Thursday, January 24, 2013

Saranac Yards

Collinwood Rail Yard coal tipple
Saranac Avenue intersects E.152nd Street, and then a bridge goes over the rails, on the other side is the old main entrance to the yards, and Darwin to the west. When these were the New York Central yards, and even later there were many buildings, including dormitories and a engine garage with a turntable in front. During the end of the anti-Hitlerite War, this multi-bay coal tipple was built to accommodate the loading of coal tenders. By the end of the 1950s, diesel locomotives had made this superfluous. 

Cleveland was a very important rail center. The first growth of Collinwood was because of the railroad. Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railway set up shop in the mid 1870s after looking for a flat place midway between Buffalo and Toledo. The village was in Euclid township.

In 1877 a mission church of St. Paul Euclid (suppressed by Lennon 2009) was built at Saranac and Aspinwall. The first St. Joseph was built on Saranac and Aspinwall. Collinwood was annexed by Cleveland in 1910. The then new high school was nicknamed the Railroaders. Manpower expanded at the yards before and after the Depression of the 1930s. By the 1980s there had been continual shrinkage, jobs were taken away, and buildings levelled. St. Joseph built a new church/school on St. Clair Avenue to the south in 1921. The parish was merged into St. Aloysius in 1994, while the school stayed open for some years thereafter.           
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postscriptum: demolished August 2019

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