Ever since 1894, Clevelanders who’ve been to Public Square have witnessed the tall, powerful Soldiers' and Sailors’ Monument — the 125-foot column, surrounded by bronze statues depicting scenes of fighters in battle.
Step inside, and you’ll also see the more than 9,000 names of Cuyahoga County residents who fought in the American Civil War neatly listed on the four walls of the memorial’s interior room, along with various artifacts and a set of four bronze relief sculptures of the local and national heroes who helped end slavery in the country. A bust of the monument’s architect and artist, Levi Scofield, resides above the south side door.
There’s a lot to explore here — and even more to discover in the tunnel system that winds underneath the 130-year-old building.
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Greg Palumbo, the executive director of the monument, has the twists and turns in the cool stone basement memorized. He estimates that he’s led around 500 tunnel tours since he started working at the monument in 2020. But before he led those tours, he had quite an initiation, spending much of the 2020 pandemic cleaning up over a century’s worth of sand, dust and storage materials from the tunnels.
“We cleaned the entire thing out,” Palumbo says, “so I got to know the tunnels really, really well.”
He also rethought the organization’s annual tunnel tours, sharing small details like salt efflorescence dripping down old brick in small white stalactites — or an original metal ladder, leaning against a stone wall with a rusty blotch beneath — or the numbers that workers painted on the backs of an exterior staircase to keep stone blocks in order, more than a century ago.
Some Clevelanders will be able to experience those tours in the spring of each year.
The key word is “some.” Tickets sold out for the 2024 experience in less than 30 minutes, and Palumbo says they would’ve sold out faster had there not been technical difficulties with the organization’s website. (However, those interested in experiencing the tunnels could also opt for a standby option each day.)
Clevelanders are curious about what lurks beneath Public Square, and demand is high. Palumbo recalled one year’s tunnel tours, before the ticketing system, where thousands of visitors lined up for first-come, first-served time slots — and some of them wound up waiting more than six hours, queued on Public Square.
Despite that, Palumbo says the organization isn' table to offer more tours. For one, they’re a lot of work, taxing the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument’s limited staffing and volunteer teams. But a bigger roadblock is that the space isn’t entirely weather-proofed, getting too cold in the winter and too hot in the summer to comfortably host groups for more than a select period.
At one point, the monument hosted a fall tunnel tour, themed around ghost stories.
“That worked out okay for a little while, but it really became disrespectful to the men on the walls upstairs,” Palumbo says. “We want to make sure we’re honoring the men that not only are on the walls upstairs but the ones that built this building as well. So we decided that fall was probably not the best fit.”
Those many workers created not only the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument, but also other beloved landmarks in Downtown Cleveland, says Palumbo.
“The building of this monument is really the building of Cleveland,” Palumbo says. “The people that built this building also built the Arcade, also built the Guardians [of Traffic]. They also built the bridges, the Terminal Tower, everything else. So this is the story of those people, and I think that’s what people want to connect to. There’s this Cleveland pride to it.”
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Beyond the tunnel tours, the Soliders’ and Sailors’ Monument also typically hosts a slate of other events throughout the year, including ceremonies around Veterans Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day and Juneteenth. Find more details at soldiersandsailors.com.
See more photos of the tunnels and the monument:
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