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Cudell Neighborhood

The growing and diverse Cudell neighborhood centers around the Cudell Recreation Center, where residents exercise and swim, and the Cudell Fine Arts Center, the City’s only free center for all-ages creativity. Cudell’s productive Madison Avenue includes small business, makers, and urban farmers. The historic West Boulevard, with its impressive houses, curves northward to the neighborhood’s Red Line station on Detroit Avenue, where neighbors catch the train to the airport, Downtown, or the east side. While this busy intersection is orbited by large apartment buildings, most of Cudell’s long blocks are rowed with one- and two-family homes.

Cudell has long been a working class community, since the early 20th century when residents were employed at the many industries around the rail lines that crisscrossed the neighborhood. The West Technical High School was Ohio’s largest school building when it opened in 1912, and it now lives on as a residential community. Construction of Interstate 90 in the 1960s separated the Lorain Avenue commercial area from the bulk of the neighborhood to the north, and that barrier persists to this day.

Cudell is named after prominent architect Frank E. Cudell, a German immigrant who had inherited a large estate from his father-in-law. Cudell bequeathed the estate, now Cudell Commons, to the City in 1916, and the tower that stands there today is a memorial to him from his wife. A second memorial is on the Commons — the Rice Butterfly Memorial Garden, dedicated by the Tamir Rice Foundation in memory of Tamir's life and the sacrifices of his sister, Tajai, and their families.

The Cudell neighborhood logo (above) is the result of a collaborative project by residents and Northwest Neighborhoods. The script and colorful outlines represent Cudell’s unpretentious and accepting community, full of diversity of backgrounds and lifestyles. The butterfly icon represents the spirit of Tamir and our community’s ongoing movement for justice, which have rewritten the future of our neighborhood.