MONUMENTS. What a city may think of itself is expressed, in large part, by the monuments it chooses to build. The emphasis, the mix of subject matter, the recurrence of themes establish a mood and convey a message to those who reside there and those who visit, and give a city its character. There are 4 themes evident in the principal monuments of Cleveland: tribute to individuals who served their nation and state, e.g., monuments to Commodore Perry and JAS. A. GARFIELD; the honoring, collectively, of groups either for their public service, as in the case of the SOLDIERS & SAILORS MONUMENT, or for contributions to the community's heritage, as in the case of the Cultural Gardens; the conscious attempt to create the essence of a monument through rational order, as seen in the Group Plan of 1903; and, lastly, an unselfconscious celebration of the city's spirit, as revealed in the Terminal Tower, which, under careful analysis, seems to summarize the essential meaning of this industrial community in monumental terms.
From its inception as a village in the wilderness, Cleveland set aside a place in its plan for memorials. PUBLIC SQUARE appears in the 1796 plan, quite explicitly designed as a civic center around which the city would grow in a roughly symmetrical fashion to the east and west. That ideal could not be realized with geometric purity because of the CUYAHOGA RIVER, which initially retarded settlement to the west, and the then-unforeseen industrial concentration in the upper Cuyahoga River Valley and on the near west side. These forced an ever-widening wedge into the implied unity of the plan that could not be knit together even by the extraordinary array of BRIDGES that spanned the river. An attempt was made, with the Group Plan of 1903, to reinforce the monumental character and focus on the center city, which was planned tangential to and east of Public Square. It could have made Public Square irrelevant, had it not been for the construction in the 1920s of the Terminal Tower at the southwest corner of the square, which, with its ancillary structures embracing the south and west sides, restored the Square's prominence and established a diagonal axial link with the southwest corner of the Group Plan.
In Sept. 1860 Clevelanders dedicated their first major monument, a 25' tall Italian-marble statue of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, the hero of the Battle of Lake Erie, Sept. 1813. Their gratitude for his leadership had endured, but it was to be forgotten in the next 40 years. When it was dedicated, the statue occupied the geometrical center of Public Square, reinforcing its significance to the community. By 1867, however, commercial pressure caused the Square itself to be bisected on north/south and east/west axes, creating 4 park quadrants in place of the previous single park, and the Perry statue was moved to the southeast quadrant, only to be displaced entirely with the construction in the early 1890s of the Cuyahoga County Soldiers & Sailors Monument. From Public Square, the PERRY MONUMENT traveled first to WADE PARK, then to GORDON PARK and eventually left town altogether, to settle in Perrysburg, OH. Thus Clevelanders, from one generation to another, shifted from veneration to ambivalence to disinterest with regard to the achievements of America's Great Lakes naval hero of the War of 1812.
The GARFIELD MONUMENT honoring Pres. Jas. A. Garfield, Cleveland's second great monument, stands on the crest of a hill east of the city in LAKE VIEW CEMETERY. It was constructed in 1890 and designed by Geo. W. Keller of Hartford, CT. The composition consists of a main cylinder 50' in diameter and 165' tall, capped by a conical roof and flanked on the west by a stolid rectangular portico, to which are attached 2 small transitional cone-capped turrets that join it to the main tower. The local sandstone has soaked up considerable industrial smoke over the years and has weathered to a deep, almost acrid brown. Its overall feeling is medieval, morose, and vaguely unpleasant, as though its purpose were more to mourn the trag