Crawford-Tilden Apartments

Built in 1908, this low-rise apartment building occupies a triangular lot where Crawford Road meets East 84th Street in Cleveland. Its V-shaped plan wraps an internal light court, and its undulating yellow brick walls carry shallow bay windows topped by stepped, pinnacled parapet projections. Stone lintels, keystones and a continuous watertable tie the bays together. At the end bay, a stone plaque shaped like a Dutch gable carries the building name, above a pediment on Ionic columns that frames a wrought-iron balcony. The building holds twenty suites, and its interior detail remains largely intact despite poor maintenance. Burt Corning designed it, and Albert Dudley built it. Corning specialized in apartment buildings and was described as the first in the city to build apartment houses with private porches. The nomination values the building as an architectural prototype of the Progressive period, as possibly Corning's finest work, and as a forerunner of the suburban garden apartment.