Walking tour of historic Coventry Village scheduled for Aug. 25

This Saturday, Aug. 25, Mark Souther, associate professor of history at Cleveland State University and member of the Cleveland Heights Landmark Commission, will lead an app-enhanced walking tour of historic Coventry Village. The tour will start at the Coventry P.E.A.C.E. Arch by Coventry Village Library at 9 a.m.

Souther will guide walkers through Coventry’s beginnings as a planned garden suburb in the late 1800s to the counterculture epicenter of the 1960s. The tour will include stops in the business district, as well as the surrounding neighborhood. To help bring the neighborhood’s history to life, Souther will use the Cleveland Historical mobile phone app, which was developed by Souther’s team at CSU.

Participants can download the free app prior to the tour at the App Store (for iPhone), the  Android Market or at http://clevelandhistorical.org.

“You don’t need to own a smart phone to enjoy Saturday’s tour,” said Souther. “We’ll be using the app to help enhance the tour with historic photos and audio clips of people telling the history of their neighborhood.” If you have a smart phone, bring it, and we’ll will show you how to download and navigate through the Cleveland Historical app.

The free tour goes from 9 to 11 a.m., and will take place rain or shine.

Coventry Village is the first of four Cleveland Heights neighborhoods to be featured in a Cleveland Historical mobile app tour. FutureHeights, together with Cleveland State University’s Center for Public History and Digital Humanities the Cleveland Heights Landmark Commission and the Cleveland Heights Historical Society, is creating the tours to showcase the unique and well-preserved historic neighborhoods and cultural assets that make Cleveland Heights a desirable place to live and work.

Through the Cleveland Historical app, visitors are encouraged to explore the Heights at their own pace by using their smart phones. The project is generously funded by the residents of Cuyahoga County through a public grant from Cuyahoga Arts & Culture, and with support from Coventry Village Special Improvement District, Cleveland Heights Mayor Ed Kelley, the City of Cleveland Heights, the Cedar Fairmount Special Improvement District, Nighttown Restaurant, Council Member Dennis Wilcox and others.

The other neighborhoods selected for the project are Noble Road, Dugway Brook and Euclid Golf/Cedar Fairmount. Each tour consists of eight to ten historic sites that are linked to tell the story of the neighborhood. Community volunteers have worked with the project team to research each site and tell the neighborhood’s story through historic photographs, interviews and other documents.

For more information, visit www.clevelandhistorical.org.