How did I not know the story? I’ve lived in the Akron-Canton area for most of my life, the fourth generation on both sides of my family to reside in Summit County. Countless tales were handed down to me, but not this one. Maybe my great-grandparents didn’t want to remember it.
For nearly twenty years, I have written “This Place, This Time,” a weekly column about local history in the Akron Beacon Journal. During the column’s formative years, I stumbled across a reference to the Furnace Street gang and its deadly war against Akron police in the early twentieth century. It was one of the most shocking chapters in the city’s esteemed and occasionally lurid history, and I had never even heard of it.
Each day, thousands of vehicles zoom past the eternal flame at the Akron Police Memorial in front of the Harold K. Stubbs Justice Center on South High Street in downtown Akron. I’ve glanced at it hundreds of times—perhaps more—because the monument is only a few blocks north of my office. I didn’t know that so many of the etched names on the marble slab belonged to men who were killed in a fifteen-month span.
Black-and-white pages blurred together when I sat at the Akron library’s microfilm machine to examine vintage newspaper articles about the infamous series of crimes. The low hum of the machine served as white noise as I read the stories in rapt attention, occasionally taking notes on a legal pad or printing out copies. After months of dimly lit editions flashed past my retinas, I grudgingly pushed the rewind button and returned the microfilm boxes back to their shelf.
I couldn’t possibly write a history column about this! The plot was too complex and the subject too important to be condensed into a single article for “This Place, This Time.” So, I gathered my notes, placed them in a box and hid them away for another time. Before I knew it, a decade had passed.
A mental calendar began flipping its pages. A few years ago, I realized that December 2017 would mark the 100th anniversary of the Furnace Street gang’s reign of terror. When The History Press approached me about writing a follow-up to my 2015 book Lost Akron, it dawned on me what the topic should be. I couldn’t be the only native son who didn’t know about the 1917–19 gangland war. I dusted off the old notes and began new research, compelled to tell the story to a new generation.
Sadly, this true-crime tale is timelier than ever. With more than sixty officers killed in the line of duty last year in the United States and hundreds of police-related shootings stirring protest and controversy, it’s impossible to regard the tragic events of one hundred years ago as merely a peculiarity from yesteryear.
A century isn’t nearly as long as it seems. When I thumbed through vintage Akron city directories to see who lived and worked on Furnace Street during that tumultuous era, a dozen familiar surnames jumped off the pages. I attended Akron’s North High School in the late 1970s and early 1980s with students who shared those last names. These were good kids from good families. Did their ancestors claw their way out of that tough environment to find a better life? As the great-grandson of a bootlegger and reputed mobster, I know how much can change over a few generations. My cousin is a police detective.
Although I moved away from North Hill years ago, it still feels like home to me. The Akron neighborhood, which rises up from North Howard Street like some modern-day Camelot, stands directly across the Little Cuyahoga Valley from Furnace Street. For generations, it was nicknamed “Little Italy,” a tribute to the immigrants who lived there.
Life was a green, white and red tapestry of Italian restaurants, specialty markets, businesses, social halls, private clubs, spaghetti dinners, bake sales and solemn rites at St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church. Fortunately for Akron, vestiges remain from that golden age, including DeVitis Italian Market, Dontino’s Fine Italian Cuisine, Unione Abruzzese, the Italian Center, Emidio’s Pizza, Carovillese Lodge & Club, Crest Bakery and Rasicci’s Pizza.
That is the community that I grew up loving. That is the community that the Furnace Street gang could not destroy.