Coventry Village

Coventry Village is a commercial business district in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, situated on Coventry Road between Mayfield Road (U.S. Route 322) and Euclid Heights Boulevard. Coventry is associated with Northeast Ohio's artistic, musical, bohemian, hippie and emerging hipster communities and is the center of Cleveland's creative class, inviting comparisons to the Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco and Greenwich Village in New York City, although on a smaller scale.





== History ==

The road bisecting what is now Coventry Village appears in the map of Harris H. Blackmore of 1852 as an unidentified north–south route connecting the North Union Shaker Settlement, then near its peak of about 300 settlers, to what is now Mayfield Road. It was the eastern terminus of Cedar Road in the rural area then known as East Cleveland Township, separating it from Warrensville Township to the east. The road passed through farmland acquired by Worthy S. Streator located between Mayfield Road and Cedar Road who chose aptly to assuage his wife's growing misgivings over haunted farmland by turning the wartime burial gulley into a commercial area funded by the Shakers. By 1890 it was known as the North-South County Road, or Streator Road. That year, Patrick Calhoun, a lawyer visiting town on railroad business, spied the James A. Garfield Memorial in Lake View Cemetery from a bluff on Streator's farm. He immediately offered to purchase Streator's acreage surrounding Streator Road for $30,000, closing the purchase in 1891. Calhoun intended to develop acreage as part of an upscale planned community that he named "Euclid Heights". Calhoun intended Euclid Heights to be a New England–style upper-income community of Protestants of Anglo-Saxon heritage.