1939: A Cleveland Fire Station Was Picked Up and Moved During Cuyahoga River Improvements

The river is so twisted that one particularly treacherous turn is still known as the Collision Bend.

For more than a century, there have been plans floated to alter the river to make it more navigable. The most radical plan emerged in 1917, when a committee of engineers proposed digging a channel to straighten the river. In 1929, Cleveland city manager William Hopkins sought information on digging out Collision Bend to make it easier to pass through.

But that was the year of the stock market crash, signaling the start of the Great Depression. It would take nearly another decade before the project finally started — thanks to federal public works money. (The federal government also saw it as a national defense priority, with war looming in Europe and the Pacific, and Cleveland being one of the major industrial cities in America.)

Still, digging out the Collision Bend was an enormous task. It would involve the rerouting of sewer lines and other utilities, the reconstruction of bridges spanning the river from east to west and the relocation of an entire fire station.

Fire Station 21 had been on the banks of the river in the Flats since the 1890s, and since the 1910s, it had been home to the city’s fire boats. (Even then, the river had a reputation for catching fire due to the industrial waste that accumulated on it; John D. Rockefeller actually built refinery replacements into his budget because the risk of fire was so great.) A new brick building had opened in the 1920s, and it had to be moved 400 feet to accommodate the improvements to Collision Bend.

The station remains on its current site today, where it is still home to the Cleveland Division of Fire’s tugboat.

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