Coming January 2027 from The History Press
This book tells the complicated story of one Cleveland neighborhood that, in many ways, reflects the history of the entire city.
It was a place of remarkable contradictions. Millionaires’ Row stood only blocks from crowded tenements, gambling houses, brothels, and speakeasies. During Prohibition, vice and corruption helped earn the neighborhood a nickname that stuck: the “Roaring Third.” Eliot Ness battled its underworld, while the nearby ravines became forever associated with the still-unsolved Kingsbury Run murders.
But the Roaring Third was never simply a neighborhood of crime and vice.
It was home. Generations of immigrants built lives there, followed by Black families arriving during the Great Migration, who built communities and political power even as many faced discrimination and were confined to increasingly overcrowded and deteriorating housing.
Freeways eventually cut through its streets. Urban renewal erased entire blocks. Disinvestment took its toll. Yet people and institutions endured.
That is the story I wanted to tell—not just what happened in the Roaring Third, but what it was like to call it home.