Charles W. Chesnutt to Samuel S. Rosenthal, Inc., 28 June 1932
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Cleveland, Ohio,
June 28, 1932
Samuel S. Rosenthal, Inc.,1
11810 Superior Avenue,
Cleveland, Ohio
To CHARLES W. CHESNUTT, Dr.2
1646 Union Trust Building
Cleveland, Ohio
1 9 3 2
| July 1 | To rent sign privilege on building at 11900 Superior Avenue:3 2 months @ $2.00 | $4.00 |
Received Payment
Correspondent: Samuel S. Rosenthal (1885–1957) was a prominent Jewish businessman and philanthropist. Born in Austria, he came to Cleveland, Ohio, in 1914 via the Northeast and founded the Cleveland Overall Company, which specialized in making, repairing, and cleaning rented work clothes and later also military uniforms. He was involved in a number of other business ventures, including an automotive company, in Cleveland.
1. Samuel S. Rosenthal, Inc. was incorporated in 1930 as an automotive company. In 1931, Chesnutt agreed to have an advertisment for one of its dealerships, located at 11810 Superior Ave., painted on the façade of his immediately adjacent rental property at 11900–11902 Superior. This proximity is the likely reason that, in one of his three 1932 letters to Rosenthal about tardy payments, Chesnutt mistakenly uses the street number of his own building in Rosenthal's address. [back]
2. Charles Chesnutt received an honorary LL.D. (Doctor of Law) degree from Wilberforce University in 1913 (Helen Chesnutt, Charles Waddell Chesnutt: Pioneer of the Color Line [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1952], 259). He only used the title sporadically in his correspondence. [back]
3. 11900 and 11902 Superior Ave. in Cleveland, Ohio, were a single building, which Chesnutt owned by the 1920s along with another rental property at 1267–1269 Lakeview Road (less than 400 feet away); the Union Trust Co. held the mortages. Superior Ave. is the main artery connecting the east and west sides of Cleveland's downtown; east of the city center it leads through a number of residential neighborhoods with storefronts along Superior. The area around 105th St., as Chesnutt noted, housed "quite a few" of the 75,000 African Americans that lived in the city by 1930 (see Chesnutt's essay The Negro in Cleveland"). Chesnutt's properties were about a mile (1.5 km or 15 blocks) east of 105th St.. [back]
