As a youngster growing up in the 1950s, I would frequently ride my bike from my home on W. 67th Street near Lorain to the small ball field on Herman Avenue where my dad sometimes played on a Westinghouse softball team in the evenings and I played choose-up-sides baseball games during long, lazy summer afternoons.
Just getting into following sports at the time, I remember the kids at the playground boasting about how the great boxer, Johnny Kilbane, had once lived nearby and how he would still occasionally stop by the ball field and chat with neighborhood kids. They talked about how, when he returned to Cleveland after winning the featherweight crown (in 1912), 100,000 people greeted him at the train station.
I also remember hearing them talk about Kilbane dying (in 1957) and how there would never be a featherweight champion that could compare to him. These were mostly Irish kids — immigrants or sons of immigrants — who made no bones about wearing their heritage proudly on their sleeves.
My memories of that time were sparked by the news last month that a statue honoring Kilbane had been erected in what’s called Battery Park, not far from the Herman Avenue home where Kilbane lived at the time he won the title.
Battery Park currently sits on 18 acres that were the original site of Eveready Battery, which closed its facility in the 1970s, and included numerous multiple-story buildings and a powerhouse. The abandoned site remained in disrepair until the 1990s, when pressure from the city of Cleveland forced Eveready to clean up the site to a residential standard.
Then in 2002, the state of Ohio committed an initial $50 million to develop the west Shoreway, which helped attract Vintage, a private developer. Vintage’s Battery Park is a $100 million urban project that is located on W. 73rd and W. 76th and is currently the largest housing development in the city of Cleveland, with 130 of its projected 440 units already completed.
The original powerhouse remains on the site — its towering, lighted smokestack visible for miles. The recently closed Battery Park Wine Bar is set re-open next month as CHA Spirits and Pizza Kitchen, whose liquor license permits delivery of beer and wine — something Johnny Kilbane and the folks I remember from the 1950s would greatly appreciate.
A small park next to the powerhouse is site of the three-statued sculpture of Kilbane, depicting him as a boy, as the champion and in his older years when he served as Cleveland’s clerk of courts. It was sculpted in Ireland by renowned Dublin-based artist Rowan Gillespsie and is entitled “Johnny Kilbane: Fighting Heart.”
The entire Kilbane project — including a 2013 documentary on his life called A Fighting Heart produced by a distant relative from Ireland, Des Kilbane — was spearheaded by the Irish-American Archives Society and is designed to celebrate both the life of Cleveland’s greatest boxer and the rise of the immigrants who contributed so much to the fabric of our area.
The revival of the Detroit-Shoreway neighborhood over the past two decades has been one of great success stories in the difficult revitalization of Cleveland’s communities that has been taking place — slowly but surely — all over the city.
Back when I was a kid and hanging out down on Herman Avenue, the name Johnny Kilbane was pure magic — conjuring images of greatness and grit. Now, 50 years later, his statue sits proudly in Battery Park — a place of hope and promise in a neighborhood showing the heart of a champion.
[Photo: Dan Hanson, courtesy of ClevelandPeople.com]
Larry Durstin is an independent journalist who has covered politics and sports for a variety of publications and websites over the past 20 years. He was the founding editor of the Cleveland Tab and an associate editor at the Cleveland Free Times. Durstin has won 12 Ohio Excellence in Journalism awards, including six first places in six different writing categories. He is the author of the novel The Morning After John Lennon Was Shot. LarryDurstinATyahoo.com