By Ed Staskus

   By the time Dave Bloomquist set foot on Prospect Ave. the street had been there for more than a century. It is one block south of Euclid Ave. Between 1870 and 1930 Cleveland’s Euclid Ave. was known as Millionaire’s Row. Nearly 250 houses ran along its four miles. Some of the mansions were as big as 50,000 square feet on lots of six acres. One of them owned by Sam Andrews employed one hundred servants to make sure the mansion made it through the day.

   On Sundays everybody paraded to church dressed in their best. At the time Euclid Ave. was called “The Most Beautiful Street in America.” High-spirited sleigh races in winter attracted thousands, lining the thirty blocks between East 9th and East 40th Streets to watch. In the spring children busted out to the many small parks within running distance.

   Prospect Ave. was a second cousin to Euclid Ave., but the cousin was well-to-do in its own right. It housed the upper middle class, lawyers, doctors, and businessmen. Rowhouses were built between 1874 and 1879 near East 36th Street in Gothic Revival, Italianate, and Second Empire styles. A grand house was built in 1883 for Sarah Benedict, the widow of Cleveland Herald publisher George Benedict. The five-story Plaza Apartments, acquired by Dave Bloomquist in 1973, was built in 1901.

   Dave grew up in Sandusky, in northern Ohio on the south shore of Lake Erie, midway between Toledo and Cleveland. Back in the day the native Wyandots called his hometown Soundustee. It means cold water. Today Sandusky is known for the Cedar Point amusement park and its many roller coasters.

   “I was recruited my senior year in high school by Findlay University on a basketball scholarship, but was disciplined and dismissed after the winter semester of 1968,” he said. He quickly pulled up his dorm room stakes and went to Colorado. “I was avoiding arrest on a possession and sales charge but was eventually picked up and extradited back to Ohio. When I got out on bond I petitioned for probationary enrollment to Cleveland’s Tri-C community college.”

   It was one of the only higher education schools of any kind in Ohio that offered that kind of re-entry opportunity. Keeping his nose clean and finishing with a 3.5 GPA he was able to transfer to Cleveland State University. In the meantime, in between classes, he needed a job. When the Auditorium Hotel posted a stock boy position on the community college’s job board, he went downtown.

   “The manager’s assistant assumed I was there for another posting, for night auditor, since I showed up in a jacket and tie. I fabricated math and accounting skills on the spot.” He was hired on the spot.

   The 10-story hotel built in 1927 was on the corner of East 6^th Street and St. Clair Ave. There were 420 rooms. It was close to everything because everything was close-by. “Most of the rooms stayed mostly empty, except when the Metropolitan Opera came to town,” Dave said. “That’s when my limited skills with the NCR auditing machine and the Lilly Tomlin-style switchboard became obvious. The three manual elevators were operated by retired prostitutes. The second shift bell captain was a city supervisor during the day, but at night became the procurer for all the shady desires of the guests. The hotel had off-duty policemen moonlighting as security. They were good at raiding the restaurant refrigerators for steaks and regaling me with crook stories.”

   He was the last night auditor at the Auditorium. Six months after he started the hotel closed. Soon after that it was demolished. Married and with an infant son, Dave dropped out of school for a quarter to work full-time. When he went back to Tri-C, he worked as a student assistant in the Art Department and the night shift at a local psychiatric hospital. When he moved on to Cleveland State University, he found work in their Art Department and became director of the university’s daycare, as well.

   The psychiatric hospital hadn’t driven him crazy. Infant crying and irritability at the daycare didn’t tip the scales, either. When he became the janitor at the Plaza, it tested him. The work can be messy and the mess is always back the next day. It can drive a good man crazy. Janitors work odd hours and are prone to a high risk of trips, slips, falls, repetitive motion misery, and musculoskeletal injuries caused by overexertion. More than 46,000 janitors suffer work-related mishaps every year requiring time off, according to the National Safety Council.  

   “Ruby and David, the janitors at the Plaza, had moved out and Betty Basil, the manager, offered me the job. I had to sweep the halls, shovel the snow, cut the grass, and empty the three big trash barrels. I was also paid $50 for every room that I painted. Overall, most things were dutifully taken care of. It just took patience.” When you have the patience to do simple things well you get the hang of doing the dirty work.

   Keeping the grounds and premises clean gave him a window into the workings of the Plaza. When he met Allen Ravenstine, he knew as much about the building as anybody. Allen was mulling over what to with the inheritance he had secured after both his parents died in an accident. He had since abandoned college life and was re-inventing himself as a musician.

   “It started the day Bob Bensick moved into the suite below me in a house in Lakewood,” Allen said. “Bob used to take these fuzztones and rewire them so they were oscillators. He had these little black boxes and he played them for me. They made neat noises. I had tried to be a guitar player but I hated all that crap of putting up with bloody fingertips until they got calluses. But I liked the idea of playing music. So, I fooled around with Bob’s black boxes. After a while there were three or four of them. One day Bob said, ‘Hey, you know when you get a whole bunch of these little black boxes in one big box, they call it a synthesizer.’”

   Music wasn’t the only thing Allen was engaged with. “He was keen on being more personally engaged with his recent windfall,” Dave said. “He was concerned that his investments were helping IBM and other blue-chip corporations that were supporting a government and a war.”

   The Vietnam War had gone fire and brimstone. The ten-day Christmas Bombing of 1972, targeting Hanoi and Haiphong, was accomplished by B-52 Stratofortress’s. They were the biggest strikes launched by the United States Air Force since the end of World War Two. During the Asian war more tonnage was dropped on Vietnam than all the tonnage dropped on everybody everywhere during World War Two. Other than blowing up lots of earthlings and infrastructure it didn’t get anything done to end the hostilities. 

   After all the blood spilled, and the countryside a wreck, 1973 dawned with a new peace agreement. It was repeatedly violated by both sides as the struggle for power and control continued. Nobody figured that by the end of the year there would hardly be any American combat forces left in the country. When that happened, it was just a matter of time before Charlie won the war.

   Dave and Allen brainstormed all that winter. “With the help of some wine and some smoke, Allen and I discussed a wide variety of investments. We talked about publishing and selling stories and poetry like City Lights, opening an art gallery, or getting an experimental music venue in the works. But as these interests were unlikely to go beyond a hobby that drained Allen’s resources, which were meant to sustain him into full adulthood, and some kind of career, one by one they were tabled.”

   After more talk and more ideas tabled as no good, Dave floated the notion of buying the Plaza and using the revenue from it to support their art enterprises.  At the time it was owned by the family who also owned Blonder Paints at East 39^th St. and Prospect Ave. Blonder Paints went back to 1918 when a cigarmaker and a paperhanger teamed up and got it off the ground. They sold paint, varnish, and paperhanging supplies, both wholesale and retail. By the 1950s it was the country’s 6th largest wholesaler of wallpaper. 

   “We learned the family might be open to a purchase offer, so we got started,” Dave said. “It was the days of red lining and white flight. We had difficulty finding an appraiser who would even look at the building. Of course, no banks would talk to us.” A white shirt and tie didn’t obscure his Grateful Dead full beard and shoulder-length hair.

   Working with an inner city realtor and appraiser with an office on Cedar Ave., they got a number on which to base an offer. “Everett Pruitt helped us draft a land contract that was reviewed by Allen’s attorney and his older brother, who both thought we were nuts. We then manned up, dressed up, and made an offer. After a little back and forth we struck a deal. We got the Plaza, the Victorian house next door, and the parking lot for $62,500.  I put in every penny my wife Ann and I had, which was $1,000, and Allen contributed the remaining amount, which was $9,000. The balance was amortized over 15 years. We formed Corona Unlimited, a partnership agreement based on a handshake and a toast.”

   They paid themselves $75.00 a week and lived rent-free. When a six-room front apartment on the top floor came open, Dave, Ann, and their son moved into it from their small second floor rooms. It didn’t pay to have a bad memory at the Plaza and have to go up and down the stairs all the time for something you forgot, although that was how the family got their exercise.

   “Mike Roccini had been living in that suite,” Dave said. “He was a writer, some magazine articles and a novel. He graduated from the University of the Americas in Mexico City with a degree in pharmacology and a taste for tequila and cigars. After coming down with a heart ailment he retired from dispensing drugs and spent most of his time at the Plaza in what he called his Moose Hall writing, with breaks to check the mail and report to his off-the record office at the bar of the Sterling Hotel.”

   His wife Speedy was a schoolteacher.She kept him flush in pencils and paper. It was when the fourth-floor walk-up became too much for Mike that he and Speedy moved to a chicken farm east of Cleveland. None of the chickens complained about his cigar smoke, fearing for their heads. Dave opened all the windows and aired out his new digs.

   To make ends meet Dave tended bar weekends at the Viking Saloon, helped out at the Mistake Saloon, and filled in at the Library Saloon when they were short-staffed. The best thing for a case of nerves is a case of beer. The Library was popular with Cleveland State University students and local bohemians. It was at East 37^th and Prospect, in what had been the Benedict House. It was long past its glory days. The students who went there tried to pick up girls, drank too much, and got into arguments, even though it never mattered who won or lost the wrangling. The girls usually steered clear of polemics. The bohemians stayed chill.

   He found work at the Round Table, an old downtown German restaurant. “It had become a tired-out attorney’s bar with most of the grand old rooms empty. A young hustler from Lakewood convinced the owner to convert all three floors to a music venue. It was wildly successful. But bar tending was tailor made for my increasingly flagrant infidelities. After we purchased the Plaza, my wife Ann grew tired of it and found sympathy and comfort with Allen.”

   Even so, infidelities notwithstanding, the partnership continued for a dozen-and-more years. They used the rental income from the 48 apartments for operating expenses and renovations. With a 30% vacancy rate, a mortgage at 17%, insurance for a troubled building, taxes and utilities, it ate up most of their income. Renovations meant DIY for almost everything. 

   “There was an old hardware store on Euclid just east of 55^th Street, owned by a Mr. Weiss. Before buying the Plaza, I got to know him and his helpmate Jimmy in my role as janitor of the building. Their stock of plumbing and building supplies dated back at least 50 years, which is a great resource when keeping an 80-year-old building alive.” It was the kind of old-school hardware store where you could buy dynamite fuse by the foot. “Since I was limited in my knowledge of trade skills it meant I would frequently go to there for information on how to sweat pipe or wire a switch. They were  generous with their knowledge, if sometimes humored by my ignorance. They knew we were committed to the neighborhood.”

   The downside of living it up on the late-night bar life roller coaster finally proved to be too much. He left his old haunts to tend bar at the Elegant Hog on Playhouse Square. “It had an older crowd that tipped much better and they closed much earlier.” He put his nose to the grindstone and the Plaza got one step ahead month after month. The vacancy rate went down and the waiting-to-rent list went up.

   Taking risks doesn’t mean shirking responsibilities. It rather means embracing possibilities. Dave Bloomquist wasn’t Lord of the Manor, not by a long shot. Upper Prospect wasn’t anybody’s magic kingdom. Those days were done and gone. He was more like the Prince of Prospect, a hammer, wrench, and screwdriver on his coat of arms. When the roof leaked or the boiler faltered, he put on his dab hand gloves and got down to work.

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Ohio Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”