Previous Exhibits & Events:
current exhibit
index of previous exhibits

• Panoramic Photographs of Cleveland:
  Past and Present
  An exhibition of two sets of panoramic photographs: one taken circa 1915-1921, showing sections of Cuyahoga River and the old Big Italy neighborhood south of downtown and the other set of photographs show those same areas today.

  Both sets of panoramic photographs were taken with the same model 1904 Cirkut camera, which moves through a 180 degree arc as the shot is taken. The negatives are typically four feet long and one foot high. The original set of negatives were donated to the Library by Mr. Robert Linsey and the new set of photographs and the exhibit itself were funded by the North American Railway Foundation

The Cleveland Union Terminal Collection, in Special Collections, Cleveland State University Library, consists of much of the surviving construction materials from the building of the union passenger station, capped by the Terminal Tower, in the 1920s.

The archives of the Cleveland Union Terminals Company were kept by that company in a lower level of the complex until 1968, when Robert Linsey was given permission to remove large portions of the photographic material. He kept the material at his home in Shaker Heights while he worked as a locomotive engineer and officer of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers.

In the early 1970s, after Mr. Linsey removed the photography, another habitue of the C.U.T., Gerald Adams, was tipped off by the last company employee to the impending destruction of the remaining archives. Not allowed to purchase the archives directly, Mr. Adams purchased the file cabinets containing the archives and removed it all to a storage locker. Some time later, after shopping the collection around to other institutions, Mr. Adams met Dr. Walter Leedy, of the Cleveland State University Art Department, who helped find it a home at the Cleveland State University Library.

In 1994 the Library received a grant from the John P. Murphy Foundation to process the collection. Mr. Murphy had been the Van Sweringen's attorney and a President of the Higbee Company and the foundation had maintained an interest in the C.U.T. through its then-director, Herbert Strawbridge, also a former Higbee's president. William C. Barrow was hired to perform that processing and in order to give this unique collection some wider access, created a web site about the material in 1997.

In 1998, Mr. Linsey decided that he had held the photographic materials out of circulation long enough and started thinking about placing it with some institution where it would benefit researchers. A friend of his, Marcus Ruef, pointed out the Library's C.U.T. Collection web site and Mr. Linsey decided that re-uniting his portion of the original company archives with that material Mr. Adams had donated made sense and so donated it to C.S.U.

Subsequently, in 2001 the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority donated several thousand drawings to the C.S.U. Library that they had been given by Forest City Enterprises, from the remnants of the original C.U.T. archives still residing in Tower City. Drew Rolik, the Tower City Archivist and Carol Thomas, the G.C.R.T.A. Records Manager, were instrumental in effecting this transfer.

The material donated by Mr. Adams consisted of thousands of engineering drawings, hundreds of boxes of office files and some 800 photographic prints about the building of the C.U.T. Mr. Linsey's donation consisted of 5,500 photographic prints, six boxes of glass lantern slides, five boxes of negatives from the building of the Cleveland and Youngstown interurban railway and fourteen panoramic negatives.

These panoramic negatives depict the before and after conditions for the building of the New York Central Railroad's Orange Avenue Freight Station and the Nickel Plate Road's Broadway High Level Freight House and includes some shots pertaining to the C.U.T. itself. The freight house projects were undertaken to bring local railroad traffic into the city via a southern route, in part to avoid the congestion present on Cleveland's lakefront in the years circa World War I.

The NYCRR sold the NKP to the Van Sweringen brothers, who were developing their famous Shaker Heights project and required rapid transit access to the city center and wound up developing the C.U.T. to revive a dormant union passenger station idea and relocate it to Public Square. Since all these freight and passenger projects were nominally under the management of the Van Sweringens, the panoramic negatives had made their way into the C.U.T. archives.

In 1998, the Northern Ohio Camera Collector's Club (formerly the Photographic History Society of the Western Reserve) awarded the Library a grant to make positive prints of the panoramic negatives and many Library patrons and railroad history buffs became interested in these images and what they showed about railroad history between the world wars.

In 1999, Mr. Ruef did the Library another good turn and pointed out the existence of the North American Railway Foundation, of Philadelphia. The following year the foundation awarded the Library a series of grants, one of which was to rephotograph these 14 pictures from the same original locations, in color and in black & white, using the same camera, and to mount the old and new images in an exhibit in Special Collections.

That exhibit will open in September of 2002 and run for approximately six months. It will show the old panoramic prints, explain the history behind them, contrast them with the new prints and document the process by which these new prints were shot.

The photographic work was done in the summer of 2002 by Timothy Ryan, of Cleveland, and George Bragg, of West Virginia, both of whom own original Cirkuit cameras of the type used to take the original panoramic photographs 80-90 years earlier. The exhibit is being designed and researched by Andy Chakalis and Ann Marie Wieland, of Cleveland.