Harvey Firestone’s answer to Goodyear Heights
Firestone Park began in 1915, when Harvey Firestone bought 1,000 acres south of downtown to house his tire workers. He was competing with Frank Seiberling, who had just started Goodyear Heights, and like Seiberling he hired his own estate landscape architect, Alling S. DeForest, to draw the plan.
The design has held up. Tree-lined boulevards curve around a central park shaped like the old Firestone shield. Firestone wanted families of different incomes on the same streets, so he mixed house styles and sizes. He donated land for two churches and built a school and a stadium nearby. Summit Memory, the library’s local history project, records that 600 homes went up in a single year.
The company itself sat close by. The Firestone Tire and Rubber Company building at 1200 Firestone Parkway was listed on the National Register in 2014. Wikipedia’s Akron article describes Firestone Park, like Goodyear Heights, as a community of houses based on mail-order plans, which is why you’ll see the same floor plan repeated on many blocks.
The neighborhood also has a history buyers sometimes ask about: Signal Akron reports it was originally deed-restricted to white residents.
The neighborhood today
Firestone Park runs from Archwood Avenue on the north to Waterloo Road on the south, east of Kenmore, with quick access to I-77 and I-277. People who live here talk about walking to the library, the community center and the park, where bands play on Tuesday nights in summer. Firestone Stadium, opened in 1925 for company teams, now belongs to the city.
Residents also told Signal Akron what has slipped:
- the Aster Avenue business district once had a theater, a bakery and a pharmacy
- some families and businesses have moved out
- car break-ins happen
- there’s little assisted living for middle-income seniors who want to stay
Selling a 100-year-old company house
Most original Firestone Park houses are now more than a century old. Even well-loved ones can carry a few things a buyer’s inspector will flag:
- older wiring, sometimes with knob-and-tube still in the walls, covered in selling a house with old wiring
- original plumbing and cast-iron drains
- paint from before 1978, which triggers federal lead paint disclosure
Repeated floor plans help when you price a house here. A buyer or appraiser can often find a recent sale of a near-identical house a few streets away, so condition and updates explain most of the difference in price.
Plenty of these houses have been updated and will sell well listed. If yours has, compare an agent’s estimate with ours. If it hasn’t, or you’re moving on a deadline, Bob can walk it in 15 to 20 minutes and explain his number. Owners heading to assisted living can read selling a house when moving to assisted living first.