2007
Current
2014
Now for a very brief sidetrack.
I know you all aren’t looking at this stack of letters all the time like I am but at some point I got curious about 10017 Elwell St. This is where Franz lived and where my grandpa grew up and thus where both the German letters and the letters my grandpa wrote were addressed. I decided to do a Street View search to check it out and was disappointed – the house is gone! However, while I was cruising around on Street View it suddenly popped up. And then I remembered that you can view the date that Street View photos are taken and select different dates.
The grainy picture is from 2007 and the place looks nice. By 2014 it’s looking more unkempt and maybe isn’t inhabited. The house next to it has been torn down by then. According to property records, it looks like 10017 Elwell was demolished around 2017 or 2018. The online records only go back until 1977 and maybe some day I can head to Cleveland and see if I can dig through paper records to see whether Franz built the house or what he paid for it and maybe how long he lived there. I'm also interested in the street name change. The early letters to Franz are addressed to 10017 Elwell Marshall St. but at some point it becomes just Elwell St.
The lovely news is that the parcel at 10017 is now owned by Habitat for Humanity and there’s a permit for new construction. Hopefully a nice new house will take its place some time soon and someone will get a great leg up with the opportunity to live there.
