DUCK ISLAND
Duck Island was not an island, and it had nothing to do with ducks, which is a good way to begin understanding Cleveland.
There was no water around it. There were hills, railroad cuts, bridges, factories, dead-end streets and the Cuyahoga Valley falling away beneath it. For much of its life, that was close enough.
The old neighborhood story says the name came out of Prohibition, when bootleggers and other people with reasons not to meet the police could duck into the little streets or disappear down the hills toward the Flats. Whether that is precisely how it happened hardly matters anymore. It sounds like the place.
Before there were bootleggers, there were workers — of every stripe and color. Eastern Europe was heavily represented, especially Hungarians and Slovaks, but name almost any country in Europe and somebody from there probably found his way to Cleveland and a job around the mills.
They lived in small frame houses and brick cottages crowded onto the bluff and went down every morning into the Flats to work in the mills, factories, lumber yards, railroad operations and docks. The houses were not architecture. They were places to eat, sleep, raise children and get up tomorrow morning and do it again.
One piece of that immigrant neighborhood is still there. St. Wendelin was founded by Slovaks in 1903. It was caught in the Catholic church closings announced in 2009 and shut in 2010, but the parishioners appealed and won. The church reopened in 2012 and remains alive, still carrying its Slovak identity into a Duck Island where that kind of ethnic continuity has become rare.
Then Cleveland started building around everybody.
The original Abbey Avenue viaduct crossed Walworth Run in the nineteenth century. A new concrete deck went on in 1930, and for generations the bridge provided one of Duck Island’s essential connections to Tremont, a much larger working-class neighborhood surrounded by steel mills then much as it still is today — except Tremont, too, has been completely gentrified.
At the same time, the great railroad cut of the 1920s carved along Duck Island’s western edge for trains serving Union Terminal.
By the early 1980s the Abbey bridge had deteriorated so badly that it was closed and dismantled. For years the connection was gone. A replacement finally returned in the early 1990s, bringing traffic back into Duck Island just as the neighborhood was beginning another transformation.
Duck Island never needed water to make it an island. Infrastructure did the job. For decades it sat there in between things — not quite Tremont, not quite Ohio City, close to downtown but somehow hidden from it. When Cleveland industry began shrinking, Duck Island went down with it. People left, houses disappeared, vacant lots opened up and roofs sagged. Some cottages survived down little interior drives where you could pass twenty times without knowing anybody had ever lived there.
In 2006, there were still little worker cottages on Eureka Street at West 19th and the remains of an alley that had once been lined with garages. The wood had gone gray. The street was quiet. From certain angles you could have been standing in a forgotten mill town fifty miles from Cleveland instead of several minutes from downtown.
That was the Duck Island worth walking.
You could turn a corner and find a worker’s cottage, the remains of an old alley, the Hope Memorial Bridge hanging above you and the whole industrial valley suddenly opening beneath your feet.
Then follow the valley around.
Below the bluff stood one of Cleveland’s great fastener works. Upson Nut became Republic Steel’s Bolt & Nut Division in 1930. Republic sold the operation to Federal Steel and Wire in 1973. Much of the sprawling complex was eventually abandoned, and after a 1990 fire the remains were torn down.
A little farther around stood Ferry Cap & Set Screw. The company began making fasteners there in 1907 and stayed for a century. Operations moved out in 2007–08. The old factory hung around considerably longer than the jobs and was finally demolished in 2024.
Keep circling and another piece of Cleveland is still alive.
At 1730 Train Avenue sits Werner G. Smith, a small specialty-oils plant surrounded by tanks, pipes and old industrial buildings. It has operated there since about 1950, processing vegetable and fish oils into lubricants, waxes, esters and other industrial products.
It is not an old petroleum refinery in the usual sense anymore, but it occupies remarkable ground.
Train Avenue follows roughly the course of Walworth Run, the creek valley that became one of Cleveland’s first great oil districts. During the nineteenth century, Walworth Run and nearby Kingsbury Run held scores of refineries and oil works. Rockefeller and Standard Oil gradually swallowed much of that business, consolidated it and shut much of it down.
Very near the present Werner G. Smith plant, Standard Oil operated paraffin and wax works. Farther along Train Avenue stood James Corrigan’s Excelsior Oil Works, later sold to Standard Oil.
The creek itself eventually disappeared. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Cleveland put Walworth Run into a sewer, filled portions of the valley and built over it. The water went underground. The industry stayed. And there is one marvelous final echo down there: storage tanks at the Werner G. Smith property once reportedly held some of the last legally imported whale oil in the United States.
So from Duck Island you can stand on the bluff and look down at oil tanks on ground where Rockefeller’s refineries once lined a creek that Cleveland buried.
Then turn around. The city behind you has changed again. It ain’t soot-covered anymore. In fact, it’s downright gentrified, and the Terminal Tower now has many contemporary acquaintances all around it.
Duck Island did not become desirable because it was isolated. It became desirable because it wasn’t anymore. Downtown was minutes away. So was the West Side Market, itself being “rediscovered.” But the real sign was simpler: Duck Island had made the real-estate map and the real-estate news.
That meant it had arrived for slaughter — I mean, redevelopment.
The mills, bridges, tracks and smokestacks that generations of workers had looked at because they happened to live there were repackaged as the view.
Steel and glass houses began appearing beside the surviving cottages.
One of them on West 17th Street came with a swimming pool and lounge on the roof, secure parking underneath and a view toward the Guardians of Transportation. It sold for around $1.38 million.
There may be no cleaner history of Duck Island than that.
A century ago, a man climbed out of the valley after ten hours at a mill, railroad yard or dock and went home worrying about whether the roof leaked.
Today somebody can swim on one.
The people who had been there all along never thought of the view as an asset. What mattered was that they could walk to work, church, the stores and the bars. A few are still there.
Although most of the old-growth trees are gone — further proof that, for generations, nobody gave a shit about the view — what remains of it is now blocked by extremely modern homes and one very large condo, there since the 1990s, that took away most of it.
Speaking of roofs, one of the many things that came with gentrification was the property-tax bill. People who had grown up there, sometimes for generations, suddenly watched theirs go through the roof.
And that produced the biggest change in the neighborhood since it came into being: those who could, and those who could not, afford the place, let alone the view.