The Court Houses of Cuyahoga County

Taken together over their own history, the court houses and judicial facilities of Cuyahoga County represent in a clear manner the development of the place and the ideals of Cleveland and its metropolitan area. While building may say something about the ways and manners of those who used them, they very nearly always say something about the beliefs and dreams and visions of those who built them.

The first court house in Cuyahoga County was built by Levi Johnson, in 1812-13, under a contract with the Board of County Commissioners. The building was unique among the buildings in Cleveland at the time, but it was not a building meant to be permanent. Although the Ohio General Assembly had designated Cleveland to be the Cuyahoga County seat, the village of Newburgh contested the decision for almost fourteen years, until 1826. While the matter was being adjudicated, it seemed reasonable not to construct a building of great consequence or permanence. The building was about twenty-five by fifty feet and two stories in height. According to Edmund H. Chapman, in Cleveland:   Village to Metropolis:

Half of the lower floor consisted of a two-cell jail at one end. This part of the building was constructed of squared logs some three feet in length, placed transversely and bolted together so that they formed and unbreachable wall. The rest of the building was ordinary frame construction. On the ground floor, living quarters for the jailor were provided adjacent to the cells, and on the second a single large hall. This large upper room served a multiplicity of uses . . . social gatherings, . . town meeting, . . . religious services and lectures, and as a court room when occasion demanded. It thus became the first civic center of the infant community.

The building was covered with clapboard and painted red. It had no exterior adornment at all, and only painted white window frames to stand out against the red clapboarding. The drawings in the Court House exhibition show the building in its structural appearance (that is, without designating the exterior dark to represent the red paint) and, with color designation indicated by dark pencil, the building’s location on the northwest corner of Public Square.

Like many buildings in such “outposts” of the American western movement, the first Cuyahoga County Court House was not a little tenuous, grasping for a hold in an unknown land, a hold made less strong by the legal battle about its final location.

By the time the question of the location of the county seat was finally settled, in 1826, Cleveland had come to realize the enormous benefits of the Ohio Canal prosperity. The County’s ties with the east, which had always been strong, were bolstered by Cleveland’s becoming the western terminus of goods coming from the east and for food and other items of western manufacture going to the east in return. A fine and fitting building was necessary to correspond both to the city’s eastern ways and its new and growing prosperity. In March 1827 the Board of County Commissioners opened bids for the construction of a new court house; on July 4th that year the first canal boat made the thirty-seven mile trip from Akron to Cleveland to open the Ohio Canal. The two events should not be thought unrelated, since the prosperity of the canal made possible the construction of an elegant and well-proportioned building.

The second court house was completed in 1828 for about eight thousand dollars. The “joiner and builder” was Henry L. Noble. The 1837 Cleveland City Directory describes the structure:

It is a brick building, two stories high, the front is ornamented with stone antaes or pilasters of the Dorick order, supporting a Dorick entablature; the whole is crowned by an Ionic belfry and dome. On the ground floor are the departments for county officers. The court room is on the second floor.

Chapman, in Cleveland:   Village to Metropolis, adds this description, based on the 1839 painting of the Public Square which is reproduced by photograph in this exhibition:

It is a square block of a building raised on a low stone basement with an entablature which encompasses all sides of the structure, also of stone, which is carved into a rather crude interpretation of the architrave of a Doric order. The principle facade facing north on the Square is ornamented by six pilasters, four of which support a flattened pediment into which a depressed semicircular fan light has been let. It has a flattened hipped roof with two balustrades, one at the eaves and a second at the base of the central cupola above.
. . . This is, in fact, a Federal Style building. It has the severity and simple block form of the new manner and in particular the full entablature and large scale order of a classical style. In these respects, the second Court House was the only building in Cleveland before 1830 to incorporate the progressive spirit which dominated the architecture of the east during the preceding decades. . . . this building was an attainment of considerable significance and reflects the national artistic revolution of these years.

In 1832 the stone jail with three cells and living quarters for the sheriff was added behind the second Court House and came popularly to be known as the “Blue Jug.”

That Cleveland was a New England village transplanted in the Connecticut Western Reserve of Ohio in 1828 there is little disputing. What is became in the following thirty years, however, was a full-fledged Great Lakes city with the beginnings of a world-wide perspective. That change, the result of canal, commerce, and burgeoning industry which attracted scores of immigrants, is reflected in the third Court House of 1858. This building was approved at an election in 1857 and was located in the northwest area of the Public Square, just west of the building now known as the 75 Public Square Building, but formerly the Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company Building. Its construction reflects all the technological and design changes which thirty years of industrialization had made possible: instead of a wooden frame the interior support structure was made of cast- iron members. Just before the third Court House opened, the Cleveland Leader published a description which may be read in conjunction with the description of the second Court House:

There are forty tons of iron stairways in the building. A circular gallery extends from the first floor to the roof. Labor and materials for this immense building come from Cleveland Mechanics, with the exception of the corrugated iron roofing which comes from Pittsburgh. . . . All the floors above the basement are of iron paved in concrete.

Chapman mentions that the third Court House was the first building in Cleveland to take advantage of the “radical innovation” of incorporating girders and I-beams into the structural frame. The beams for the building were twenty-four feet long, “four feet longer,” noted one newspaper, “than any ever made in this county outside New York city.”

The third Court House was the first local Cleveland building to make use of the new construction methods developed by Ammi B. Young, the architect for the United States Treasury, who designed the Cleveland Federal Building (where now stands the Federal Court House on the northeast side of Public Square). Chapman notes about the system Young designed:

By this system Young was able to design a building which had all the structural advantages of the metal frame while it retained the internal appearance of traditional wooden or masonry construction.

The third Court House was a “renaissance” or Italianate building. The building had a central well which was surrounded by a continuous staircase, a building option only possible with the new construction technologies. The architectural integrity of the building, reflected in the consistent Italianate details of quoins at the corners on the lower sections and the balcony over the entrance and cornice and pediment above, was damaged when, in 1884, for $100,000, two additional stories were added to house the expanding duties of the County and the county courts. The third Court House was completed in 1860, at a final cost of about $152,000; its size was eighty by one hundred and fifty-two feet; and it was connected to the jail behind it by the “Bridge of Sighs.”

One other notable fact about the third Court House is that it was designed by a professionally trained architect who was not himself the builder of the structure. This man, J. J. Husband, as well as the then sitting Board of County Commissioners and the constructors of the building, were commemorated in the cornerstone, which is on view in a rubbing in the Court House exhibition. Husband’s name, however, was chiseled from the stone in April 1865 after he was heard to remark in public that Lincoln’s death was well deserved. Mr. Husband had to remove himself from Cleveland very quickly; the incised section of the cornerstone, in the lower left side, is where Husband’s name and appeared.

The growth of Cleveland to a city with genuine world-wide interests and conscious of being in the forefront of design and architectural experimentation is reflected in the fourth Court House, built in 1875 at a cost of a quarter of a million dollars. The building was constructed entirely of fire-proof materials, including iron and slate for the roof. It was located on Seneca Street (now West Third Street) and extended to the third Court House. Four stories tall, and opulently “Renaissance Revival,” with no little hint of French influence, the fourth Court House has the least available material on it of all the County’s court houses. A pedestal statue of Justice was mounted on the Seneca Street entrance; the building housed administrative as well as judicial functions of the County. One fine photograph of the forth Court House is on display, on loan from the photographic collections of the Western Reserve Historical Society. It displays the solid “four-square” appearance of the building, with its front pilasters and attached columns supporting the pediment, all in Composite capitals. The attractive decoration at the top of the adjoining smokestack reflects the Italianate composition of parts of the building and softens the impact on the scene of that incongruous visual element.

The fourth Court House was designed by Walter Blythe, whose commission on the $250,000 structure is recorded as being four hundred and fifty-five dollars. In 1931 the fourth Court House, also called the Seneca Street Court House, and, until 1912, the “new” Court House, was demolished. Four years later its older and more dignified sister on the Public Square was pulled down. The third Court House had passed its last years as the location of criminal court trials in Cuyahoga County, a need which passed with the construction of the Criminal Courts Building in 1931.

When Cleveland entered the twentieth century, it did so with the reputation of being among the most eminently well-governed municipal areas in the United States, and certainly among the most progressive. The city proudly expected to become the model of urban development and good government, the nations “Third City”, after New York and Chicago. Cleveland anticipated being able to avoid the calamities which attended in recent experience rapid urban development and industrial growth. It planned to create the all but ideal urban community. The architecture of the city’s needs in that context had to represent ideals not only of good government but of exceptional cultural, industrial, civic, and economic integrity and development.

The Columbian Exposition of 1893, the starting point of Beaux-Arts influence in American architecture and design, provided the models for Cleveland’s and Cuyahoga County’s needs. Then the Group Plan of 1903 put bricks and mortar to the ideal of the community with a plan to develop a central city mall surrounded by elegant, functional, and highly developed public buildings. For the first time the public life of the community would center in one area with amenable, impressive, dignified, and open surroundings - - a combination of the democratic and civic ideals of Cleveland and the older understandings of public life of Europe.

Second building in the Cleveland Group Plan (whose other completed elements include the Federal Court House and Cleveland Public Library, the Cleveland City Hall and Board of Education Building, and the Cleveland Public Auditorium), the fifth Cuyahoga County Court House was begun in 1906 and substantially completed by 1912. The structure cost about five million dollars (including architectural fees) and the land for it slightly less than one million dollars. A Beaux-Arts building in the Girard style of late eighteenth- century French architecture, the Court House has four full floors and a partial fifth floor which houses the Law Library. The model for the building is the mid-eighteenth century Hotel de Cite of Nancy, France, the old capitol of Lorraine. The Court House is built along the lines of the golden mean, the ratio of the length to the sides being one to two. The building is approximately four hundred feet long and two hundred feet deep.

The architects for the Court House were Lehman and Schmitt (specifically Charles Morris of that firm’s staff, a Beaux-Arts trained architect) and Charles F. Schweinfurth for most of the interior spaces, although Morris prepared some of them as well.

The Court House is faced in Milford (Vermont) granite; the columns on the east side are detached from the building to add to the impression of grandness coming from the proposed but never built train terminal which was to have been between the Court House and the Cleveland City Hall to the east. (The City Hall’s west columns are also detached, for the same reason.) The interior is done in marble (Tennessee and Georgia for the floors and Colorado for the columns and wainscoting) and English oak, chestnut, and other woods for the courtrooms. Original Great Hall skylights were covered for wartime purpose in 1942 and have not been re-opened. An ornamental plaster and glass ceiling in the west light well was lowered to make room for offices and has not been restored.

The series of decorations on the outside of the Court House form a kind of visual representation of the development of law, both in the English and American systems and in the larger human context. Specifically, the development of English and American law is represented by the marble statues on the south cornice. In order from left to right these are Archbishop Stephen Langton (for the Magna Charta); Simon de Montfort (for the early development of what became the House of Commons); King Edward I (for English judicial organization and reform); John Hampden (author of the Petition of Rights); John Lord Somers (for the Declaration of Rights); and William Murray, Earl of Mansfield (for the development of commercial law). The entrance below the statues are flanked by statues of Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, who represent the application of principles of English law to the American commonwealth. Similarly, the north cornice has four statues, representing the law in all its human manifestations: from left to right they are Moses (for the moral laws); the sixth-century Roman Emperor Justinian (for the civil law); the ninth-century King Alfred the Great (for English common law), and the thirteenth-century Pope Gregory IX (for the ecclesiastical for canon law). The north entrance is flanked, too, by two statues, one of Chief Justice John Marshall (for the doctrine of judicial interpretation of the law in the federal system), the other of Ohio Chief Justice Rufus P. Ranney (for the same doctrine in Ohio law).

A group of sculptors performed these statues. The ten cornice statues are all in Tennessee marble. The sculptor Herman executed the statues of Moses and Pope Gregory IX; Isidore Konti did Justinian and Alfred the Great; Herbert Adams did Archbishop Langston and Simon de Montfort; Daniel Chester French did King Edward I am Hampden, and Karl Bitter the Lords Somers and Mansfield. The four bronze works are by Herbert Adams (Marshall and Ranney) and Karl Bitter (Jefferson and Hamilton).

The inscription on the north cornice, “Obedience to law is liberty,” is from Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, a sixth-century work of enormous influence in the West until well into the nineteenth century. The interior inscriptions are from the thirty-ninth chapter of Magna Charta and the third book of Aristotle’s Politics. The Latin inscription above the Great Hall reads, “No free man may in any manner be destroyed except by legal verdict of his equals or by the law of the land.”

The Court House is Decorated with a series of paintings and murals throughout; all of them were commissioned especially for the building and represent aspects of the law and its development. At the entrance to the Court of Appeals courtroom in the south Lunette of the second floor is “King John Signing the Magna Charta at Runnymede,” an oil on canvas, done by Sir Frank Brangwyn, R. A., in 1913. By courtesy of the Western Reserve Historical Society the exhibition is able to present to view two of the drawings which were done by Sir Frank in preparation for the final paintings. These were discovered in London in 1967 by Albert I. Borowitz, a Cleveland attorney, who presented them to the Society. The entrance in the north lunette of the Court House, to the Probate Court, is surrounded by “The Constitutional Convention, September 17, 1789, “by Violet Oakley, an oil on canvas executed in 1912. The barely distinguishable lettering on this painting is from the sixtieth chapter of Isaias. In the Court of Appeals courtroom are two paintings, oil on canvas, by Charles Yardley Turner. They are “The Trail of Captain John Smith,” (on the east wall) representing the first English trial in the United States, and “The Conclave Between Pontiac and Rogers’ Rangers at the Cuyahoga River, November 1760,” representing one of the first treaties undertaken by the American colonies outside their own boundaries. Both of these paintings date from 1913. In the courtroom of the Probate Court is a mural by Fredrick Wilson which is entitled “Appeal”. On the south wall of the Law Library, on the fourth floor, is another mural, by Max Bohm, entitled “A New England Town Meeting.” Both of these works date circa 1913. The Law Library has also retained its wall friezes, with the names of significant persons in the history of American and English law building were obliterated in the late 1950s because of severe deterioration.

The marble staircase, with its two approaches to the second floor, rises to a large stained glass window, representing Justice, which is placed to catch the rising sun. Designed by Fredrick Wilson and Charles F. Schweinfurth, and executed by the Gorham Glassworks of New York City, the allegorical presentation shows the figure without covered eyes, to indicate that justice should see not only the letter but also the spirit of the law. The figure’s right hand is covered in mail, while her left hand is uncovered, representing the New Dispensation of justice tempered with mercy. The tablets of the Ten Commandments are on both sides of her, while the city in an orb (from the twenty-first chapter of the Apocalypse, the celestial city of St. John’s vision descending from heaven to establish perfect justice and freedom) above the figure descends through the represented order of the created universe.

Originally housing both the judicial and administrative functions of Cuyahoga County, the fifth Court House eventually became a solely judicial building. The current restoration of the building (which has won the 1978 restoration award from the Cleveland Chapter of the American Institute of Architects) attempts to put the building back into the shape of its origin, including opening closed corridors, clearing blocked-off lobbies, duplicating original paint colors, and so forth.

By the late 1920s the burden of the courts had expanded to such a degree that another building was constructed. Completed in 1931 at a cost of about one and a third million dollars, the Criminal Courts Building - - in the then popular Art Deco style - - housed the criminal courts of the Common Pleas Court, the 350-person jail, the offices of the County Sheriff and the criminal division of the County Prosecuting Attorney. The building was placed next to the headquarters of the Cleveland Police Department for the sake of convenience, on East 21st Street, just north of Payne Avenue. It was used extensively for forty-five years and, though now empty, is being considered for re-use for different County and local functions. The architect for the Criminal Courts Building was the Cleveland firm of Warner and Mitchell.

The Criminal Court Building’s design consistency is remarkable. The Art Deco idiom is used throughout the public areas of the structure and is particularly noticeable in the main rotunda, a three-story open space laid out in an octagon and surmounted by a large octagonal light which was capable of being raised or lowered to suit the lighting needs and for repair. Interior room fixtures represent the same conscious adaptation of the style to the needs of the judicial functions. Some of these fixtures have been removed for permanent display of the style at the Western Reserve Historical Society. In a strange manner the same number relationship which exists at the fifth Court House - - the ratio of one to two - - recurs at the Criminal Courts Building: the tower is four-sided on the exterior but immediately within becomes an octagon, duplicating the ratio of one to two which exists at the Court House.

The reason for the Criminal Court Building’s falling into desuetude was the construction, finished in 1977, of the Cuyahoga County and City of Cleveland Justice Center, on the block surrounded by West Third Street and Ontario Street and Lakeside Avenue and St. Clair Avenue. This complex of three buildings houses the new administrative headquarters of the Cleveland Police Department, the 900-person City and County jails, and the twenty- three story Courts Tower, which houses City and County Courts and the administrative offices of the Clerks of those two court systems. The entire complex was constructed over the course of five years at a cost of about one hundred and thirty-five million dollars. It is among the most sophisticated courts buildings in the United States. Its architect (for the Tower and the Correction Center) is Prindle and Patrick and Partners and (for the Cleveland Police Headquarters) Richard L. Bowen and Associates.

The building complex is faced entirely in granite from Spanish quarries, which was meant to correspond in color and general texture with the nearby Court House and the other near buildings in the Group Plan. The existence in the building of extensive court and jail facilities necessitated considerable design adaptation adaptations in the otherwise simple design problem.

Several works of art decorate the structure. On the Ontario Street entrance is a work by Isamu Noguchi, “Portal”, and, on the West Third Street entrance, Richard Hunt’s “Sentimental Scale and Wedge,” a two-piece construction. Inside the Galleria is John Pearson’s “Mondrian Series, Designed for the Justice Center, “and Gene Kangas’s “Edge.” The last two works were commissioned from a competition; the first two were, respectively, the commission and donation of the Gund Foundation and the Cleveland Foundation.

With the removal of many Court functions to the Justice Center, the Cuyahoga County Court House retains the Court of Common Pleas, and the administrative and supporting services attending the duties of these courts.

From small and frontier-like judicial practices and surroundings the County has come to a huge complex of structures to deal with the same kinds of judicial problems, much expanded and all but infinitely more complicated, in a population approaching two million persons. In each development of the systems of justice the Court Houses and other facilities have had to be designed to meet contemporary needs and then adapted to even greater needs before newer structures could be made to accommodate them. In doing so these buildings speak, in some clear way, of the ways of life and the ideals of those who use and build the structures. This exhibition tries to make some of those aspects of the Court Houses more apparent.
           
  - - Roderick Boyd Porter
Director
The Cuyahoga County Archives