Glenn Sobola has lived a lifetime in Slavic Village, but his knowledge of the neighborhood extends much further back.
“As an amateur historian, I find it very difficult to walk the neighborhood anywhere and see it with today’s eyes,” he said. “I see everything as it was, with my mind’s eye.”
Over the last month, Sobola, who heads the Slavic Village Historical Society, has shared his mind’s eye in a series of walking tours tracing the history of the neighborhood’s Polish community.
The free tours, which ran each Tuesday night in October, attracted more than 100 walkers. They are part of the Take a Hike program, which hosted more than 30 walking tours across Cleveland this year. Take a Hike, created by the Historic Gateway Neighborhood Corp., began with history tours downtown and expanded this year across Cleveland.
Throughout the Slavic Village tours, participants told Sobola about their childhoods in the neighborhood. Others shared the stories of parents and grandparents immigrating and building lives in a section of Slavic Village some called Little Warsaw, nicknamed after the capital of Poland.
Tight-knit community along East 65th Street
The way those memories stick hearkens back to how tight-knit the Polish community was during its heyday from about 1900 to 1930, Sobola said.
Immigrants who’d already gotten settled helped newcomers learn the language, find jobs at nearby steel mills and start their own businesses. Churches, taverns, banks, florists, butchers and funeral homes sprang up around East 65th Street. As Sobola guided walkers down the street, he pointed out homes with wide front windows. Many people built storefronts directly onto their homes, he said, so they could work where they lived.
In Sobola’s recounting, the community leaned on a handful of prominent residents who could navigate between Polish and American cultures in Cleveland. The Rev. A. F. Kolaszewski was one of those people.
Kolaszewski is behind a notable landmark of Little Warsaw: St. Stanislaus Church. Pastor of the church in the late 1800s, he oversaw its construction to replace the small wooden one. Even before the congregation had their own building to worship in, their gatherings in other nearby churches helped build community among Polish immigrants, Sobola said.
Slavic Village schism
Kolaszewski got the new St. Stanislaus building open in 1891 after spending $250,000, but the process earned him the ire of his boss, a bishop who oversaw the Catholic churches in Cleveland.
“He wasn’t really honest with the bishop as to the expenses involved,” Sobola said. “He was even more dishonest with how he raised some of the money to pay for St. Stanislaus Church.”
The bishop took issue with Kolaszewski selling people “passes” to skip the lines for confession during the busy Easter season, Sobola said. The bishop fired Kolaszewski from St. Stanislaus, moving him to a church in New York, but a group of loyal parishioners convinced him to come back a few years later.
Kolaszewski went rogue when the bishop refused to reinstate him at St. Stanislaus. He and his parishioners started a new church, the Immaculate Heart of Mary, fewer than 10 blocks down the street from St. Stanislaus in 1894. A month after the church opened, Catholic authorities in Rome officially kicked the Immaculate Heart of Mary out of the Catholic Church, forbidding its members from receiving sacraments.
Kolaszewski kept performing baptisms, weddings and funerals anyway. It stayed that way for 14 years, but when a fire broke out in the church in 1908, its members wondered if God was sending them an omen, Sobola said. The Catholic Church forgave them, and let them back in later that year.
To Sobola, the story speaks to the character of Cleveland’s early Polish community. It’s a story of “courage, pride, determination, independence and a little bit of stubbornness here and there,” he said.
Growing up in Cleveland’s ethnic communities
Longtime friends Terry Babuder, Evelyn Barber and Diane Price signed up for the tour in Slavic Village together, but it’s far from their first. They’ve been on more than a dozen Take a Hike tours in a handful of different neighborhoods, they said.
Babuder was born in a refugee camp in Italy as her parents fled Slovenia, their native country, after it was absorbed into communist Yugoslavia. They moved to Pittsburgh, then Cleveland a few years later. Babuder grew up in St. Clair-Superior, with St. Vitus Church as a cornerstone of her childhood, she said.
“My parents didn’t know the language,” she said. “They didn’t have anybody to help them.”
Now, Babuder is curious about other Cleveland ethnic communities reminiscent of the one she grew up in.
“For Mother’s Day, I asked my husband to take me to church at one of these beautiful churches, so we went to St. Stanislaus,” she said.
Spotlighting pockets of cultural history in Cleveland
Babuder is in good company, as the Take a Hike program had more than 6,000 people join its tours this year, said Eileen Cassidy, the executive director of the Historic Gateway Neighborhood Corp. That number includes those who took multiple tours, she said.
About 90% of the participants this year have been Cleveland residents, Cassidy said.
“They are Clevelanders more deeply discovering Cleveland,” she said.
The Slavic Village Polish heritage tour was part of a new series from Take a Hike that focused more narrowly on pockets of cultural history. The program more than doubled the number of tours it offered last year by diving into the histories of Cleveland’s Slovenian, Italian, Ukrainian, Asian and other communities. These cultural heritage tours bring walkers into places like churches and museums, and some of them feature food tastings, sometimes for a cost.
“A good number of the attendees are kind of searching for their story because they might have heritage rooted in that tour’s theme,” Cassidy said. “The additional experience that we’re really pleased with is learning about other cultures, other heritages, that make up Cleveland.”
