CLEVELAND -- Historic murals of trains have completed their round trip in Cleveland.
After years of being out on loan and then lost, the paintings, titled "History of United States Locomotives," are back in the possession of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen. The nation's oldest union, which owns the 20-story Standard Building on Ontario Street, now has the artwork hanging on the building's mezzanine level.
"It's history, history that could've been lost," said Tom Grdina, the building manager who was instrumental in getting the paintings returned.
During the Great Depression, the U.S. government commissioned works by artists around the nation as part of the Federal Art Program of the Works Progress Administration.
Among the artists was Earl Neff, a graduate of the Cleveland Institute of the Art who, in later life, became known as much for being a UFO enthusiast as for his art.
His assistant on the project was Leo Nowak, another noted Cleveland artist. Nowak worked on Superman comics with the hero's creators, Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel.
Neff and Nowak completed the locomotive mural in 1937. Composed of 12 individual paintings, the four-foot-high panels stretch more than 100 feet. The artists were paid $750 for the piece.
The first panel shows the humble beginnings of trains when they were drawn along rails by horses. In subsequent panels are steam engines, then coal engines and, finally, they end with what was at the time the cutting edge vision of trains.
The murals hung for decades in the grand lobby of the Engineers Building. They were put in storage when the building was demolished in 1989. The union later lent the paintings so they could be hung in Gund Arena, where they decorated the walls of a basement room used for banquets, Grdina said.
"As long as they were there, they could use them, but we didn't give them to them," Grdina said. "If they didn't want them or weren't going to use them, they'd come back to us."
A few months ago, Grdina started wondering what happened to the paintings.
"I don't know what made me think of them," Grdina said.
He called over to the arena and learned that the room had been redecorated. Officials at what is now Quicken Loans Arena hadn't been aware that the paintings were on loan from the union and had given them to the Cleveland Art Foundation.
Officials at the foundation also were unaware of the contract. They had shown the paintings, including at an event in 2006 titled "Covering History: Revisiting Federal Art in Cleveland, 1933-43." But the murals had subsequently been put in storage.