Callahan’s Irishtown Bend Painting Bridges Past and Future
Before it was a park, before it was a project, Irishtown Bend was a Cleveland neighborhood — full of families, laborers, stories, and songs. This month, our striking new cover, by Cleveland artist Timothy Callaghan, brings that history into view in iIrish.
Once a vibrant Irish enclave on the city’s west side, Irishtown Bend was gradually erased by mid-20th-century development. Now, as the site begins a new chapter as a 25-acre public park, Callaghan’s painting offers both a tribute to what was and a vision of what could be.
Honoring an Erased Past
Irishtown Bend was home to generations of Irish immigrants in the 1800s, a clifftop enclave overlooking the Cuyahoga River, just below Ohio City. Over the years, it gained a rough-and-tumble reputation, with crowded shanties and hardworking dock laborers.
By the mid-1900s, the rundown neighborhood was cleared away, leaving a blank hillside and, for decades, a gap in Cleveland’s cultural memory. The new park project aims to fill that gap by transforming the vacant slope into a vibrant green space, and by remembering its Irish roots.
Callaghan’s painting helps kick off that remembrance. As a landscape painter, he often shines a light on “forgotten places” around the city, places overlooked, yet meaningful.
The painting layers historical imagery from Irishtown Bend’s heyday with elements pointing toward the future, bridging past and future in one frame. “This was a community that was erased,” he says.
Irish American Charitable Foundation
The idea for the painting began with an email. In July of last year, Irish American Archives Society Executive Director Margaret Lynch reached out to the Irish American Charitable Foundation (IACF) for support in researching Irishtown Bend.
Founded by Jack Coyne, Gerry Quinn, Tom Scanlon, and Packy Hyland — four cornerstones of Cleveland’s Irish American community, the IACF has spent decades nurturing Irish cultural life in Northeast Ohio. The organization’s mission is to provide startup funding and sustained support for educational and cultural initiatives in the region. Its portfolio includes everything from the Irish American Archives Society to the Rose of Tralee Festival and the Irish Cultural Garden renovation.
Lynch’s request stayed with IACF President Michael Coyne. A St. Ignatius alumnus, Coyne had run past the Bend countless times as a student athlete and felt a strong connection to the area. “I’m always on the lookout for meaningful projects we can underwrite or assist with,” Coyne says.
Not long after, he met Callaghan at a jazz night at Treelawn Social Club, a creative venue Coyne helped open. When Callaghan mentioned his last name, something clicked.
Coyne, who assists his son Jack’s art dealership in New York, told Callaghan he’d try to find a project they could work on together. A few weeks later, Irishtown Bend came back to mind, along with the archival photos Lynch had shared.
After a series of meetings between Coyne, Lynch, and Callaghan, the IACF commissioned the painting in February 2025. The plan: to raise awareness, and funding, for Lynch’s research by selling the original and a limited run of signed prints.
Callaghan, already drawn to overlooked corners of Cleveland, was all in. He’d painted the Bend once before, in 2022, capturing the hillside in winter, a piece he describes as “cold and very melancholy.” This time, with a renewed sense of purpose and community backing, he reimagined Irishtown Bend in a different light.
Meet the Artist
Timothy Callaghan has been chronicling the beauty of Northeast Ohio for over two decades. Born in Toledo and trained at the Cleveland Institute of Art and Kent State University, he brings a distinctly regional voice to contemporary painting.
Callahan teaches at Lake Ridge Academy, where he also serves as Director of the School of Fine Arts. His style is vibrant, gestural, and rooted in place.
He paints gas stations, alleyways, rooftops – not for irony, but with affection. His work asks viewers to re-see what they think they know.
In Irishtown Bend, that instinct becomes both artistic and historical. “The places people inhabit … it shows who they are,” he says. “There’s a kind of story in the architecture, in the layout of a neighborhood, even in what’s left behind.”
Irishtown Bend
For Callaghan, the project became more personal than he expected. “Other than my last name, I don’t know a lot about my own Irish heritage, but I’m getting to that age where I want to know. I’ve been in Cleveland long enough that I feel like this is my home.”
Painting Irishtown Bend became a journey of discovery, into Irish Cleveland history, and his own identity. It was also a way of stitching past to present.
He even included a small figure of his son, Hayes, perched on a rooftop, gazing over the Bend. “He’s kind of looking through the space, looking through history, looking to the future,” Callaghan says.
The river itself holds powerful symbolism in the story of Irishtown Bend. It once sustained the immigrant community, shaped their boundaries, and connected them to the wider world.
For Callaghan, that winding stretch of the Cuyahoga became more than just a backdrop — it became a metaphor. “There’s this idea of rivers and streams being a boundary between our world and the other world. Maybe that’s why the Irish were drawn here.”
The Bend, cradled by water, seemed to him both insular and open, grounded and mythic. As he worked, Callaghan began to think of the painting as a kind of odyssey, a journey through history, family, and place. He mentioned Ulysses and the Irish literary tradition, noting how themes of migration, identity, and return ripple through both the novel and the neighborhood. “There’s a lot of joy or hopefulness in it,” he says.
Though the shacks and muddy lanes are rendered with care, light and color break through, a sense of morning after long darkness.
In the brushstrokes (gouache on paper, 40 by 30 inches), you can almost see the outlines of the future park: children playing, neighbors gathering, the skyline rising. “The painting is kind of looking forward, into the future.” Callahan offers.
It’s a tribute to what was, offered up to inspire what could be.
This column is the first in a two-part series. We’ll delve deeper into the history and future of Irishtown Bend in the October issue.
References – Learn More:
Irishtown Bend Park project: irishtownbendpark.org.
Irish American Archives Society (IAAS): irisharchives.org
LAND studio: land-studio.org
Timothy Callaghan’s art: timothycallaghan.com
