History of street names in Westlake, Part 2
Clemens Road is named for Eli Clemens who came to Dover from Rhode Island and built this house in about 1840. It was moved from the northwest corner of Cahoon and Detroit to 29445 Detroit Road in 1949.
Part two of a two-part series.
One of the more interesting streets in Westlake is Horseshoe Boulevard. As originally platted, Horseshoe Boulevard continued along Sperry Creek south of Center Ridge, touched Clague Road between Hedgewood and Smith roads, continued south along the creek, intersected Westwood then extended west toward Hawkins, south toward Walter, then west toward Columbia parallel with Maple Ridge Road.
We are not sure if the name Horseshoe came from the fact that the street as originally conceived had a horseshoe shaped route through Dover Village, because it originally was a horse trail along the creek or because the circa 1900 Horseshoe Inn at 23123 Center Ridge Road was located approximately 700 feet east of where the street intersected Center Ridge.
The Horseshoe Tavern building is now the home of Warner Interiors. A resolution approved by Dover Village Council in 1927 had a very grandiose plan with Horseshoe Boulevard continuing west from Columbia toward Dover Center then northwest in an arc shape until it eventually intersected again with first Center Ridge and then Hilliard Boulevard!
The first winding subdivision with custom homes was Queen Anne’s Gate, platted in 1963 by the King James Group with street names of royalty including Prince Charles and Queen Anne. West Ridge Subdivision was platted in the mid-1960s, but no-one calls it “West Ridge”; it is known as the “musical streets” for the street names which include Mozart and Gershwin. In 1976 the first model homes for Settler’s Reserve were opened; the street names honored early Dover families such as Coe, Cooley, Farr, Limpert, Taylor and Sperry with three-word names that were popular at that time, such as “Farr’s Garden Path.”
In 1990, one of Westlake’s first single-family cluster developments, Water’s Edge, was under review. The name of one of the streets was rejected by the safety forces because it duplicated the name of an existing street in the city. The developer glanced up at the poster I had hung over my desk, titled Whispering Cove, and decided “Whispering Cove Circle” would make a nice street name.
In the early 1990s, working with another Westlake employee, Jim Alaimo, we sorted out the jumble of proposed names for the cul-de-sacs in the Woods cluster development. We kept Camden, Guilford, Lexington, Princeton, Trenton and Yorktown – which memorialize Revolutionary War battle sites to accompany the names of Revolutionary Era heroes Adams, Jefferson, Lafayette and Washington on the adjacent streets, and eliminated the proposed stray Civil War battleground names.
In 2013 longtime Planning Director Robert Parry was honored for his involvement in the creation and success of Crocker Park by having Parry Lane in Crocker Park named after him. The unusually named S.S. Comet Lane in Crocker Park is named for developer Robert Stark’s father-in-law and Carney Court for the development partners and owners of the land underneath it.
If you wish to share information on how other streets in Westlake were named send an email to wrk295@aol.com.
William Krause
William R. Krause, AICP I am the Assistant Planning Director for the City of Westlake. I have worked for Westlake for 30 years. I served on the Bay Village Planning Commission for 5 years. I was a member of the Reuben Osborn Learning Center Steering Committee. I was a Board Member and Historian for the Westlake Historical Society and am a Trustee of the Western Reserve Architectural Historians. I have been married to Debra for 38 years and am the father of three grown children, grandfather of three and owner of a Shih Tzu.