Street Stories: High Street

If you strolled down High Street in the 19th century, you might have spotted dozens of misguided souls waiting for the world to end.

Or witnessed hundreds of women helping to start the national suffrage movement.

Or watched the birth of Summit County government.

The clues to this street's colorful past still exist, if you know where to look.

This is the third installment in a series of walking guides to downtown Akron.

University of Akron archivist Steve Paschen and local history lovers Chuck Ayers and Ron Syroid contributed their knowledge of High Street, from the city's oldest brick building at the corner of Exchange to the site of a famous civil-rights event near the corner of Market.

Face west

There's a 165-year-old reason downtown's government buildings are concentrated between Bowery and University.

It was the only politically correct territory between two feuding villages.

Before merging in 1836, North Akron and South Akron were bitter rivals, competing for commerce and citizens. The two square-shaped communities, with fewer than 500 residents each, bumped together at a slight angle, leaving an unclaimed triangular hilltop called “the Gore.”

Religious leaders wisely chose the Gore for Akron's first churches, even installing entrances facing west to avoid any hint of partiality. When the Baptists broke with tradition and built a southern door, they lost many north side members.

Summit County was formed in 1840, and the churches were moved to make room for the new courthouse. Other government buildings soon set up shop in the neutral zone.

There's no feud to keep them there, but the old Gore is still home to City Hall, law enforcement, county and state offices and the 1908 courthouse built on the site of the original.

And none of their entrances faces north or south.

High Street Trivia

At the Akron Beacon Journal, the top-floor windows overlooking High at Exchange were in the office of John S. Knight, the Pulitzer Prize-winning editor of the Beacon who co-founded the Knight Ridder chain of newspapers.

The Beacon Journal parking lot at High and Exchange was a heartbreaking scene in 1938. Back then, the corner held the Kaiser mansion, a gray stone structure built in 1879 for businessman Joseph Kaiser.

Augusta Kaiser, the 82-year-old daughter of the builder, had to be forcibly carried from the house. She had unknowingly signed papers selling her lifelong home, and her three-year battle to correct the mistake ended unsuccessfully.

Within 24 hours of being taken from the house, the distraught woman fell and broke her hip. She never recovered, and died a few months later.

Akron Children's Hospital got its start at High and Buchtel, where the Polsky parking deck sits. From 1891 to 1928, the Mary Day Nursery cared for children of working mothers. Over the years, it evolved into a place that cared for sick children.

Left of the courthouse is the Akron Centennial Boulder. Erected in 1925, its bronze tablet lists 32 industrial leaders, though some notable names (like Goodyear founder F.A. Seiberling) are missing because it honored only those who had died by 1921.

Behind the boulder is the Spirit of the American Doughboy, a statue honoring World War I veterans. A plaque lists 66 Summit County casualties.

It was erected in 1934 in front of the former National Guard Armory, and moved to its current location when the armory was razed to make room for the Oliver Ocasek Government Office Building.

For more than 50 years, the armory was the city's main auditorium, hosting everything from concerts to circuses to an annual rummage sale.

But before the armory, the land was home to the First Methodist Episcopal Church, which had a national claim to fame.

In 1872, a member of the church, Lewis Miller, designed an addition that put Sunday school classes in a circle to be opened to view the sanctuary.

The architectural feature was so popular, almost every Protestant church built in the United States for the next 50 years incorporated what was called the “Akron Plan.”

The church burned down in 1911, despite being directly across the street from a fire station.
Greystone Hall (103 High) was built in 1917 as the Masonic Temple. When the Masons moved out in 2003, it was the first time in 162 years that there was no Masonic lodge in downtown Akron. Today, the Greek-inspired structure is used for theater, meetings and weddings.

Judgment day

The Rev. James Pickands shocked his congregation in 1841 when he announced the end of the world was coming.

The pastor of the First Congregational Church, then located at what is today's northeast corner of High and Bowery, had joined the Second Adventist movement.

Pickands' revelation split the congregation, and he moved his fellow converts to a tabernacle they built on the opposite side of High Street.

That's where they stood on April 4, 1843, wearing snow white Ascension Robes and waiting for the flight to Heaven.

The mother of all terminations did not come then, nor on other dates that Massachusetts cult leader William Miller announced as he apologized for each miscalculation.

In 1845, someone blew up the tabernacle. The movement faded away after Pickands admitted it was “a humbug and a delusion.”

Eye candy

It's not much to look at now, but the blue-painted brick building at the corner of High and Exchange is a cherished piece of Akron history. Built in 1835, it is thought to be the first brick home in the original village of Akron.

The once-stately Federal style home belonged to Richard Howe, chief engineer of the Ohio & Erie Canal. The Ohio & Erie Canalway Coalition is raising funds to restore it.
The 1903 Gothic building (102 High), featuring yellow and orange brick, houses All Ohio Sports. It was designed by Frank O. Weary, who transformed Akron's skyline before embarking on a career that took him from New York to California.

In 2002, the city launched a national campaign to find someone to buy and rehabilitate the four-story glazed-brick building. No takers so far.

The Zion Lutheran Church (139 High) was built in 1876, a Gothic structure of brick and stone. It's home to one of Akron's oldest congregations, started in 1854.

Next door to Zion is the High Street Church of Christ, built in 1977 to replace one that had burned down. The cornerstone and a pillar saved from the original 1892 church are displayed at the entrance.

City Hall (166 High) was completed the year the city turned 100 years old. The years 1825-1925 are in the stone above the entrance. The nine-story Italian Renaissance structure was designed by Akron's foremost architectural firm of the 1920s, Good & Wagner.

Summit County Courthouse (209 High) was completed in 1908. The staircase once descended all the way down to High Street.

Note the two lion statues that flanked the old staircase, and the human figures at the entrance: one holding a scroll to represent law, the other holding a sheathed sword to symbolize justice.

The three-story sandstone structure replaced an earlier courthouse on the same site. One of the round columns from the 1843 courthouse was used to build the John Brown monument in Perkins Park.

Two of downtown's last homes (combined now into 245 High Street) were built in 1895 in the architectural style of Queen Anne. In a later incarnation, the homes were used as a convent for nuns from St. Bernard Catholic Church.

Women’s Rights event

The Universalist's Old Stone Church is gone, but the Sojourner Truth
Building in its place is named for an event that put Akron on the civil-rights map.

On May 29, 1851, the church hosted the second Woman's Rights Convention. There, former slave Sojourner Truth electrified the gathering with her “And Ain't I A Woman?” speech, in which she compared her physical and mental attributes to those of a man.

A dozen years later, after Truth became a nationally recognized
suffragette and abolitionist, the 1851 convention president, Francis Dana Gage, published her recollection of Truth's speech.

While Gage said Truth had rhythmically repeated ‘and ain't I a woman,‘ many historians have come to believe Gage made up that phrase.

Regardless, Truth's Akron speech was turned into a battle cry that
empowered the civil-rights movement for decades.

All gone

Some High Street buildings you can't visit anymore:

The Sawan Building, (formerly 22 High) played an important role in local women's history. It was called Grace House when it was built in 1904 and donated to the YWCA by the son of Akron's founder. The building was later named for a doctor who owned it. It was demolished in 1994, but some of its brick was salvaged for use in a community garden in Akron's West Hill neighborhood.

From 1931 to 1991, the YWCA occupied a new brick office and residential building at 146 High (now CitiCenter), then relocated to South Balch Street.

The organization's story ended this year, when the group voted to disband.

The United Rubber Workers operated from a building where the John S. Knight Center stands.

The building is gone, but a historical marker on the Mill Street side memorializes the URW's invention of the “sit-down strike,” first used against Goodyear in the mid-1930s. The strategy gained popularity with unions around the country.
Copyright (c) 2005, Beacon Journal Publishing Co.
publication date: Saturday, September 10, 2005.
By Paula Schleis, Beacon Journal staff writer