Clarification:
The number of people attending the visioning workshop was updated.
Alice Christie, the program chair for Progress Through Preservation, remembers a time in elementary school at St. Vincent de Paul Parish School, in the 1950s, when she and her classmates would travel down the Glendale Steps on their way downtown for field trips.
Today, the 242 sandstone steps descending from the top of the hill at South Walnut Street to Glendale Avenue are crumbling and lead to an empty parking lot space that was originally intended for a park.
The City of Akron was supposed to develop a park called Glendale Park, Christie said, and the steps were to be a connector for folks in the West Hill neighborhood to have easy access to the park.
“As it was envisioned, it was going to be a beautiful downtown park,” Christie said. “And actually would have been much larger than it appears now because some of the land that would have been the park was taken over by the Innerbelt.”
The brainchild of Gertrude Seiberling, who was married to Goodyear co-founder F.A. Seiberling, the Glendale Steps were designed by Warren Manning and built in partnership with laborers from the federal Works Progress Administration (WPA).
Work began during the Great Depression in the mid-1930s and the steps opened to the public in 1938. They cost $22,000 to construct – the stones were dressed on site and hand-laid by the workers.
Manning was a premier landscape architect of the time, Christie said. He designed Stan Hywet’s gardens and grounds, as well as the layout of the landscape and streets in Goodyear Heights and Fairlawn Heights. Leaning into the shape of the land, Manning used a zig-zag design for the steps due to the 200-foot slope of the hill, leaving space for plants and gardens.
During the time of the steps’ inception, Gertrude was the president of the Akron Garden Club, which took the project on as its first.
Restoring with residents
The Glendale Steps have an architectural history that local preservationists and neighbors want to see celebrated, preserved and brought back to life. Earlier this month, neighbors came together at St. Vincent de Paul School for a visioning workshop hosted by PTP, which advocates for historic buildings and places in Akron and Summit County.
Nearly 80 people filled the school cafeteria, eager to learn more about and actively participate in deciding the future of the steps. PTP is working with MKSK, an urban design firm, to engage with and hear feedback from the community about how it wants to see the steps and park utilized. Walking paths, picnic areas, a community garden, a playground – and even a zipline – are just a few of the ideas that neighbors said they’d like to see brought to life in the park space.
The National Register of Historic Places added the Glendale Steps to its prestigious list in September 2023. The steps were eligible because of their association with the WPA, the New Deal and the Great Depression, as well as for the architectural significance of Manning’s Romanesque Revival style, said Courtney Zimmerman, treasurer for PTP.
As a member of the group that put the National Register nomination together, Zimmerman said the designation was important to helping get the steps restored.
“What we don’t want to happen is for us to put a bunch of time and money into these steps for them to remain sitting there,” Zimmerman said.
Next steps for the steps
The next steps for the project, as outlined in a PTP presentation from January, are to:
- Gain licensing approval from the City of Akron to preserve the steps (which is in progress, according to the presentation)
- Hold community engagement sessions with MKSK to help envision the Glendale Steps and park (like the session held in February)
- Establish high-level documentation on construction and budget
- Fundraise
- Begin construction of the steps and park
Danny Durst, who has lived in the West Hill neighborhood for 15 years and is a past board member of the West Hill Neighborhood Organization, came to the visioning workshop to see what is being done. He said it’s important to him that a plan come together and the investment be made into the Glendale Steps and Glendale park because “otherwise this is just an act of futility.”
“I believe that it was put together as a resource of the community, in part; it’s not a standalone thing,” Durst said. “I think Glendale park – where they stated here that that is something that they’re concerned about developing – that this was a park vision that the steps were a part of, and right now they’re just steps to nowhere.”