Cars Have Crashed Into a Cleveland Heights Man's Home For the Past Two Decades. A Fix May Finally Be Coming

Signs Gall has posted in his front yard explaining his very frank feelings on the lack of response from Cleveland Heights Credit: Mark Oprea

Strangely enough, it wasn’t the first car that crashed into John Gall’s home on Fairmount Boulevard that radicalized him, but one that came later.

In was a mid-November morning around 2 a.m., and Gall was asleep on his couch, the one that hugs up against his front window, close to wear Gall displayed the pottery he crafts. It was chilly outside. The TV blared as Gall slept.

A little after two a.m., a GMC Yukon flew like a missile at 74 miles an hour right into Gall’s kitchen.

“Suddenly the whole house explodes on both sides. Everything was just vaporized,” Gall, 60, recounted recently in his kitchen. “Insulation was flying in the air. Mud all over. A ton of noise. There was a car in the kitchen—that’s how I woke up.”

Strangely enough, Gall wasn’t surprised in the slightest.

His house at 3444 Fairmount Blvd. had been, since the City of Cleveland Heights removed a guardrail protecting it from oncoming traffic from South Taylor in 2005, left perfectly vulnerable: drunk drivers on the tree lawn; distracted mothers in the driveway; a trio of teenagers, in 2012, slamming a stolen car through Gall’s garage.

And yet, despite calls to the city to ameliorate the problem, Gall was here yet again, with a GMC Yukon hanging out of a story-tall hole in his kitchen. And, minutes later, Cleveland Heights Police officers storming the property.

“I remember saying, ‘Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!’ with my hands up out the side” of the house,” he recalled. He stuck his hands up. “And they were all out in the front yard with guns drawn, ready to blow someone away.”

Gall’s situation, after 19 years of seeking serenity at a home he’s owned half his life, has now neared a two-roads-diverged state of things.

Following dozens of incidents, three crashes, three insurance hikes, three totaled cars of his own and four mayors, Gall may actually be finding relief with an attorney’s help. Cleveland Heights may install bollards, he said, where “temporary” boulders now stand and a guardrail maintained by the Ohio Department of Transportation used to be.

John Gall, 60, has been living in his home since 1996. He’s tried to get Cleveland Heights’ help replacing a guardrail in front of his house for the past decade or so. Credit: Mark Oprea

That, or the situation could go south. Gall believes that another major crash could send his insurer, State Farm, into a literal rock and hard place, and leave Gall to fend for himself.

“They raised my rates, and if I have another claim, I’m done,” Gall said. “I mean, it’s not if there’s gonna be another claim. It’s when.”

The abject vulnerability of the home at the dead end of South Taylor and Fairmount is an almost perfect case in point of how the pandemic’s spike in car accidents has illuminated poor street design of past planning efforts.

Gall’s home—and the destruction cars have done to it—is ripe fodder for a growing culture of activists that point to such shoddy design for, in its most extreme, human fatalities. Pedestrian deaths nationwide have jumped 70 percent since 2011.

Though Cleveland has, under Mayor Bibb’s leadership, drawn more attention to reaching its Vision Zero goal—“eliminating” car-caused pedestrian deaths by 2030—the city’s suburbs have slower to address the issue. In November 2022, months after car thieves crashed into Gall’s garage, Mayor Kahlil Seren released a traffic calming initiative, one that led to, besides Gall’s two boulders, three flashing-light signs and a speed bump.

But no clear-cut answer to Gall’s main question after the GMC Yukon destroyed his kitchen. One he painted on white signs on the sidewalk: “Where’s My Guardrail?”

Seren told a reporter, shortly before a crash that July, that City Hall’s hands were tied, by both its own laws and the state Department of Transportation. “Based on the advice of our engineering firm, we could not recommend and it would not be safe to install a guardrail at that location,” Seren told Cleveland 19 that June.

He doubled down on defending the boulders last October, after a drunk driver rammed into them and tore up Gall’s lawn—but didn’t, Seren noted, lead to an insurance claim.

“The protective measures that we placed on his yard at the city’s expense, as we saw over the last week,” Seren told WKYC, “had a demonstrable impact on his safety and the safety of his home.”

Gall has taken his situation public, in an effort to putting pressure on the city to ameliorate the problem. Along with hiring an attorney in March. Credit: Mark Oprea

A crash that destroyed Gall’s garage in 2022, shortly after repairs were finished from a crash the year before. Credit: John Gall

Gall took it as an attempt to swipe the problem of 3444 Fairmount under a political rug. In late 2023, after William Hanna, Cleveland Heights’ law director, offered to buy Gall’s home at “fair market value” (about $172,000), Gall went on the offensive. He hired a lawyer, Marlon Primes, to ensure that—at the worst—the city couldn’t commandeer his home via eminent domain.

Primes, a former attorney for the Northern District of Ohio, said he immediately empathized with Gall’s case. After a “few thousand dollars,” Primes chose to take Gall’s case, he said, “low bono.”

“You know he has not been in it to try and enrich himself,” Primes told Scene. “What he basically wants is the problem solved. He wants him and his loved ones to be protected and he wants to be able to feel comfortable in his own space.”

“I live in Cleveland Heights,” he added. “I can relate to him. He has a right to live in peace.”

Multiple calls and emails to a spokesperson for Cleveland Heights and to Hanna were unreturned. A representative for State Farm refused to comment on Gall’s rate hikes.

While Gall waits to hear a yay or nay on the so-called permanent fix, he does his best to enjoy what he said is rightfully his.

In early December, Gall invited Scene to his home, which, for the past two weeks, has welcomed visitors with a barrage of cries-for-help signs in front. Those lambasting Hanna. “I Can’t Get Homeowners Insurance!” one reads. “Speed Bump, Seriously?” says another.

“I’ve lived in Cleveland Heights for 40 years,” Gall said, walking around his garden out back. He pointed out barrels of picked blueberries, his pottery kiln in the basement. “I’m a homeowner. I’m a voter. I’m a taxpayer, I’ve made it a home. It’s paid off.”

“It’s the American dream, dude. You know, I’ve achieved it here in my little slice of heaven. And their solution to my problem is what? To get rid of me?”