Cleveland

John D. Rockefeller founded Standard Oil in Cleveland in 1870, and within a decade controlled most of American refining. The reason the company started here rather than in the oil fields is that Cleveland sat where the lake shipping met the railroads, and refining is a transport business as much as a chemical one.

That geography is the whole story of the city and it is visible in every wide photograph. The Cuyahoga River meanders through a low industrial valley called the Flats, with the city on the bluffs either side. Photographs from the bluffs show smoke, bridges and shipping stacked in layers.

The bridges are worth attention in themselves. Because the river carried freighters and the banks were high, Cleveland built an unusual number of lift bridges, swing bridges and high-level viaducts, and photographers used them constantly as subjects and as vantage points.

Public Square is the center, laid out in 1796 on the New England model by a surveyor from Connecticut — Cleveland was part of the Western Reserve, which is why northern Ohio has town greens. The Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument went up in 1894 and the square is where most of the street photography was made.

Millionaires' Row ran along Euclid Avenue and was, for a time, reckoned the most impressive residential street in America. Rockefeller, Hanna, and dozens of others built there. Almost none of it survives, which makes the photographs the only remaining record of a stretch of houses that visitors compared to European boulevards.

Terminal Tower opened in 1930 and was the tallest building outside New York for two decades. It was built over the rail terminal, which meant excavating and rebuilding the whole southwest corner of the square, and construction photographs of it show the scale of that.

The lakefront runs the length of the city and was industrial for most of this period — ore boats from the Mesabi Range unloading for the steel mills, and the docks that handled them.

Water, Oil and Film — Three Things That Should Not Have Been Here