Home of Cleveland icon Jesse Owens headed for landmark designation

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CLEVELAND, Ohio – Cleveland is moving forward with a landmark designation for the East 100th Street home of Olympic Gold medalist Jesse Owens.

City Council is considering legislation in the coming weeks that will advance the nomination already approved by the Cleveland Landmarks Commission late last year.

The Black Cleveland icon clinched four Gold medals in track and field at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, humiliating Adolf Hitler on the world stage, and dispelling his theories of white supremacy.

The house at 2178 East 100th Street was the place 22-year-old Owens called home during his Olympic run. It’s located next to the present-day Cleveland Clinic campus, just south of Cedar Avenue in the Fairfax neighborhood.

Owens and his family lived in several locations in Cleveland, mostly in the Central neighborhood, after they moved here in 1922. They moved to the East 100th Street home in 1934, and it was during his time at this house where Owens achieved some of the most impressive feats of his athletic career, Cleveland Restoration Society’s Margaret Lann told members of the Landmarks Commission in December.

When they moved in, Owens was fresh off his high school years, and his 1933 world-setting record for the 220-yard dash at the National Championship in Chicago. In 1935, after they’d moved to the East 100th Street home, Owens won international recognition for setting three more world records during the Big Ten Championship in Ann Arbor, which made him a favorite for the 1936 Olympic games, Lann said.

Also in 1935, Owens married his long-time girlfriend, Minnie Ruth Solomon, and moved her into the family home.

The next year, when Owens traveled to Germany for the games, his family stayed behind in the home, where they did several press interviews about their youngest son’s accomplishments. Owens returned to the home after the Olympics, but soon moved to Detroit and on to Chicago after he struggled to obtain a job in Cleveland during the Depression era, Lann said.

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