The Cleveland Union Terminal Collection
Terminal Tower - from Public Square, 1927.
Higbees Building - north from Prospect Avenue, 1931.
Cuyahoga Viaduct Pier No. 17, 1926.
Rosenberg etching - Terminal from West Third Street Bridge, July 1929.
The Cleveland Union Terminal Collection is the archives of the company that built the Terminal Tower, the union passenger station, the complex of office buildings, post office, department store and the infrastructure of tracks, bridges, signals, electrical catenary structures and yard facility buildings necessary to switch passenger coaches over from steam to electric and bring them in to the downtown area. This was a massive urban redevelopment project that foreshadowed the Rockefeller Center, in New York; gave Cleveland the third-tallest building in the world in 1930; and forever changed the face of Public Square and wide swaths of adjoining neighborhoods.
The physical collection is comprised of 300 linear feet of files, 500 archival drawings, 800 photographs dealing with all aspects of the conception and building of the Cleveland Union Terminal complex. Located in Special Collections at the Michael Schwartz Library, Cleveland State University, it contains early records, office records, blueprints, drawings and plans, bids, specifications and legal documents.
The Cleveland Union Terminal Online
Digitized portions of the CUT Collection are available online at the links listed below:
- Cleveland Union Terminal Construction Photographs, 1926-1929
- Cleveland Union Terminal Construction Film, 1928
- Cleveland Union Station - a souvenir dedication book, 1930
- Cleveland Union Terminal Etchings - by Louis Conrad Rosenberg
- Models of the Terminal Tower
- Cleveland & Youngstown Railroad Panoramas, Then and Now
Other Links of Interest:
- "Cleveland's Terminal Tower: The Forest City Acquires a Metropolitan Image" by Walter Leedy (PDF)
- "Cleveland's Terminal Tower - The Van Sweringens' Afterthought" Gamut article by Walter C. Leedy, Jr. (PDF)
- C.U.T Photos in from the Fred Harvey Collection Exhibit
- Dirty Little Secrets: Foundations From the Past - A video documenting research by a team local geologists, paleontologists and glaciologists on core samples taken from the CUT construction site and vicinity in the early 1920s. Read more about this video.
About the Donors
The Cleveland Union Terminal Collection was the gift of Mr. Gerald Adams, a life-long local railroad history enthusiast and collector who acquired the material in the early 1970s and through the efforts of Dr. Walter Leedy, donated it to Cleveland State University years later. Mr. Adams passed away in 2001, after several more substantial donations and many years of friendship.
In 1998, Mr. Robert Linsey very generously donated some 8,000 photographic images of the C.U.T. construction. The material had once been part of the C.U.T. archive before Mr. Adams purchased his portion.
These two gifts have reunited the major pieces of the historic Cleveland Union Terminal archives.
