Chapter 33
Bratenahl has always been home to fighters.
At the turn of the twentieth century, when Cleveland was sinking into a pit of urbanization, this little strip of land fought to become its own separate village.
Then for decades, Bratenahl fought to keep its school system separate—there’s that word again—from the schools of the rest of the Cleveland masses.
Then came civil war over those two ugly apartment blocks, and of course these days there are the brawls about beach access, all that snarling over property deeds and natural shorelines.
It’s a positive trait, I think: conflict like this keeps the mind sharp, when it otherwise might be pickled in privilege.
Once in a blue moon, though, an adversary comes along that’s completely out of your league. A bomb gets dropped that you never saw coming; resistance is futile. This has happened in Bratenahl before too.
But where to keep this snazzy surface-to-air defense system?
Nike had to be somewhere close to the target city, but somewhere separate too, somewhere discreet where no one would think to look for fifty thousand pounds of metal casing and rocket fuel .
. . did such a place still exist in Cleveland at that time?
It did! We know it did! And once Uncle Sam set his sights on this particularly strategic stretch of Erie’s southern coast, he didn’t give two shits who lived there, or how rich they were. The battle for the western end of Bratenahl was literally nuclear, and it was over before it began.
Boom! The thirty-four-room Tudor manor house at 8907 Lakeshore Boulevard, built in 1899, was razed to the ground by the US military.
Blam! They took out 9913 Lakeshore the same year. That place was practically indestructible, they say. The army had to set fire to it—twice!—to finish the demolition.
Ka-bang! Down came “Orchards” at 489 East Eighty-Eighth. That was a hell of a house too, by all accounts, with a ninety-foot tower and views all the way to Canada.
Into this freshly cleared acreage, an entire military base was thrust upon Bratenahl’s shell-shocked citizenry, complete with twenty missiles in underground storage, a launching area, and barracks for over a hundred military personnel. There was a mess hall too, and admin blocks and outbuildings.
You have to admire the ruthlessness of Uncle Sam here, this ability to plow through the bullshit and take what was needed.
Pretty quickly, though, the whole Nike enterprise came to not much: by the 1970s the panic was over, and the site was decommissioned and disassembled.
Some of the smaller buildings, however, are still standing today.
(And some aren’t, but you knew that already.)