This detailed guide to Greater Cleveland's most significant architecture covers urban commercial avenues and towering buildings, opens up neighborhood streets and historic districts, and touches on significant architectural activity in the city's suburban perimeters. This second edition has been meticulously updated and includes all of Cleveland's most recent buildings, such as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Gateway sports complex, and the new Stokes Wing of the Cleveland Public Library.

This study looks at the architectural transformation of Cleveland during its "golden age"--roughly the period between Civil War reconstruction and World War I. By the early twentieth century, Cleveland, which would evolve into the fifth largest city in America, hoped to shed the gritty industrial image of its rapid growth period. Encouraged by the spectacle and enthusiastic response to the Beaux-Arts buildings of the Chicago World's Exposition of 1893, the city embarked upon a grand scheme to construct new governmental and civic structures known as the Cleveland Plan of Grouping Public Buildings, one of the earliest and most complete City Beautiful planning schemes in the country. The success of this plan led to a spillover effect that prompted architects to design all manner of new public buildings that adopted similar Beaux-Arts architectural characteristics over the ensuing decades.

Walker and Weeks was the foremost architectural firm in Cleveland for nearly 40 years. Their clients were the wealthy and influential of Cleveland and their landmark accomplishments included the Cleveland Public Library and the Cleveland Municipal Stadium.

Downtown Cleveland has many architectural landmarks that define this big, proud city on the lake. Most famous is Terminal Tower, the "grand dame" of Cleveland skyscrapers, which was the tallest office building outside of New York City from 1930 until 1967. Other notable high-rises such as the BP building, Key Tower (at 948 feet one of the tallest in the nation), and the new Federal Court House with its distinctive lighted cornice also dominate the city's beautiful Lake Erie skyline. And then there are the details-the terra-cotta "starburst" motif on the exterior of the Standard Building, the extensive metal decorative work inside the gargoyle-encircled atrium of The Arcade, and the immense stained-glass dome of the Cleveland Trust Rotunda.

This volume presents the most current research on domestic, public, and ritual architecture created over four millennia ago along the Ohio River, its tributaries, and the adjacent lower Great Lakes.