Stand Guard

 

Cleveland's baseball team will officially stop being the Indians at the end of the 2021 season and become the Cleveland Guardians.   

This is great news for a myriad of reasons, front and foremost because it ends the use of native Americans as a baseball club name.  The team, which dropped Chief Wahoo years ago as a mascot has settled on a wonderful name - one that homage to the city and its skyline and traditions: The Guardians. 

So what is the relationship between the name and the architecture?  The Guardians of Traffic are four pylons - two on the Cleveland side and two on the west side of Cleveland, at each end of the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge, renamed the Hope Memorial Bridge.  Bob Hope's father helped carve the pylons, and Bob Hope grew up in Cleveland.

Each pylon has an art deco east-facing "guardian" and a west-facing "guardian".  Each holds a different means of transport - eight altogether.  Erected in 1932, the vehicles include pioneer wagons to automobiles and trucks.  At 43 feet tall above the roadbed, and 100 over the Cuyahoga valley below, they are among the largest pieces of public art in Cleveland.   The easternmost pylons are about 1,000 feet from Jacobs Field - which now goes by Progressive name, strangely enough, an automobile insurance company. 

The homage goes much further.  Cleveland has fought and struggled to maintain that which is our own.  People have stood guardian over our art museum, our beloved Browns, our ethnic communities, and our surrounding communities.  And we accept change but push back hard as hell when something of merit is threatened.  And we worked hard to reclaim the Cuyahoga River valley as our own after that last burning river incident 50 years ago, too.  (Cleveland also has the Guardian building.  Built-in the early 1920s it was the second-largest office building in the nation.  Still huge by anyone's imagination, it's slated to become condos, event space, and offices by 2025-27.)

The symbolism of the bridge is also deep and important. It was one of the new modern high-level bridges to link Cleveland east bank with the west, designed for automobile and truck traffic.  That may not seem like much, but the Cuyahoga river valley is a wide and deep gorge, and it splits the city into two distinct places - the west side and the east side. At one point, Cleveland was on the east bank, and Ohio City, its own municipality, was on the west.  While Cleveland assumed Ohio City, that gorge was still there.  So the bridge unified one with the other, just like our sports teams do.  And each side has four Guardians facing each direction with their winged helmets.

And if you have read this blog, you know how much Cookie loathes one Albert Porter, the Cuyahoga County Engineer who tried to ramrod the Clark Freeway into and through Shaker Heights, and how that plan thankfully failed when people pulled together to thwart that plan.  Well, Porter also wanted to remove the Guardians of Traffic for his own monument: a modern freeway style bridge in place of the Lorain Carnegie.  Cookie is hoping his remains (location unknown) are spinning in their grave, or in its urn, or whatever happened to it with this wonderful news. 

There is nothing worse than a sore loser, and plenty of people are bitching up a blue streak because they don't like "Guardians" as a team name.  (I, personally, would have preferred the Cleveland Kraken, but Seattle beat us to that in NHL Hockey this year.)   But I am embracing this change because it's as far away from the nonsensical team names like "Crush", "Krunch", and the "Power" - as one can get.  (A personal non-favorite of Cookies is any team named the Predators, which makes me think of child sexual deviants. Ick, right?)

Now there are plenty of people bitching and moaning about how "the team will always be blah, blah, blah," and "no one is going to take this Chief Wahoo* cap off my hat blah, blah, blah.   And buster, no one wants to. 

But I can guarantee you that once we make the playoffs because of great playing and the curse of Wahoo behind us, you'll stand "Guard" with the rest of us, too.

CBS NEWS and SPORTS articles on the symbolism of the change. 

*Totally Racist graphics at that, too.