George E. Condon (1916–2011)

The long-serving Plain dealer journalist George Condon gives us a chatty account of Cleveland’s origins and tells us about some of the remarkable people who have made it what it is. He’s understandably proud of his own city, the fifth sixth eighth … 54th largest in the US, but he’s also well aware that not everyone is equally convinced of the joys of the Great Lakes climate or the elegance of the Downtown area, which was essentially one large demolition site at the time of writing, in 1967, and now looks a bit too much like a city that was rebuilt in the sixties.

We learn about Cleveland’s industries, its bewildering array of ethnic communities, its sports teams (I skipped lightly over all the football and baseball), its newspapers (how can you not like a city whose main paper has stuck doggedly to the name Plain Dealer since 1842) and its magnificent cultural institutions.

But the real joy of the book is in his pleasantly anecdotal biographies of Cleveland characters, from tycoons like Rockefeller, the Van Sweringen brothers and Cyrus Eaton to politicians like Mark Hanna and Tom Johnson, as well as oddities like the con artist Cassie Chadwick (who in the early years of the 20th century cheated banks out of over $2M by pretending to be Andrew Carnegie’s natural daughter) and the 20s lawman Eliot Ness.

A good fifty years out of date, and probably not a book you would want to read unless you are curious about the background to this particular city, but fun if it does happen to fit your needs.… (more)