Bekah Swope is an MLIS student at Kent State currently completing her work on her practicum. Her project: to digitize subsets of the 1930s and 1960s real estate appraisal cards housed at the Cuyahoga County Archives pertaining to Little Italy's Murray Hill and extrapolate statistics on the streets evolution. In the end, her practicum will involve a collaborative effort between Pursue Posterity, the aforementioned Cuyahoga County Archives, and Cleveland State University.

Paesani. Fellow countrymen; fellow villagers.

            Change is a constant in our world—something that is often feared or thought of as a cause for concern. When we consider change as an opportunity to bring about new successes and triumphs, it can become a more welcoming mechanism, though it still can conjure hesitation. We rely on the past to mark notable changes of ourselves, our surroundings, and the greater world. We try to preserve that past from the constant movement of modernity and contemporary change, but a balance must be made for society to function and change as it always will. The past becomes symbolized and condensed, holding memories, stories, emotion. When those living representations of memories are threatened, they can trigger emotions and sentiments of preservation in the name of future generations. As professionals in the memory, history, and information realms, finding a balance and helping to strengthen, recreate (reinvent/reawaken/rediscover), and preserve those links to the past—all the while making them accessible—are our challenges.

            As part of this project covering Little Italy, I wanted to focus less on prominent or notable people of the area and dig deeply into the community of Murray Hill. Though the scope of this project is focused from the 1930's to the 1960's, the permeation of time and history forces onlookers to remember to consider things that have happened before a focal time period as well as the subsequent effects. The following snapshots of Murray Hill businesses and organizations not only emphasizes the community that developed after the immigration and establishment of Italians in this Cleveland neighborhood, but it also gives an insight into the skill-sets, professions, and work that the everyday people of Murray Hill did.

        The above interactive chart offers us a great deal of information in a condensed form. We can see the changes in businesses that have both sprung up and became discontinued as well as the evolution of the title or type of business occupying an address. Murray Hill School is a constant across this short spectrum of time as is St. John's Beckwith Memorial Church, later St. John's Beckwith Memorial Presbyterian Church*.  Murray Hill Hardware & Plumbing Company is followed up by Murray Hill Hardware Company which later houses Pipp's Hardware & Appliance Store, and then Pipp's Hardware & Appliance Company—which comes to occupy two property lots. The Murray Hill Social Club becomes the Italian Social Club. Vitantonio's Funeral Home in the 1950's becomes Vitantonio & Son Funeral Home in 1960's. The Mesi Brothers Bottling Company building in 1940 holds the Tri-County Beverage Distributors Incorporated by 1950, but is no longer listed by 1960. The graph also shows us an increase in the number of businesses and/or organizations during 1960 which is more than double that of the previous years.                                                                      

                The chart allows us to see the variety of businesses and organizations in a specific cross-section of time as well as when it is taken altogether. From these pieces, we can develop an understanding of the evolving community year-to-year and over time. The daily needs of the people of Murray Hill are met by the department stores, grocers, bakers, and barbers, junior orchestras and fine art studio. Restaurants and funeral homes, clubs and churches, beer wholesalers and dry cleaners all offer an insight—and, perhaps, a link—between the daily lives of the past and ourselves.

* In 1963, shortly after the time span of this chart, the church property is sold after a final dissolved session.

As difficult as it was for me to narrow down the focus and scope of the Cleveland Memory Project  exhibit for Cain Park Theatre, selecting which objects to digitize for the site has proved almost as challenging.  This is my first experience working on a large archival project, so I have no basis for comparison, but I suspect that not every collection of materials is as expansive as what has been preserved from Cain Park over the decades.  Even by narrowing my focus to the “Halcyon Years” of the historic Theatre, the amount of material to sift through still included over a half dozen boxes of documents and clippings, over eighty programs from individual productions, and hundreds of photographs and slides.  Consulting Pursue Posterity Project Manager Calvin Rydbom confirmed  my instinct that a web exhibit should be highly visual in nature, so I plan to include the majority of photographs and slides that my predecessor Emily Smith has already scanned.  There are a lot of high quality pictures of plays as they were being performed, as well as rehearsal and “behind the scenes” shots of the casts and crews.  In an era when cameras were not nearly as cheap, portable, or ubiquitous as they are now in our always connected, social media-oriented society, these are very precious artifacts.  This was the easiest decision to make regarding content for the web exhibit.  

I also decided early on that I wanted to accomplish more than showcasing how prolific Cain Park Theatre was in its early days and providing a visual record of all the great times that were had there.  In addition to these goals, I also have in mind providing a useful resource for the actors that played on the stage of Cain Park's amphitheater, as well as their children, grandchildren, and other descendants.  To accomplish this will mean entering in a lot more metadata into the content management software, but the end result will allow users to not just browse through digitized programs, but search the cast listings for their own names or those of their family members.  The nature of Cain Park, by many accounts the country's first municipally run outdoor community theater, seems to demand this type of treatment.  Although there were several famous names in theater that graced the stage over the years, the majority of those who took part in the productions at Cain Park were amateurs. Many either had strong ties to Cleveland Heights to begin with or developed them after spending several summers working and studying here.  So, I guess deciding to digitize all eighty of the programs from 1938 to 1950 (and make the cast lists searchable) wasn't really all that difficult either.  It just required a commitment on my part to doing more work to achieve a more meaningful result.

The documents have been a different story entirely.  It appears that nearly every record kept and piece of correspondence generated during the daily operations of Cain Park, at least during this early period,  was boxed up and stored away for safekeeping.  These documents range from the mundane to the historic.  There are annual reports, budgets, records of ticket and refreshment sales, list after list of committees and their members, and class rosters from the Children's School of Theatre.  There are invoices and receipts for everything from makeup to stage light bulbs to sheet music and costumes.  There are letters from students seeking to join the cast or crew of the Theatre for the summer, letters from  young men and women seeking to teach drama or dance classes, and letters to and from Doc Evans (founder and director of the Theatre during this period) regarding every possible detail of running a “little theatre”.  

Some of these correspondences are simply amusing, others are quite interesting as conflicts and controversies arose over rights to perform certain plays, royalties due, artistic liberties taken with original works, and whether hiring additional guild actors during busy seasons would designate Cain Park a “professional” theatre.  World War II brought more poignant letters as young men who had worked with the theatre went overseas to fight and the directorship struggled to define the proper role of a community theatre in wartime.  At one point, the Office of War Information contacted the Theatre about staging a play to tell the story of the Jack & Heintz plants, where airplane parts were made during the war.  With so many different types of documents to choose from, but limited time and resources to digitize, add metadata, and upload them all to the Cleveland Memory Project web exhibit, it has been quite a challenge to decide what “makes the cut” and what doesn't.  I have tried to select some items which simply represent the joys and challenges of the daily operations of a community theatre, but I have also endeavored to highlight the most interesting personalities and situations.  Of course, the items from the World War II era will be especially prevalent because this is such a significant period in our nation's history, one of almost universal interest to those who will be visiting the web exhibit.  This brings me to the next stage of the project: uploading all of the objects, now numbering in the several hundred, to the Cleveland Memory Project site.  I look forward to learning to use the content management software, working to add all the necessary metadata to make the site usable, and ultimately producing a page that will tell the story of Cain Park Theatre's glory days.