Snake Charmer's Cobra Found Slithering Along Detroit Avenue

Ivy, 7, from Lakewood, dressed as a cat during last year's West Clinton Historic Haunts Walking Tour in the Gordon Square Arts District.

Kids love Halloween. Ivy, 7, from Lakewood, is no exception. Last year, she and her family attended the West Clinton Historic Haunts Walking Tour in the Gordon Square Arts District and had tons of fun. “I was a cat,” Ivy said.

The 2011 West Clinton Historic Haunts Walking Tour will be Friday, October 7 and Saturday, October 8, from 6:00 to 8:45 p.m. Beginning at Parish Hall (6205 Detroit Avenue), the walking tour, led by lantern-carrying guides, will visit neighborhood porches where guests will meet noteworthy and disreputable former residents and hear tales of romance, death and pandemonium. Tours depart from Parish Hall every 15 minutes and last approximately one hour. This family-friendly event is free for children under 15. Adult admission is $5. Free parking is available next to, and across the street from, Parish Hall.

Live entertainment will be performed at Parish Hall during registration and light refreshments will be served at the end of each tour in the Gordon Square Arcade. Historic Haunts partner, Capitol Theatre, will air a special midnight showing on Saturday of the original 1922 silent horror film Nosferatu, an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Admission to the film will be $5; free small drinks will be offered with a popcorn purchase and an Historic Haunts stub.

Tour Overview

While witches and goblins play among tombstones erected on the corner of 65th and West Clinton streets, residents of the Detroit Shoreway will host a night of theatrical history for visitors from Lakewood and throughout metropolitan Cleveland. Top hat-wearing, witty and sometimes irreverent guides will lead groups from one area porch to another where actors from the Near West Community Theater will bring local heroes, heroines, good and bad guys to life by performing skits written by neighborhood playwrights. This year, actors will portray characters whose quirks range from saintly to bizarre: 

* Even Andrew Carnegie came under the spell of Cassie Chadwick, Franklin Avenue’s champion of etiquette and deportment, who became one of the most infamous con artists of all time.

* Dolly Bond, a female artist in the early 1900s, created religious paintings in Saint Coleman Church that  propelled her from sin to redemption.

* Patrons who saddled up to Detroit Avenue’s bygone Yankee Bar were treated to murder, mayhem and stars like Queenie, the 350-pound snake charmer, and her cobra, Satan.

* Featherweight champion in 1912, Johnny Kilbane ruled ringside for 11 years, the longest stretch in history. Brawler, poet and statesman, Kilbane also served in the Ohio House and Senate.

* The notoriously vicious McCart Gang is expected to stalk the streets of Gordon Square, terrorizing the neighborhood, repeating the crimes they perpetuated in the late 1800s. Everyone is cautioned: beware!

* Few facts are known, but Marion Roberts did take her own life. Was she driven to madness by her spendthrift husband? Only the wizened spirits visiting Detroit Shoreway’s Franklin Avenue know the truth.

* Velma West wasn’t much of a wife: cooking and cleaning weren’t for her. She wanted to be a flapper: parties, drinking, dancing and fur coats, even if they meant murdering her husband!

Find out more about Historic Haunts by searching for West Clinton Historic Haunts at facebook or google.com.

Read More on Foodwoodİ
Volume 7, Issue 20, Posted 9:51 AM, 10.05.2011