Gutter Guards in Goodyear Heights, Akron

In 1912 Frank Seiberling, a founder of Goodyear, had a problem. His factories in East Akron were hiring faster than the city could house people. He turned to farmland beyond the edge of the 1910 city maps and asked Warren Manning to lay out a neighborhood on it. Manning was the landscape architect already shaping the grounds of Seiberling's own estate, Stan Hywet.

Manning followed the ideas of the Garden City movement. Streets bend with the slope instead of marching in a grid, and green space was drawn into the plan from the start. Goodyear Boulevard, Pioneer Street and Malasia Road still frame a small triangular park with a gazebo at its center.

The company built most of the first houses itself. Employees built others from plans it had approved. They were modest places of five or six rooms in brick or stucco, and the second phase was good enough to be written up in The Architectural Forum in 1918.

The neighborhood today is far bigger than Manning's drawing. It covers close to five square miles and holds more than 15,000 people, and about 86 percent of its homes are detached houses.

That matters for gutters, because there are really two kinds of house here. Around Goodyear Boulevard stand the original cottages, now past a hundred years old. Spreading out from them are the houses added between 1940 and 1980 as the area filled in.

On the cottages the roof is compact and so is the gutter system. A short run across the front, another across the back, perhaps one downspout for each. There is no spare capacity. When the single outlet on a run is blocked, that whole side of the house overflows.

The later houses are lower and longer. Their gutters are easier to reach but collect just as much, and many have never had the hangers looked at since the day they went up.

A garden suburb is meant to be leafy, and this one has had more than a century to grow into the idea. The trees along its curving streets have had the same century to outgrow the houses.

On the east side the neighborhood runs up against Goodyear Heights Metro Park, with its trails, fishing and sledding hill. Houses near the park get its leaves as well as their own, and gutters on the park side of a roof tend to fill first.

Small roofs make the debris count for more. A double handful of maple seeds is a nuisance in a long gutter. In a twelve-foot run with one outlet it is a blockage.

Stainless micro-mesh keeps leaves, seeds and roof grit out of the trough, so that lone downspout stays open. On a cottage that is the whole point. You are protecting one or two outlets that the house cannot do without.

Before any mesh goes on, the gutters are cleaned by hand and each downspout is flushed. Loose spikes on the older houses are backed up with hidden hangers into the rafter tails. Corners are mitered, including the short returns on dormers. The full sequence is on the gutter guard installation page.

The fascia on a 1910s cottage needs an honest look. If the owner finds soft wood, you will see it in the photo report the same day. The post on guards for rubber-era worker cottages goes into what a century does to that board.

Guards are priced by the foot, and a small house has fewer feet. Most of a cottage or a low postwar house is charged at the lower of the two rates. Only a tall gable end, if the gutter wraps onto it, would see the higher one.

There is no dollar figure on this site, since the number depends on a measurement nobody has taken yet. What the cost page can show is every part of the sum. You receive one written price after the visit, and it is good for a year.

Akron's leaf trucks work through the ten wards in a fixed order, and for fall 2026 Ward 10 comes last. Much of Goodyear Heights is in that ward. Leaves raked to the devil strip may sit a while before they are collected, and they will keep blowing back onto roofs in the meantime. It is one more reason not to tie a guard install to the city's calendar.

Guards fasten to gutters already in place and involve no construction. Should a repair ever become a rebuild, the Summit County Department of Building Standards issues building permits for Akron. Its office is on East Tallmadge Avenue, the same road residents name as the neighborhood's northern edge.