City Directory" turns into an account of the contributions and travails of the West Side's Irish and German immigrants, while another on "The Cuyahoga's Bridges" devolves into Condon's observations on deindustrialization and the evils of modern corporate business practices. And a chapter on the relationship between the elite Rhodes and Hanna families somehow concludes with the tale of a wayward dinkey motorman named Needles McCafferty. "The Sights and Sounds of Cleveland Past," a chapter tacked on at the end of the book, is wonderfully written and will bring a smile to any reader's face but contains precious few specific references to the West Side. Memories of railroad whistles, ice wagons, and bakery aromas might apply to any neighborhood of any city, so what does one really learn from this? Other chapters, meanwhile, are painfully incomplete, such as "A Forest of Steeples," which is limited to Catholic and mainstream Protestant houses of worship, completely ignoring the West Side's beautiful and famous Orthodox churches. Only near the end of the book, in a chapter on the city's resurgent Tremont neighborhood, does Condon rectify this omission.

The most perplexing aspect of West of the Cuyahoga is Condon's infatuation with Marcus Hanna. Three entire chapters—thirty-two pages out of a 164-page book—are devoted to Hanna, his family, and his wealthy associates. What does one learn about the history and character of the proletarian West Side of Cleveland from a chapter on the high-society marriage of Ruth Hanna and Joseph Medill McCormick? What purpose is served by an account of Hanna's role in the 1896 McKinley presidential campaign? Most of Condon's Hanna material comes from Thomas Beer's eighty-year-old hagiography, including lengthy passages quoted verbatim, some of them cringe inducing in their hero worship and almost embarrassing to read. It is as if Condon could not find enough real material on the West Side and had to pad his manuscript with paeans to the rich and powerful.

West of the Cuyahoga is also poorly organized, as it begins in a chronological format but quickly erodes into a veritable stream of consciousness, as Condon flits about from topic to topic in no particular order. There are no transitions between chapters, which appear to have been written at different times over an extended period and then slapped together. This results in annoying repetitions, recurring events, and reappearing people. Thus, the reader endures the author's maudlin account of his hero Marcus Hanna...