Relics from Toledo's past -- a past when people traveled from city to country aboard electric trains and firefighters drew water from underground cisterns to fight fires -- surfaced last month when The Blade rebuilt its employee parking lot.
Among the debris found when contractors dug up the lot's pavement were railroad spikes and a strip of rail perhaps 40 feet long, relics from days when much of what is now The Blade's property belonged to the Toledo Railways & Light Co. and the Lakeshore Electric Railway.
The former operated streetcars in Toledo during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the latter had a freight house in the 500 block of North Huron Street, opposite what is now Government Center.
But more damaging to the parking lot's reconstruction schedule than the old railroad bits was the presence of an underground cavern that Toledo fire Lt. Matthew Hertzfeld said was almost certain to have been a fire cistern: essentially, a small reservoir that collected rainwater as a fire-fighting reserve.
Lieutenant Hertzfeld said that a century ago, when the city's public water system wasn't advanced enough to deliver the volumes of water needed to fight fires, such cisterns could be found all over downtown Toledo, with most if not all built beneath streets and alleys.
The lieutenant said he was not aware of any surviving maps of where the cisterns were. But the cavern's mid-block location on The Blade's property is consistent with old lot lines, suggesting an alley once passed through the area where it was discovered when the parking lot was dug up in mid-October for rebuilding.
The cavern's presence caused several days' delay in rebuilding the parking lot, compounded later on by heavy rain that fell after the project's original completion date, facilities manager David Dennis said.
Sand that apparently had been poured into the chamber once it was no longer needed for fire-fighting did not completely fill it, he said, and that left voids beneath the structure's reinforced concrete roof. When that aging concrete started to fail, parts of the parking lot above those voids became prone to cave-ins.
To resolve the problem, workers poured water into holes in the concrete and sloshed it around to make the sand more level. Then, Mr. Dennis said, the top of the chamber was filled with a light concrete slurry. Only after the slurry hardened was the affected part of the site graded for paving.
"I pity the fool that finds it 60 years from now and wants to do something with it," Mr. Dennis said. "But we didn't want it to collapse."
Use of the southerly portion of The Blade's block as a parking lot predates the newspaper's ownership of the entire block.
The Blade bought the land that would soon be home to its 541 N. Superior St. headquarters in 1925 from Toledo Railways & Light, which, according to maps of the time, had some sort of maintenance or support facilities on the northerly half or so of the block.
Lakeshore Electric, which operated an interurban railroad between Toledo and Cleveland, had its adjoining freight house there, while the Jackson Street side of the block and abutting parcels were home to a variety of small businesses.
Lakeshore Electric was one of as many as 10 such railroads built around the turn of the 20th century linking Toledo with other cities in the region and providing local transportation to communities large and small along the way.
In an era when automobiles were expensive and fragile and roads were poor, the electric-powered interurban railcars provided fast, easy transportation for farmers sending their goods to market, for salesmen making rural calls, for scholastic sports teams traveling to "away" games, and yes, newspapers distributing daily editions into the countryside.
They also spearheaded rural electrification, giving electric utility companies an immediate return on wires they strung out from the cities while marketing electricity service to farm dwellers.
In Toledo and other cities, the interurban cars shared the streetcars' tracks, towering over the smaller urban trolleys, to reach downtown stations and freight houses.
Toledo's main interurban station was in the 400 block of North Superior, diagonally across the Superior-Jackson intersection from what is now The Blade's block. Plans were drafted during the 1920s to build a grand new interurban station along the 500 block of Huron, near the Lakeshore Electric freight house.
Although tracks were laid in the street to support such a facility, the station itself was not built before the interurbans fell into precipitous decline.
An economic slide that started with the rapid rise of automobiles and motor trucks during the 1920s became catastrophic during the Great Depression, which in Toledo claimed all of the interurban railroads that had survived that long.
The Lakeshore Electric, one of the last survivors, closed the Huron Street freight house in 1937 and replaced its passenger rail service with buses the following year.
The last Ohio Public Service Co. interurban car called at the Superior Street interurban station on July 11, 1939, and the last interurban passenger service anywhere in the Toledo area quit a short time later when the Toledo & Indiana dropped service from a depot near the University of Toledo.
The freight house was one of several structures on the block that were leveled during those years to create parking lots to serve the growing number of downtown workers who commuted by auto instead of by streetcars and trains.
Only during the 1970s were those parcels acquired by The Blade for expansion of its building and creation of its current private parking area.
Considerable numbers of rail and other Toledo Railways & Light Co. relics were dug up during the newspaper's building expansion, but what apparently was former Lakeshore Electric rail, based on its location, remained until its excavation last month.
Streetcars survived in Toledo until the last Long Belt service quit in 1949. As was the case with the never-used interurban rails in Huron Street, the trolley tracks were simply paved over, leaving many of them to be rediscovered decades later when it came time for those streets' reconstruction.
Contact David Patch at: dpatch@theblade.com or 419-724-6094.
First Published November 14, 2011, 5:15 a.m.