The three adjoining buildings that comprise Landmark Office Towers were originally conceived as part of Oris P. and Mantis J. Van Sweringen’s Cleveland Union Terminal complex, the “city within a city” the brothers launched in the 1920s. Designed by Graham, Anderson, Probst & White of Chicago and built between 1929 and 1930, the buildings occupied an entire city block bounded by Prospect Avenue, Huron Road, Ontario Street, and West 2nd Street, all of which were built as viaducts above the railroad tracks entering the Union Terminal. 

In keeping with the idea of a city within a city, each building focused on a different sector: the Medical Arts Building was built for physicians’ and dentists’ offices; the Builders Exchange Building was devoted to businesses associated with the building trades; and the Midland Bank Building was dedicated to banking institutions and other business firms. The buildings included passageways connecting them with each other and with other components of the Terminal complex. A skybridge over Prospect, planned to link the Medical Arts Building with Higbee’s department store, was never added. 

The three buildings were all built with structural steel frames clad with gray limestone on the lower four floors, cream face brick above, and terra-cotta trim near the tops. Detailed Art Deco motifs graced each facade, and the complex featured setbacks and light wells to break their bulk and provide ventilation. Inside, they featured travertine marble floors, fluted pilasters, plaster ceilings with ornamental friezes, and bronze elevator doors. The three-story lobby of the Midland Bank Building featured a wood-burning fireplace, a mezzanine, and pillars and panels carved from the trunks of seven giant oak trees. The trees were selected from an English estate and transported by steamship from Liverpool. The Builders Exchange Building included Guildhall, a tenth-floor restaurant inspired by a 15th-century London namesake, and a two-story demonstration house called the Home in the Sky on its two top levels.

The introduction of such an expansive block of choice office space soon after the onset of the Great Depression had a profound impact on downtown, precipitating a consolidation of business and professional activity around the Terminal and leaving older office buildings with hard-to-fill vacancies. Four major corporate headquarters relocated to the complex between 1930 and 1935. Two were local: Sherwin-Williams moved its offices from its Canal Road property into portions of the Midland Building and Builders Exchange Building, while Standard Oil Co. of Ohio (Sohio) left the East Ohio Gas Building on East 6th for the Midland Building. The Midland Building also attracted the Erie Railroad headquarters away from New York City in 1931 and Republic Steel from Youngstown in 1935. The arrival of the latter led the Medical Arts Building to be renamed the Republic Building. 

Yet the Depression also forced the complex to grapple with challenges. In 1932, Midland Bank went bankrupt and merged into Cleveland Trust, closing its offices in its namesake building. Three years later, the Van Sweringen Company went bankrupt. Thereafter, ownership of the towers complex was administered by the Prospect Terminals Building Co., a subsidiary of Cleveland Terminal Building Co. In 1940, the Cleveland Builders Exchange left for a new headquarters on Euclid Avenue, and Sherwin-Williams expanded to the floors that had housed the Exchange's Home in the Sky. At that time, the building was named the Guildhall Building.

In 1950, Cleveland Terminal Building Co. sold the entirety of the Union Terminal group except the rail station in 1950 to the 66 Trust of Philadelphia. That same year, the four main tenants of the towers complex — Republic Steel, Erie Railroad, Sohio, and Sherwin-Williams — formed RESS Realty (a portmanteau of their names) to coordinate leasing of office space in the three conjoined towers. For the 35 years that followed, the complex harbored a workforce of around 5,000 people. 

In 1986, ten years after the Erie-Lackawanna Railroad (formerly Erie Railroad) closed its Cleveland headquarters following its merger into Philadelphia-based Conrail, Sohio completed its move from the Midland Building to its new 45-story headquarters on Public Square. Following the departures of these firms and Republic’s recent merger into LTV Steel, RESS Realty was administered by only LTV and Sherwin-Williams. In the year preceding Sohio’s exit, RESS Realty renovated and rebranded the LTV-Guildhall-Midland Building complex as Landmark Office Towers. 

During the renovations, Sherwin-Williams bought the complex, bringing its ownership back to Cleveland. Changes included a central lobby for the elevator banks serving all three buildings, along with the revitalization of the Midland Building’s lobby, which Sohio had modernized into offices with dropped ceilings in 1970, as the Van Sweringen Arcade. The bank’s vault became Haymarket Restaurant, later Piperade, and then Hyde Park Chophouse until the space closed in 2011. 

The renovation and promotion succeeded in turning around the towers at a critical time. After Sohio moved out, the complex’s occupancy dropped from 100% to 62%, but upon completion of the renovations, it bounced back to 90%. Landmark Office Towers had a nearly four-decade run until its owner, Sherwin-Williams, sold the complex to Detroit-based Bedrock in 2023 ahead of the paint and coatings company’s move to its new 36-story headquarters tower on Public Square. Today, the future of the complex seems tied to Bedrock’s Riverfront Cleveland project, but its precise use is uncertain. Office demand in downtown districts has not recovered from the pandemic collapse of 2020, and conversion of such a massive structure to residential use is costly. But the towers — with their Art Deco flourishes, contribution to a big-city atmosphere, and central location in an evolving downtown — deserve a new, bold vision.

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For much of the twentieth century, sports and physical fitness were interwoven with Cleveland’s civic life. One place where this sporting culture took shape was the Cleveland Athletic Club (CAC) Building on Euclid Avenue, designed by architect J. Milton Dyer, who also held other notable local commissions, including for the design of Cleveland City Hall. The architectural contract awarded to Dyer totaled $150,000, marking the building as a significant investment for its time. Operating from 1908 until its closure in 2007, the Cleveland Athletic Club served generations of members and offered state-of-the-art athletic facilities that reflected the growing interest in organized recreation and physical training in the early twentieth century.

The CAC’s origins date to the night of August 10, 1907, when a group of founding members held their first preliminary meeting in the rooms of the Cleveland Auto Club. At that meeting, they elected a temporary president, secretary, and treasurer, and began organizing what would become one of Cleveland’s leading private athletic institutions. Most of these early members were affluent businessmen and professionals who contributed their own funds to establish the club and recruit additional members. Membership grew steadily during the club’s early years, even as members debated the final location of the clubhouse.

Formal elections were held in 1908. W. P. Murray was once again elected president. Also elected that evening were A. J. Huston as vice president, George A. Schneider as secretary, and A. H. Bedell as treasurer. After two more years of discussion, members decided on a site on Euclid Avenue in 1910. The finished clubhouse occupied the upper ten floors of the 15-story Cleveland Athletic Club Building, which opened in November 1911, giving the CAC a permanent home.

From its earliest years, the Cleveland Athletic Club distinguished itself through its facilities, which included multiple gymnasiums, boxing rings, handball courts, and a large indoor swimming pool, as well as dining rooms, meeting spaces, and social areas. These amenities made the club both a center for athletic training and a favored spot for Cleveland’s business and professional community to gather.

The clubhouse attracted many prominent athletes to its facilities for training exercises. Boxing legend Joe Louis trained for several days at the CAC during a visit to Cleveland in 1936. Swimming exhibitions and competitions were also held in the club’s twelfth-floor natatorium, attracting many skilled swimmers. The most illustrious was Johnny Weissmuller, who set the world record for 150-yard backstroke in the club pool in 1922 before going on to win five gold medals in the next two summer Olympics and, later, starring in the Tarzan films.

Track meets hosted by the club marked another contribution to the city’s sporting culture and gave young athletes a place to develop their skill during the winter months. Among them was Jesse Owens, who participated in meets there during his school years. At the time, Owens was already gaining recognition locally for his remarkable speed, shattering several records—some of them his own—on the club’s track. 

The Cleveland Athletic Club remained a strong institution for nearly a century, serving as one of a number of prestigious anchors on the city’s most celebrated street. Although the CAC closed in 2007, the building continues to offer a reminder of the era when large cities’ athletic clubs were prominent features of urban civic life. When it was converted into apartments in 2019, the CAC Building got new name—The Athlon—that commemorates its history as a place that connected the city to regional and national athletic networks and gave Clevelanders an opportunity to see some of the great athletes of their time.

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The Hermit Club was founded in 1904 by Cleveland architect Frank B. Meade, who was inspired by a visit to New York City's Lambs Club, a private social club devoted to the performing arts. After returning to Cleveland, Meade envisioned a similar space to serve the city's musicians and actors. He designed a clubhouse in a British pub style modeled after the Lambs Club.

Meade and his associates recruited members from all over Cleveland, notably from the Gatling Gun Company, which employed many musicians and performers. A budget of $10,000 was set for constructing a clubhouse on Hickox Alley (now East 3rd Street), near the Euclid Avenue Opera House, then the center of Cleveland's theater district. The building's brickwork, leaded windows, and floral wood engravings evoked its English inspiration. 

From its beginning, the Hermit Club was both ambitious and exclusive. By 1909 it had grown large enough to need a bookkeeper, and its annual dues increased from $20 to $60, a substantial sum at the time. This high membership fee ensured that members were affluent and dedicated to musicianship and performance. The Club formed house and finance committees by 1910 to organize events and collaborations. 

The Hermit Club quickly became a center for musical performance. Under the leadership of Meade, himself a trained musician, the Club featured musical concerts by the Original Fadette Jazz Orchestra, which included five violinists, a cellist, a bass violist, a clarinetist, a cornetist, and two pianists. The Club's first production, Hermits in Holland, set the tone for other musical "pilgrimages," including performances set in Spain, Austria, Mexico, Africa, California, the American South, and so forth. These location-specific shows involved elaborate costumes, makeup, and acting as the Hermits tried to embody the cultures they portrayed on stage. By the mid-1920s, the Hermit Club hired an orchestra conductor and began composing original music. 

The Hermit Club also played a notable role in Cleveland's civic and charitable life. Proceeds from early productions supported causes such as the Cleveland Day-Nurse Premature-Babies Dispensary and the Hospital of Cleveland. The Club shared costumes and resources with other organizations, hosted “ladies' nights,” fielded its own baseball team, and even branded tobacco and cigarette boxes. In 1911, the Club began accepting junior members between the ages of 21 and 23, offering them reduced dues and training from senior members, all in an effort to connect with colleges and engage younger performers. 

The Club also adapted to legal and social change. When Ohio adopted prohibition in 1912, the Club halted its alcohol sales, resuming only after repeal in 1933. Membership held steady at around 100 members, but it then dropped during World War II when 40 members left for military service. After the war, membership rebounded. In 1971, the Hermits voted to permit women to attend meetings and participate formally, though women had long been present at some social events and galas. 

A major physical change came in 1928, when the Hermit Club sold its original clubhouse as demand for office and retail space intensified on lower Euclid Avenue. The Club followed the eastward drift of Cleveland's entertainment district to Playhouse Square, building its new clubhouse at 1628 Dodge Court in a similar Tudor style to that of the original. Although Meade stepped down as the Club's president in 1938, the organization he founded continued to thrive. 

In more recent decades, the Hermit Club maintained its status as a private institution with roughly 100 dues-paying members. Its biggest modern transformation came in 2016, when a 50-seat public restaurant serving German cuisine opened inside the building. While most of the clubhouse remains private, the restaurant allows non-members to experience the space and learn about Cleveland's cultural legacy. The Club has also maintained its musical tradition, contributing performances honoring figures such as Judy Garland and Frank Sinatra. 

More than a century after its founding, the Hermit Club remains a living testament to Cleveland's artistic heritage. Like Playhouse Square, it nurtures a performance culture interwoven with civic engagement while providing a place for people to enjoy food and music.

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The Hart & Co. Building is located at 1235 West 6th Street in the Warehouse District and currently contains the Hat Factory Lofts and Richardson Design. The Hart & Co. Building was commissioned in 1888 by Elbert Irving Baldwin, one of the city’s oldest dry goods merchants, who came to Cleveland in 1857. The building’s first tenant was E. L. and F. W. Hart & Co., which leased the building until 1900. Hart & Co. was one of the most prominent millineries in a millinery market that ranked third in the nation (behind New York and Chicago) by 1895. Hart & Co. made hats for women and imported hats and materials from Europe. Hart & Co. sold straw, felt goods, feathers, flowers, ostrich plumes, ribbons, silk, velvets, ornaments, and other goods for making hats; many of these items the company sold made their way to the “far west and extreme south.” Furthermore, in 1897 it was reported that thousands of milliners (most of whom were women) came to Cleveland each year from Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, and Pennsylvania to see the latest spring hat designs.

On April 15, 1899, catastrophe struck Hart & Co. At noon, a fire erupted in the building occupied by Comey & Johnson behind the Hart & Co. Building. The fire threatened the entire block bounded by West St. Clair Ave and West Lakeside Avenues and West 3rd and West 6th Streets. Eventually, the fire spread to the Hart & Co. Building; by 1:00 p.m. the building was “doomed.” The heaviest loss was suffered by Hart & Co. whose building was a wreck, with damage estimated at approximately $75,000. In 1899, the building was rebuilt and redesigned by F. S. Barnum and Co. and Hart & Co. moved and rented out the Brush Building. It is unclear whether the entire building was destroyed or if only parts of it were destroyed. What is certain is the building suffered significant damage from the fire.

In 1900, the building was sold to Adams & Ford, a wholesale dealer in rubber goods that primarily made boots and shoes. In 1941, White Tool & Supply Co. bought the building and used it as a warehouse until 1983. White Tool & Supply Co. seemed especially prosperous in the 1950s. In July 1951, it was reported that the company sold more than $3,000,000 of tools, equipment and machinery each year. Business likely declined from the 1960s to 1980s as many of the businesses in Cleveland (and elsewhere) saw a decline due to deindustrialization and urban decline. Additionally, other factors that led to the decline of the machine tools industry included the failure to modernize/innovate, the failure to sell internationally, bigger companies buying smaller companies in the industry, and the dismantling of the iron and steel industry, which was linked with the machine tool industry. Hence, many buildings in cities became vacant/abandoned and left to deteriorate. The solution many cities implemented due to the crisis of deteriorating structures was demolition. From the 1940s to 1970s, approximately one-third of the buildings in the Warehouse District were cleared and replaced with surface parking. By 1980, 40 percent of the structures in the Warehouse District were gone.

In 1971, in response to demolition in Cleveland, the Cleveland Landmarks Commission was formed. The Landmarks Commission’s mission was to find architecturally and historically significant buildings in Cleveland and label them as landmarks to prevent their demolition. In April 1977, John D. Cimperman, head of the Landmarks Commission and Cleveland City Council member, revealed a plan for the Warehouse District that focused on reusing buildings through renovations and creating urban housing. Cimperman was aware of the historic value of the Warehouse District: it contained early commercial skyscrapers and much of the early wealth acquired in Cleveland was earned in the district. Cimperman summed up the situation best when he stated, “We need luck money, and cooperation, but saving and restoring this area is [a] must.” In 1982, the Warehouse District gained further protection from destruction. That year, Cleveland City Council established the Warehouse Historic District and the National Park Service approved listing the Warehouse District in the National Register of Historic Places. However, in 1983, White Tool & Supply Co. left the Hart & Co. Building, leaving its fate in question.

Luckily, on January 8, 1984, the Cleveland City Planning Commission approved an Urban Development Action Grant proposal for the building and in March, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development approved the application. This meant funds of $800,000 and a $2 million mortgage were approved to help restore and repurpose the building. The renovation was undertaken by the Old Cleveland Properties division of the Dalad Group and turned into an apartment building with thirty-three loft-style suites. The first floor was used as a commercial space where a restaurant and tavern were expected to be installed. Additionally, the developers tried to keep elements of the industrial history of the building but also made it look like a cozy residential space. In June 1985, the Hat Factory Lofts opened. Thus, the Hart & Co. Building began its life as the first legal housing unit in the Warehouse District. 

The transformation of the Hart & Co. Building into the Hat Factory Lofts was the first step in the spread of adaptive reuse in the Warehouse District. The Hat Factory Lofts was one of twenty-one buildings the Dalad Group planned to develop in the Warehouse District. Additionally, there were plans to establish pedestrian walkways and courtyards in the district to make it pedestrian friendly and to transform it into a mixed-use neighborhood. In 1987, Old Cleveland Properties undertook a $3 million renovation of the Hoyt Block, a four-story Victorian building. This led to the creation of eighty thousand square feet of retail space at ground-level and upper-floor offices. In 1988, Old Cleveland Properties made fifty-six apartments out of upper-story space in the Hoyt Block. In 1990, only three buildings in the Warehouse District had apartments: the Bradley Building, Hat Factory Lofts, and the Hart Building. Hence, the adaptive reuse of the Hart & Co. Building paved the way to revitalize the Warehouse District and served as part of the national trend to use adaptive reuse to save struggling cities like Baltimore, Minneapolis, and Pittsburgh. In the end, the Hat Factory Lofts tips its hat to the building’s first inhabitant, Hart & Co., through its name and architectural features, continuing to provide a sense of Cleveland’s past as the city continues to live on.

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William Hart (1811–1892) was born in Norwich, Connecticut, and migrated to the former Western Reserve with his parents and seven siblings in 1821 or 1822. Hart’s first experience in Cleveland was sleeping in the family’s covered wagon a couple of blocks west of Public Square, where they stopped on their way to the place they settled in Lorain County. About two years later, Hart’s parents both died within days of each other, orphaning eight children. In 1825, the same year that the Ohio & Erie Canal construction began, 14-year-old William moved to Cleveland to work as a cabinetmaking apprentice to Asabel Abel. After his apprenticeship ended, he opened his own small workshop and store at 49 Water Street near present-day Lakeside Avenue in 1834. That same year, he married and took up residence a block east of the shop on Bank Street.

The young cabinetmaker worked hard to provide for his younger siblings as well as for nieces and nephews that he and his wife adopted. Hart’s fortunes rose alongside Cleveland’s in the years after the canal launched the city’s upward arc of development, and in 1843 he moved just south to a larger building at 59 Water Street. By mid-century, William Hart & Co. was one of the six furniture wholesale houses that lined Water Street. However, soon thereafter, he suffered some setbacks. First, he nearly severed his arm in a circular saw accident in 1850, leading sympathetic voters to elect him City Treasurer, then a light job that enabled him to remain focused on his furniture business. Two years later, a fire destroyed his building and entire stock.

Undeterred, in 1853 Hart reopened briefly on Bank Street while he completed a larger four-story building at 103-105 Water Street (today 1370 West 9th Street). In 1868, two years after partnering with his son-in-law Hezekiah P. Malone to become Hart & Malone, he expanded to encompass the nine-foot-wide space between his building and the newly built Crittenden Block to its south. This became 107 Water Street (now 1374 West 9th Street). To match its cast-iron facade, he covered the old building with ornamental tinwork. This was at the height of the popularity of cast-iron facades, which also covered similar buildings erected in other cities in the 1850s-80s, perhaps most notably in New York’s SoHo and Tribeca districts. Hart also added a mansard roof on the fifth floor that further unified the two buildings. Today the facades appear more distinct because the older building’s tin facade was later removed to expose the brick.

In 1874, Hart & Malone was on the leading edge of an eastward shift of retailing when it moved from Water Street to 2 & 4 Euclid Avenue at the southeast corner of Public Square, lending higher visibility in what was on the cusp of becoming the heart of downtown. Hart & Malone probably struggled amid the economic downturn after the Panic of 1873. In 1875, Hart, who had already retired a few years before, left the business in the hands of an assignee and moved to Bradford, Pennsylvania, where he invested in the oil business, only to lose much of what remained of his onetime fortune. Meanwhile, his furniture store moved a block south to 15 & 17 Prospect Street just east of Ontario Street, where it continued to unload its remaining stock until it closed in 1877.

After the departure of the furniture business, the Hart Building saw a succession of business uses. Among the longest-running was the Cleveland office of Chicago-based Fairbanks, Morse & Co., a manufacturer of scales, engines, pumps, and windmills, which occupied the building in the 1880s to 1910s. After business declined on and around West 9th Street following World War II, the Hart Building became a part of efforts in the 1970s and '80s to revamp Cleveland’s so-called Warehouse District, including the ill-fated Lawrence A. Halprin plan for Settlers Landing. Jacobs Investments bought the Hart Building in 1984 and renovated its upper floors as apartments. As the district revitalized, the ground-floor space at 1370 West 9th became an antique store in 1988 and then housed two art galleries in succession in the 1990s to 2010s. Since 1995 the Hart Building’s five residential units have been condominiums. Its 1868 addition remains as a rare remnant of a time when the Warehouse District had many tall, narrow commercial blocks.

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In 1943, Central National Bank sold its slender 17-story headquarters building at 308 Euclid Avenue to the F. W. Woolworth Co., which later demolished the building for a much shorter retail store (now the House of Blues). The bank continued to lease space in the “matchstick” building until it opened its new headquarters in 1949 in five floors of the Midland Building at West Prospect Avenue and West 2nd Street. Central National also acquired property at 509 Euclid near the northwest corner of East 6th Street to build a “service bank” convenient for downtown shoppers. The separation of main operations from transient services was part of an emerging postwar banking trend in large cities. The bank's purchase of 509 Euclid prompted the termination of Clark's Paul Revere Restaurant's lease, ending the eleven-year run of this replica of the silversmith and Patriot Revere's Boston home. 

The new five-story, air-conditioned Central National Bank Euclid Avenue Office, designed by Conrad, Hays, Simpson & Ruth of Cleveland, opened with fanfare in November 1948. With its facade of imperial red Swedish granite, stainless-steel geometric panels, plate-glass windows, and six-foot electric clock, it could not have been more different from the rustic, log-sided Paul Revere Restaurant. As a Cleveland Press reporter observed, “modernity prevail[ed]” inside as well. The ultra-modern building featured the first “moving stairway” (escalators) to be installed in a Cleveland bank. Its first and second floor lobbies featured terrazzo floors, white oak paneling and furniture, and formica counters in the tellers’ cages under a "luminous ceiling" like that in the United Nations Security Council chamber at Lake Success, New York.

The new building’s cost ultimately exceeded its million-dollar budget by a quarter, leading Central National to lease most of the three upper floors to other firms to offset its expense. Less than four decades after it opened, Central National’s Euclid Avenue branch closed quietly in 1986 after being sold to Ohio Savings Association as a real estate investment. Ohio Savings also acquired adjacent buildings, giving it control of everything between the Arcade and East 6th. Ohio Savings in turn sold to developers who built a parking garage in 2005 and, in 2019, completed the Beacon apartments above it, lending a new ultra-modern look to the block.

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Located prominently on downtown Cleveland’s Public Mall A, the Fountain of Eternal Life, also known as the War Memorial Fountain, stands to honor the bravery and sacrifice of Americans lost in armed conflicts from the Spanish-American War to the present day. Envisioned as a memorial to Clevelanders lost during the Second World War and Korean War at the time of its initial dedication in 1964, the fountain has served as a site of reflection of Clevelanders' attitudes towards armed conflict as well as a subject of debate on historic preservation over the decades of its existence.

The Fountain of Eternal Life’s sculptor, Marshall Fredericks, was a graduate of the Cleveland Institute of Art and had served in the United States Army Corps of Engineers and the United States Air Force during the Second World War. As the conflict came to an end in 1945, several organizations and media outlets in Cleveland began formulating a plan to develop a memorial to honor local residents who were lost. By the end of 1945, the Cleveland Press had raised $104,000 through a public subscription drive, enough for the initial planning and sourcing of materials for a monument to take place and for Fredericks to be officially selected as the designer and sculptor of the memorial. By 1946, it was decided that the memorial, dubbed the War Memorial Fountain in the media, would be built on Cleveland’s Mall.

March 25, 1955, marked the official groundbreaking ceremony for the memorial. The event was highlighted by the first turning of dirt being performed by Cleveland’s then-mayor Anthony J. Celebrezze alongside the president of the Cuyahoga County Gold Star Mothers, Stella Stark. As the monument was initially planned ten years earlier as a memorial to Clevelanders lost during the Second World War, organizers already had to contend with the fact that another conflict, the Korean War, would have to be addressed upon the memorial’s completion. This restructuring of exactly which conflicts are being represented by the monument would be a constant throughout the memorial’s life.

As the monument’s development and construction continued beyond the initial groundbreaking, it would not be without some adversity. In 1959, the City of Cleveland held public hearings on a proposal to lease Mall A to build a skyscraping Hilton hotel. If approved, the memorial would have been forced to relocate, potentially undercutting its significance by not allowing for a prominent location to be held. Although some on Cleveland’s City Council highlighted financial upsides to the hotel’s existence on the Mall, voters ultimately rejected the plan in a special referendum, permitting development of the monument to continue.

After 19 years of preparations and construction, the memorial was ready to be officially dedicated. On May 30, 1964, thousands of residents and spectators descended on Cleveland’s downtown Mall for Memorial Day celebrations and the dedication of the “Press War Memorial Fountain,” which featured the Fountain of Eternal Life sculpture. The sculpture itself featured four large granite slabs and a towering bronze figure arising upwards out of flames and a sphere meant to represent the universe. In all, the monument towered 46 feet above the ground. Marshall Fredericks described his work on the sculpture, stating, “This figure expresses the main theme of the Memorial Fountain, namely, the spirit of mankind rising out of the encircling flames of war, pestilence, and the destructive elements of life, reaching and ascending to a new understanding of life. Man rising above death, reaching upward to his God and toward peace.” Placed around the monument and inlaid upon the granite labs would be inscribed bronze tablets containing the names of local residents who perished during the Second World War and the Korean War.

In the years following the fountain’s dedication, the site was consistently utilized as a location for parades and speeches in celebration of patriotic holidays and days of remembrance. However, coinciding with this continued use of the Fountain of Eternal Life as a place of honor was the entrenchment of the United States in another major armed conflict: The Vietnam War. By 1971, the fountain had transitioned from a location seen as primarily honoring Cleveland’s perished soldiers to one that often hosted rallies and protests against all war. News publications of the time often highlighted the symbolism of holding such antiwar gatherings around a sculpture that depicts a figure striving upwards for peace, as Marshall Fredricks had originally intended.

Moving into the 1980s, the Fountain of Eternal Life experienced yet another major evolution in its perception and meaning. On May 30, 1983, the 19th anniversary of the monument’s dedication, Plain Dealer columnist William F. Miller ran a story with the very provocative title “Memorial fountain in sad shape.” In this piece, Miller detailed the current condition of broken concrete, failed water pipes, and cracked granite across the basin of the fountain. Miller went even further in describing the cracked sidewalks and rusted-over trash cans in the immediate vicinity of the fountain, further detracting from any aesthetic quality or any attempt to convey the memorial’s meaning. By 1987, discussion amongst media publications and within City Council meetings regarding the possible removal of the Fountain of Eternal Life had sparked Marshall Fredericks himself to comment on the matter. Fredericks depressingly stated to a reporter shortly before the fountain's 23rd anniversary, “I spent my whole life… doing sculpture. But what’s the point of it all when the most important one I did in my life is about to be torn down.” Ultimately, plans to preserve the Fountain of Eternal Life moved forward, and by November 1989 the monument was being hoisted from its place in Mall A and taken to a local restoration center. The occasion, which occurred on November 6, 1989, was marked by a small performance from a United States Marine color guard, in which the soldiers saluted the monument as it was taken away.

The Fountain of Eternal Life was returned to its place atop the now-named Memorial Plaza in 1991. With this, the sculpture itself was rededicated and became the centerpiece of what would now be named the “Peace Memorial Fountain.” Moving forward to the end of the 20th century and into the 21st, the fountain continued to serve as a site for both military memorialization and occasionally for antiwar and peace rallies. In 2004, the monument was once again rededicated, with this occasion officially marking the site’s commemoration of Clevelanders lost in all conflicts from 1899 to the present day.

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More than 130 years after his death, Phineas Taylor (P. T.) Barnum remains a household word. Despite being a philanthropist, newspaper publisher, writer, legislator, and abolitionist, he is best remembered as a co-founder of the “Greatest Show on Earth,” a circus he didn’t launch until he was in his 60s. But long before that, at age 32, he birthed Barnum’s American Museum, a wildly popular mashup of live beasts, clowns, acrobats, jugglers, magicians, and musical acts. Less savory, but every bit as popular, were the museum’s human oddities—albinos, giants, little people, the physically malformed—as well as any number of hoax exhibits: a creature with the body of a monkey and the tail of a fish, a 10-foot human corpse, George Washington’s 161-year-old nursemaid. Located on Broadway in lower Manhattan, the museum’s outside was garnished with giant images of animals and other exhibits. From the roof, attendees could go aloft in a hot air balloon. To Barnum it was all about hot air. He was, after all, the godfather of hucksterism—the self-described “Prince of Humbugs.”

From its inception, Barnum’s creation was known as a “dime museum,” a live entertainment cousin of circuses, minstrel shows, music halls, burlesque and, eventually, vaudeville. In fact, many of vaudeville’s most famous names (Harry Houdini, the Griffin Sisters, Maggie Cline) began their careers in dime museums. Still, it was freaks and fakes that most likely attracted the masses. In his own way, Barnum also sought to educate the unwashed, to offer what he called a “moral education” proffered through lectures, concerts, and the importation of exotic (translation: “savage and inferior”) humans. This mission—concurrently enlightening, amusing, and horrifying audiences—was more or less unique to dime museums.

Barnum’s first connection to Cleveland came in November 1851, when he brought the uber-famous Swedish soprano Jenny Lind to Cleveland. More than one thousand people paid $4 (about $150 in today’s money) to see and hear her at Kelley’s Hall on Superior Street at the corner of Bank Street (now West 6th). By 1871, however, Barnum had a protégé—an adept and highly ambitious showman named Frank Drew. And it is because of Frank Drew that Cleveland got its first dime museum.

Frank M. Drew was born in New York City on June 30, 1852, and, like Barnum, seemed born for show business. An actor and circus performer, Drew was a cousin of theater legend John Drew Jr. and the eventual uncle of acting greats John, Ethel, and Lionel Barrymore. Drew’s father (also named Frank) was an actor who often performed at Cleveland’s Park Theater.

After splitting with Barnum in 1881, Drew opened his first dime museum in Providence, Rhode Island. By 1884, he had moved to Cleveland and opened Drew’s Dime Museum at 189 Superior Street, just east of Bank Street and around the corner from the Academy of Music. By the late 1880s, he would also launch dime museums in Columbus, Ohio, and Indianapolis.

Housed in the Commercial Building, a multi-use structure, Drew’s Cleveland museum was largely featureless on the outside. The interior, however, was ever so Barnumesque. A “thin dime” admitted enquiring Clevelanders who, upon reaching the building’s third floor, might come face to face with Felix Wehrle (“The Elastic Skin Man”), Eugene Ward (“The Footless Song-and-Dance Man”), Jo-Jo (“The Dog-Faced Man”), R. J. James (“The Ohio Fat Boy”), or even “The Fairy Dwarf Sisters.” Inert creatures—e.g., a two-headed cow—drew abundant stares. Drew also offered what was, at the time, mainstream entertainment: black-face (minstrel) acts, trained animals (generally old, toothless, and tired), and a variety of laugh generators. The Four Mortons, a popular family act, performed at the museum early in their careers, as did comedy legends Sam Bernard and Weber & Fields.

But true to dime museums’ dual mission, Drew also hosted plays, concerts, lectures, and other forms of what Walt Disney would later dub "edutainment." For example, Drew hawked displays of animals and exotic humans as “cultural explorations,” as well as living proof of westerners’ supposed superiority over “lowly beasts and primitive cultures.” Such attractions in this era of scientific racism included the February 1884 appearances of “Cetewayo’s Zulu Princess and Suite” and nine Australian Boomerang Throwers: “ferocious, treacherous, uncivilized cannibals and savages."

Fortunately, other forms of enrichment were less dubious: In August 1884, four of the seven survivors of the tragic 28-man Greely Expedition to Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic shared maps, curiosities, and stories. In January 1887, visitors were treated to a demonstration of clog dancing, followed by a concert featuring the Beethoven Quartet. And October 1889 brought to Drew’s a demonstration of shadowgraphs (silhouettes made by casting shadows from a bright light source) along with a visit from quarrelsome puppets Punch & Judy.

In late 1889, Drew closed his museum and became manager of the Star Theater on Euclid Avenue (opened two years earlier as The Columbia and now the site of PNC Center). In 1903, Drew also assumed management of the Cleveland’s Colonial Theater at Erie and Superior Streets. He eventually retired to Gerard, Pennsylvania, and later to St. Petersburg, Florida, dying in 1949 at the astonishing, stupendous, amazing, incredible age of 95 or 96.

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The Caxton Building is named after William Caxton, a 15th-century British printer who was the first person to introduce the printing press to England. Caxton was known for printing the earliest English-language version of the Bible, along with other classical works. The Caxton Building’s namesake reflected the original motivation for its construction. Stockholders of the Caxton Building Co., Worcester R. Warner, Ambrose Swasey, Samuel T. Wellman, Rollin C. White, Luther Allen, and Wilson M. Day were behind the building's planning and construction. (Warner and Swasey were already widely known as the principals of a major Cleveland machine-tool and telescope manufacturing company bearing their name; Allen was a founder of Cleveland's White Motor Corp.) Their leadership and vision helped the Caxton Building develop as an aggregated space for printing and publishing businesses by providing the necessary infrastructure to attract such firms. The creation of nodes or hubs of aligned businesses, including so-called "power block" buildings like the Caxton, was a common practice during the rise of American downtowns.

Designed by architect Frank Seymour Barnum, the Caxton Building is an outstanding example of Chicago School architecture, which was popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Completed in 1900, the building stands eight stories tall and is noted for its steel-frame construction, one of the earliest uses of this Chicago-born technology in Cleveland. This architectural style allowed for larger windows, a lighter appearance, and more flexibility in interior space, and the building’s reinforced concrete floors were especially suited to support the heavy equipment used by printing, publishing, and graphic design firms.

The arrival of enterprise publishers establishing their quarters in the Caxton Building soon fulfilled its developers’ hopes for it to become the recognized center for printing and publishing in Cleveland. The movement of the Chautauqua Assembly’s headquarters and publication office from Buffalo, New York, to the Caxton Building was a major milestone in the building's history and it brought a unique book publishing and magazine business in the city. Among the famous products developed at the Caxton Building were the Chautauquan (magazine), Engineers’ Magazine, Iron Trade Review, and the Jesuit Relations book series. Other notable printing businesses located there were the Cleveland Printing and Publishing Company and Arthur H. Clark Company, which specialized in historical and geographical publications. Perhaps the most famous Caxton Building business was the World Publishing Company, a major publisher of Bibles, dictionaries, and children's books, which was begun in 1902 by Alfred H. Cahen.

The Caxton Building was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1973 and a Cleveland Landmark three years later, solidifying its reputation as a historic building. As many publishing and printing firms closed or moved away, however, the building became largely vacant by the early 1990s. When the Gateway sports and entertainment complex arrived soon afterward, it spurred new business interest in the surrounding blocks. A well-timed renovation in 1994 gave the Caxton Building many much-needed modern updates while preserving its historic architectural features and well-lit interiors. In the years since, the building’s adaptability has enabled it to attract and new tenants, including architectural firms, law offices, digital media firms, design studios, and civic organizations. The Caxton Building is an excellent but rare example of how a building constructed for a specialized purpose adapted to changing needs while remaining a commercial and civic hub.

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In view of Progressive Field stands a historic landmark of Cleveland’s Lebanese community. Wedged between Aladdin’s Bakery and Market on its east flank and a double-decker parking garage topped by the statues of eight saints to its west, the twin-spired red-brick edifice of St. Maron Church offers a hint of a long-lost neighborhood that was once home to thousands of immigrants from the eastern Mediterranean before central-city redevelopment and suburbanization simultaneously pushed and pulled them away.

St. Maron Church, with close to 1,000 parishioners, is a Lebanese parish that follows the Maronite Rite, a liturgy recited in Syriac, a dialect of the Aramaic language believed to have been spoken by Jesus Christ at the Last Supper. The Maronite Rite is one branch of the Antiochene or Antiochian Rite that arose from St. Peter’s establishment of the Church of Antioch. Cleveland’s St. Maron is part of the Maronite Christian denomination, named for St. Maron, a 4th-century Syrian Christian priest who later became a hermit monk. His disciples went on to settle in the cedar-forested highlands of Mount Lebanon. The Maronites have been in communion with Rome since the 12th century but retained autonomous governance under the Patriarch of Antioch in Lebanon.

Lebanese and Syrian immigration to Cleveland dates as far back as the 1870s but was more pronounced in the 1890s and 1900s. Although they settled in various parts of the central city, most concentrated in the Haymarket District around what is now Progressive Field. Among the immigrants were more than 100 Maronite families, who formed the St. John Maron Society in 1914 to raise money to establish their own parish. In 1915, they succeeded in forming St. Maron Church in an 1870 two-story brick apartment building they purchased at 2214 East 21st Street just north of Cedar Avenue. The parish converted the building into its church with an upstairs rectory. Fr. Peter Chalala of Baalbek, Lebanon, served as St. Maron’s first pastor for its first six years. The congregation had four subsequent pastors over the thirty-two years after 1921. The longest-serving pastor, Fr. Joseph Komaid, a missionary originally from Sahel Alma, Lebanon, served the church for twenty-five years (1927-1952).

Under Fr. Komaid’s leadership, St. Maron acquired the former St. Anthony Church at 1245 Carnegie Avenue in 1939. St. Anthony, an Italian parish, had formed in 1886 and met in a small wood-frame building on Ohio Street (Central Avenue) until it was able to build a large Romanesque-style church on Carnegie in 1904. As the Haymarket neighborhood it served experienced an outmigration of parishioners, St. Anthony merged with St. Bridget’s, an Irish parish on East 22nd Street off Scovill Avenue, in 1938. St. Anthony sold its Carnegie Avenue church property to St. Maron the following year. St. Maron held its dedicatory mass, followed by a banquet at Hotel Carter, on April 7, 1940.

Over the years, a flourishing St. Maron expanded even as it faced some challenges. The congregation built a rectory in 1951 and renovated the church four years later, adding new stained-glass windows. In 1971, it had to repair substantial damage inflicted by a bomb that detonated inside a car parked in the East 13th Street alley between the church and Middle East Bakery (later Aladdin’s), which had been the target of three bombing attempts since it opened the previous year. In the early 1980s the church undertook the second major renovation and built a new administration building along its rear on Bronson Court. In the 1990s, St. Maron continued to attract an increasing number of parishioners, which necessitated additions to the church in 1997 and again two years later. The opening of Jacobs Field (now Progressive Field) west of St. Maron made parking more difficult for parishioners, leading the church to demolish its social hall in 1998 for a two-story garage that could ease access for churchgoers while raising money through event parking.

Continued congregational growth led the “landlocked” church to pursue building a larger church in Independence on land once occupied by Marcus A. Hanna II’s Rhea-Mar country estate and, later, the Sisters of the Good Shepherd’s Marycrest convent. When the suburb’s government tried to block St. Maron’s plan in 2007, citing drainage concerns, the parish sued and won the right to build. Thereafter, the church initiated a long-term building fund and has since used the Independence property, christened Maronite Village, for its administrative office, chapel, and community events such as its annual Middle Eastern Food Festival even as it continues its tradition of Sunday mass along downtown’s southern edge.

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Cleveland’s Greek population, only 6 in 1890 and 42 ten years later, soared to near its peak of 5,000 before immigration restrictions in 1924 imposed low quotas for further newcomers from Greece and other eastern Mediterranean nations. A smaller but still sizable community of immigrants had also come from what are now Lebanon and Syria. So many Greeks settled in the Haymarket district around the Central Market that the enclave that some Clevelanders referred to this area as "Greek Town." Some Greeks worked as fruit and vegetable peddlers, others as day laborers or steelworkers. Over time, a number became storekeepers, bakers, and proprietors of coffee houses and wholesale import grocery houses selling everything from olives to dried devil fish. Bolivar Road emerged as the social center for Greeks, its numerous coffee houses serving as places where Greek men sipped coffee or tea, shared hookahs, gossiped, played cards, dominoes, or barbouth, and caught up on news from their homeland. Yet even as Greek Town lost more and more Greek residents to Tremont and neighborhoods along East 79th Street in the years after World War I, its businesses remained a magnet drawing them back both to buy goods and socialize.

By the early 1940s, Plain Dealer columnist S. J. Kelly lamented that he “found Bolivar Road sadly depleted of its Greek. It is, in fact, a modern business thoroughfare and most of its classic residents are scattered over the city.” In the postwar years, as so many Clevelanders departed for the suburbs, remnants of ethnic communities beckoned as “old and colorful” anomalies in a downtown increasingly dominated by office towers and parking garages. As Bolivar Road transitioned from a complete neighborhood to the central business district for Greek, Lebanese, Syrian, and Palestinian populations that were now spread across the metropolitan area, it also gained greater popularity beyond these communities. A succession of "Grecian-American" restaurant-clubs at 714 Bolivar — The Athenian, Grecian Nites, and Never On Sunday — enticed patrons with belly dancers and bouzouki music. Middle East Restaurant, opening in 1962, introduced many Clevelanders to Middle Eastern cuisine. The restaurant’s proprietor, Edward Khouri, a native of Aramoun, a village near Beirut, built a loyal clientele with inexpensive, authentic dishes prepared and served by Josephine Abraham, also Lebanese. As Abraham later recalled, pita and hummus were so exotic to many customers when she started at the restaurant that she had to instruct them on how to use pita to eat hummus; “It was like feeding babies,” she quipped.

In 1973, the Greek and Middle Eastern businesses on Bolivar Road, along with the L&K Hotel, a single-room-occupancy hotel for “down-on-their-luck men,” fell to the wrecking ball to make way for a parking lot, which was later replaced with a garage for Progressive Field and Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse. Plain Dealer columnist George Condon echoed S. J. Kelly’s lament of three decades before, complaining that “downtown is diminished again.” While the Middle East Restaurant and Shiekh Grocery were able to find space in and next to the Carter Manor (formerly the Hotel Carter), other businesses dispersed. Today there is no sign of the Greek, Lebanese, and Syrian enclave on Bolivar. Greek culture revolves more around churches such as Tremont’s Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church. However, on nearby Carnegie Avenue, St. Maron Church and Aladdin’s Bakery and Market still offer visible reminders of where Cleveland’s Middle Eastern communities got their start.

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Samuel L. Mather, the grandson of one of the founding fathers of the Connecticut Land Company whose investment had led to the establishment of Cleveland, co-founded the iron-ore mining and shipping firm of Pickands, Mather & Co. in 1883, which helped him amass a new fortune on top of his already formidable wealth. Pickands Mather had kept offices for only a short time in the Perry-Payne Building on Superior Avenue when Mather commissioned the Chicago architectural firm of Burnham & Root (already known locally for its Society for Savings Building) to design a headquarters office building on land that he and John Hay had purchased on the northwest corner of Superior and Water Street (now W. 9th).

The aptly named Western Reserve Building occupied a triangular parcel on the crest of a steep hill descending into the flats along the river. The land had once been home to the Carter Tavern, a hewn-log inn that early Western Reserve of Connecticut settler Lorenzo Carter had built in 1803. Following Carter's death in 1814, Phineas Shepard operated the inn for an unknown span of time, and it was the site of the meeting in 1816 that organized Trinity Parish, later Trinity Episcopal Cathedral. After it closed, deeds show that Carter's children Alonzo and Laura sold the land to the Oviatt family in two transactions in 1825 and 1830. By 1828, the Oviatts had replaced the old two-story inn with a three-story brick building that stood until Orson M. Oviatt razed it for a new four-story commercial block called the Franklin Buildings in 1835. The Franklin Buildings housed various dry-goods houses and professional offices, including the men's clothing store of George A. Davis, who owned the block from 1851 until his death ten years later.

The Franklin Buildings later housed Western Union Telegraph Company, which added "innumerable adornments of fencing and wires which surmount[ed] the electric ridden structure," according to an account in the Plain Dealer in 1886. Three years later, Hay and Mather, the executors of Amasa Stone's estate, purchased the property in the estate's name and set out to redevelop it. (Hay's and Mather's wives Clara and Flora were Stone's daughters.) Following on the heels of the Perry-Payne Building, the announcement of a new building to replace the Western Union block was a welcome news to those who feared Euclid Avenue's inroads. As the Plain Dealer pointed out in 1889, "Enough is now promised in the way of new buildings to save the street from becoming what it had at one time threatened to do—a street for banks and the wholesale trade plentifully mixed up with saloons."

Mather’s new eight-story pressed-brick and sandstone Western Reserve Building, which opened in 1892, is considered a transitional skyscraper. Like Burnham & Root’s Monadnock Building in Chicago and Cudell & Richardson's Perry-Payne Building, it had traditional load-bearing masonry exterior walls but also incorporated some interior steel framing, a recent innovation. On the ground floor, the Western Reserve Building featured pink sandstone piers capped by Romanesque capitals and a large Romanesque arch framing its Water Street entrance. Its upper floors had either rectangular, segment arch, or full arch windows, some of them in oriel bays. Samuel Mather had an elaborate cherry-paneled office inside. 

In addition to Pickands Mather, the Western Reserve Building housed American Steel & Wire, Cleveland-Cliffs Iron, Island Creek Coal, and other shipping, mining, and manufacturing concerns. The building’s uses reflected business leaders’ desire to locate offices in the Wholesale District (later renamed the Warehouse District) close to Cleveland’s harbor. The riverside location was also attractive to the U.S. Weather Bureau. On May 1, 1892, Cleveland’s weather observatory and signal station opened there, 135 feet above the street, giving it a commanding view of the lake and river. From this lofty perch, signalman and weather observer W. B. Stockman hoisted flags to alert ship captains and downtown pedestrians to impending changes in the weather. The station had previously operated on top of the six-story Wilshire Block on Superior Avenue a block and a half west of Public Square. Now it was another beneficiary of Mather’s eagerness to be closer to the harbor.

In 1903, the Western Reserve Building was expanded northward along Water Street with an interior lightwell that may have drawn inspiration from Burnham & Root’s Rookery Building in Chicago or perhaps from a similar feature inside the Perry-Payne Building. The expansion increased the original building's size by about 40 percent. The building flourished into the 1920s, but like other buildings west of Public Square, it faced increasing competition from newer ones that rose to the east along Euclid Avenue. In 1924, Mather sold his interest in the Western Reserve Building to the Union Lennox Company, a firm named for the mammoth Union Trust Building that had recently replaced the Lennox Building on the northeast corner of Euclid and East 9th. Soon after, Pickands Mather moved its headquarters into the Union Trust Building. With the loss of its identity as a hub of the city's iron-ore business and the rise of newer, larger skyscrapers, the Western Reserve Building's future was in question.

The Western Reserve Building changed hands twice during World War II and, under Louis E. Goldman, it underwent a modernization in 1947 that covered its Romanesque arch entrance with a blocky granite façade. Despite this effort to renew its appeal, over the next three decades, the building stood sentinel over a part of downtown that was gradually decaying and receding in civic importance. Toward the end of that time, Goldman was no longer able to attract tenants, so the building sat mostly vacant. The exception to the rule was the opening in 1970 of the Cleveland Urban Learning Community, an experiment by St. Ignatius High School that took advantage of cheap rent to place its headquarters in the Western Reserve Building.

The Cuyahoga River’s east bank had been a natural place for Samuel Mather to envision an office building housing his iron mining and shipping business in the early 1890s. Although seemingly less natural, Herbert W. Strawbridge, chairman of the Higbee Company department store, felt a similar pull toward the western edge of the derelict Warehouse District nine decades later. Several years earlier, Strawbridge had visited San Francisco’s Ghirardelli Square, a shopping, dining, and entertainment complex filling the shell of its namesake chocolate manufacturer’s former factory. As Higbee’s downtown store sales slipped, Strawbridge recalled Ghirardelli Square. Then he hatched a daring plan to buy a swath of property overlooking the river and create a similar venue. Settlers’ Landing, as it would be named, would evoke Cleveland’s start along its river and, like Ghirardelli Square, reuse existing buildings as much as possible. More importantly, Strawbridge reasoned, Settlers’ Landing could draw large numbers of tourists and suburbanites back to a sagging downtown—and hopefully to Higbee’s.

Among the properties that the newly formed Higbee Development Corporation bought through agent John H. Bustamante was the Western Reserve Building, which Goldman was doubtless thrilled to unload in 1973. Strawbridge then hired Lawrence Halprin, the man behind Ghirardelli Square, to plan Settlers’ Landing. Higbee Development sank $4.5 million into a full renovation of the Western Reserve Building in 1974-76. The results drew a mixed response locally. Some decried the sandblasting that pitted the delicate sandstone facade. Others looked askance at the similarly insensitive treatment of the building’s interior. To avoid removing any leasable space, Higbee Development enclosed the historic lightwell to add an interior fire escape, heating and cooling ducts, and new restrooms on each floor. Halprin’s designer Angela Tzvetin created a modern lobby with “domed brick vaults” and spiderweb-like iron designs between their pillars, leading one architectural critic to dub the “corny” concept “early wine cellar.” The same critic went so far as to suggest that the Western Reserve Building was “second-rate Burnham and Root” that would have been better off bulldozed.

When the Western Reserve Building reopened in 1976, it seemed that the building had a new relevance as the Flats transitioned from maritime to leisure uses, but renewal was slow and difficult. Higbee’s operated a sandwich shop off the lobby while it searched (ultimately in vain) for a full-service restaurant to assume the space. At the time of the opening, only 1,220 of 53,840 square feet of office space was leased. Then Higbee’s plans for Settlers’ Landing collapsed after a major fire consumed some of the buildings the company had hoped to renovate. Despite efforts to promote the building, including hosting an exhibit and slideshow as part of the 1977 sesquicentennial of the opening of the Ohio Canal, the Western Reserve Building underperformed expectations. Coupled with Higbee’s expenses from opening new stores at Euclid Square and Randall Park malls, its renovation of Pickands Mather’s onetime headquarters building contributed to record quarterly losses that year. By 1981, the building was reportedly at 97 percent occupancy, but Higbee’s needed an infusion of cash, so it sold the building to another syndicate headed by developer John Ferchill.

Though Settlers’ Landing had flopped, the Flats and Warehouse District boomed in the 1980s. Nightspots, restaurants, and loft apartment conversions reinvigorated an area that earlier downtown planners had largely forsaken in their fixation on Erieview. It was too late for Higbee’s, which sold out to Youngstown developer Edward J. DeBartolo and the Little Rock-based Dillard’s chain in 1987 (though the Higbee’s name survived another five years). As for the Western Reserve Building, it flourished anew. Among the firms based there was Those Characters from Cleveland (now CloudCo Entertainment), a subsidiary of Cleveland-based American Greetings that formed in 1981 to develop and license characters developed by the card company such as Holly Hobbie and Strawberry Shortcake. That year saw Cleveland artist Elena Kucharik’s creation of the Care Bears, making the Western Reserve Building the birthplace of one of the 1980s’ popular culture icons.

Ferchill and his partners undertook yet another renovation in 1990 and built an eight-story addition to the north that doubled the size of the 1892/1903 building. The sandstone- and microcotta-faced addition featured a new arched entry, while the syndicate uncovered and restored the long-hidden one on the original building. After initial success, the enlarged building gradually languished again. By 2016, it was two-thirds vacant and in foreclosure, leading Ferchill to sell it the following year to WRB Partners (comprised of developer Fred Geis, real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield, and others). During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Western Reserve Building clung to its original function as an office building in a new era marked by the loss of downtown office-based work and a spate of office to residential conversions. In addition to attracting a global co-working company, WRB Partners added to its amenity-driven approach to combatting the loss of traditional dedicated office work by doing what Higbee’s had tried and failed to do fifty years earlier: entice a restaurant operator. In 2023, the popular Cleveland Heights-based Luna Bakery opened its third cafe on the building’s ground floor.

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The historic land upon which the Perry-Payne Building at 740 W. Superior Avenue stands, and much of the land that surrounds it in Cleveland's Warehouse District, was first commercially developed by the Nathan Perry family. Nathan Perry Sr. (1760-1813) was an innkeeper in western New York's Genesee County when, in 1796, he was hired by Moses Cleaveland to provide food supplies to the surveying party that founded Cleveland. Almost a decade later, he, his wife Sophia, and their children moved here. In 1806, Perry purchased six acres of land northwest of the Public Square. On that land, which had frontage on Superior, St. Clair and Water (West 9th) Streets, Perry opened a trading post in a cabin that stood less than fifty feet from where the Perry-Payne Building stands today. 

Nathan Perry, Sr. was one of Cleveland's first merchants. Less than a decade after arriving in Cleveland, however, he died unexpectedly. Four of his six acres, including the land upon which the Perry-Payne Building stands, passed to his son Nathan Perry Jr. (1786-1865), who transformed his father's trading post into a dry goods store and, in 1819, replaced the cabin with a two-story brick commercial building, one of Cleveland's first. Nathan Jr. operated his dry goods business in that building until 1826, when he sold the business but retained ownership of the building and the land upon which it stood.

In addition to running his dry goods business, Nathan Perry Jr., as early as 1814, had been making shrewd purchases of land in Cleveland, and, by 1830, he had become one of the city's wealthiest landowners. In that latter year, he moved his family from the simple frame house they had lived in on Water Street, just north of his dry goods store, into an early-era mansion on Euclid Avenue. It stood where Berkman Hall stands today on Cleveland State University's campus, just east of East 22nd Street.

In 1835, Perry decided to lease some of his land near the corner of Superior and Water to two hardware merchants, William Cleveland and Elisha Sterling. The terms of their two leases—drawn up by a young Cleveland lawyer named Henry B. Payne—required them to construct two three-story brick commercial buildings on the land they leased. Each of the two brick buildings they built had two storefronts. The buildings with their four storefronts became known as the "Central Buildings" because the corner of Superior and Water was then the center of Cleveland's commercial business district. It was in these buildings that William Bingham, George Worthington, and other prominent early Cleveland merchants, who were mentioned in the Plain Dealer article of April 15, 1888, got their business start.

As important as the Central Buildings were to the enlargement of Nathan Perry Jr.'s real estate portfolio, lawyer Henry B. Payne, who drafted the leases that required they be built, would soon become even more important. In 1833, Henry B. Payne was a law student in Hamilton, New York, when he was impelled to travel to Cleveland to help nurse his best friend, Stephen A. Douglas, who was suffering from a severe illness. Douglas, who later became the Illinois Senator whom Abraham Lincoln famously debated in 1858, left Cleveland after recovering. Henry Payne chose to stay. Payne completed his law studies here and, in 1836, when Cleveland officially became a city, Henry Payne became its first solicitor. In August 1836, Payne, who had in 1835, as noted above, served as Nathan Perry's lawyer, married Perry's only daughter, Mary, who thereafter became known to all in Cleveland as Mary Perry Payne. 

Henry Payne practiced law in Cleveland for more than a decade before he decided to leave the practice. In 1849 he joined forces with Alfred Kelley and Richard Hilliard to build Cleveland's first railroad, the Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati ("CCC"). In the process, he became that railroad's first president. In 1855, Payne turned his attention to government service and was appointed to the City Waterworks Commission. It built Cleveland's first waterworks system. Then, in 1862, he took on the work of chairing a city sinking fund board which reportedly stabilized Cleveland's finances for years. Henry Payne also became active in local and state politics. He served in a number of Democrat party positions, before being elected in 1874 to the United States House of Representatives. A decade later, in 1885, he was elected Ohio's first United States Senator from Cleveland.

It was during the second year of Henry Payne's term as a United States Senator that local newspapers reported that Senator Payne was planning to build a new commercial building on Superior Avenue that would be named the Perry-Payne Building.  Different reporters and different historians writing in different eras have speculated differently as to the reason why Henry Payne named the Perry-Payne Building as he did. They all, however, may have been looking to the wrong person for an answer to their question.

When plans were made to build the Perry-Payne Building, the land upon which it was to be built was owned by Mary Perry Payne. The decade of the 1880s was one in which American women were beginning to acquire greater property rights, including the right to own, develop and dispose of real property in their own name. Henry B. Payne was uniformly said to be a progressive person of kind disposition who had a very loving marriage with Mary Perry Payne. Given all of the foregoing, there is no reason not to believe that Mary Perry Payne, probably with her husband's full support, was the person who chose the name of the building that was to be built upon her land. So perhaps the question that we should ask today, even if it was not asked by newsmen in 1887, or by historians thereafter, is: Why did Mary Perry Payne choose to so name her building? While we do not know the answer to that question with any degree of certainty, it might be as simple as that was where she first met Henry Payne.

In proceeding with their plans to build the Perry-Payne Building, Henry and Mary Perry Payne selected Cudell & Richardson, one of Cleveland's most prominent late nineteenth-century architectural firms, to design it. Cudell & Richardson, in additional to this historic building, also notably designed the following buildings still standing in Cleveland: St. Stephen Roman Catholic Church on West 54th Street; Franklin Circle Christian Church at 1688 Fulton Road; Belden Seymour Block at 2513-2525 Detroit Avenue; Franklin Castle at 4318 Franklin Boulevard; the George Worthington Company Building at 802-832 W. St. Clair Avenue; the Root and McBride Building at 1220 West 6th Street; and the Bradley Building at 1212-1224 West 6th Street. Additionally, Cleveland's Cudell Commons Park and the city's Cudell neighborhood are both named after Frank Cudell, one of the two named partners in that architectural firm.

The building Cudell & Richardson designed for Henry and Mary Perry Payne was described in a June 19, 1887 Cleveland Leader article. It was to be constructed "of brown stone and granite, in the Rennaissance style of architecture. The side and rear walls will be of brick. . . . The floor joists will be of iron and the floors fire clay tile. . . . [T]he stairs will be made of iron and cement or marble. Iron balconies will be provided on the fifth and seventh floors." The article stated that the building would be "eight stories high in the middle and seven on either side, with a basement. It will have a frontage of 138 feet, a depth of 100 feet, and will be 120 feet high." The article noted that the first floor of the building would be designed for the offices of banks, and the upper floors would have a total of 46 offices with an average size of 18 x 26 feet.

Other articles noted that the interior of the building would feature an eight-story interior court illuminated by a sky light. (The design of this light court, as well as the building's front facade, were reminiscent of Chicago's Rookery Building designed by Burhnam and Roots.) Other interior features of the Perry-Payne Building were its modern elevators and mail chutes that carried mail from all of the building's upper floors down to a first floor mail room. Designed with interior iron support columns, the Perry-Payne Building is notable architecturally as a transitional building between earlier buildings with masonry support walls and later buildings, including the Society for Savings Building erected just one year later, having interior steel support beams which enabled them to be built to great heights and led to them becoming known as "skyscrapers."

Construction of the Perry-Payne building commenced in the summer of 1887 after all of the old commercial buildings on the site had been razed. While construction was expected to be completed in 1888, financing difficulties encountered by Henry and Mary Perry Payne appear to have delayed completion of construction until the summer of 1889. The first tenants of the Perry-Payne Building included Bingham Hardware and National City Bank, who opened their offices in the new building on July 1, 1889.  When the Perry-Payne Building opened, it was the tallest and most grand commercial building in Cleveland, and it attracted many of the largest iron ore, coal, and shipping companies in Cleveland as tenants. It also attracted a number of Cleveland law firms, including a new firm named Squire, Sanders and Dempsey (today, Squire, Patton and Boggs), which has since become one of the city's largest and most historic law firms. 

In the first two decades of its existence, even as larger and grander commercial building went up in downtown Cleveland, the Perry-Payne Building continued to attract more than its fair share of Cleveland's coal, iron, and shipping-related businesses, as well as a number of law firms and insurance companies. However, almost all of its core tenants departed after 1913 when Marcus Hanna's son Dan completed his construction of the enormous 15-story Leader Building on the corner of Superior Avenue and East 6th Street. Thereafter, for decades, the Perry-Payne Building survived with much less than full occupancy.

During its early years, ownership of the Perry-Payne Building remained with the Perry-Payne family and their descendants through the Perry-Payne Company formed in 1899, several years after the deaths of Henry and Mary Perry Payne. However, in 1945, that company sold the Perry-Payne Building to another corporation that was unrelated to the family. The building had many new owners in the years that followed and these new owners struggled to find and hold onto tenants. Then, in 1965, the State of Ohio leased the entire building for a number of its agencies with offices in Cleveland. This, however, only temporarily solved the building's occupancy problems for, in the summer of 1979, the State agencies departed when the new Frank J. Lausche State Office Building, directly across the street, opened.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, the owners of the Perry-Payne Building struggled anew with occupancy problems. In 1994, however, a new partnership purchased the building, hired an architectural firm known for its restoration work, and proceeded to restore the front facade of the Perry-Payne Building; renovate the remainder of it; and convert it into an apartment building with 91 apartments and 8,000 square feet of retail space. As of the writing of this story in 2024, the Perry-Payne Apartments remain a prestigious address in downtown Cleveland's Warehouse District.

If Mary Perry Payne were alive today and learned that her Perry-Payne Building had been converted into an apartment building, she might say that it really didn't matter, so long as Clevelanders today believe, as she and her husband and Clevelanders of her generation more than a century ago believed, that the Perry-Payne Building stands at a place of historic memory.

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The Home in the Sky was a 39 x 31 foot, two-story, six-room, Colonial-style house erected by Building Arts Exhibit Inc. in a 51-foot-tall open court on the 17th and 18th floors of the Builders Exchange Building. A gallery on the 18th floor enabled close inspection of the house's second story and roof. The house showcased the latest building materials, home decoration and furnishings, all surrounded by a landscaped lawn and additional "Building Arts" displays. The Home in the Sky emerged from plans by the Builders Exchange in the late 1920s. In cooperation with the American Institute of Architects Cleveland Chapter and the Better Homes Association, it held a statewide contest in 1929 to design the house. Fred J. Abendroth of Dunn & Copper Architects in Cleveland won first prize, beating about 2,500 other contestants. The house’s conservative design mirrored that of the nearby Terminal Tower, which mimicked 20- to 30-year-old skyscrapers in New York and Chicago rather than embracing the modernism of Art Deco.

The house's conservative architecture was perhaps best evoked in the Cleveland Builders Supply Company’s explanation of the use of “Cleveland Rustic” face brick for much of the exterior: “Vision, with closed eyes, a home of brick nestled amongst groups of trees and masses of flowering shrubs; a home, not glaringly new in appearance, but reflecting the softened, weathered touch which is Nature’s gift alone; a home redolent with the atmosphere and age-old glamour which typifies the architecture of our forefathers. This pictures, briefly, the effects created by ‘Cleveland Rustics’ in ‘The Home in the Sky.’”

The May Company’s home decorating department furnished the Home in the Sky. The house’s first floor featured a vestibule with coat closet; a living room with a bay window, a fireplace, and wooden mantel flanked by bookcases with a door opening onto a garden porch; a dining room; a modern kitchen with the latest electric appliances and a breakfast nook. The second floor included a stair-hall, three bedrooms with closets (one of them a nursery), and a green and mauve bathroom. In the basement was a pine-paneled recreation room with a fireplace, bright-red leather lounge chairs, and laundry with “electrical labor-saving devices designed to lighten the work on the modern home-maker.”

Visitors were free to roam the house on their own or to take a guided tour led by Florence LaGanke, who also served as the exhibit’s director of women’s activities. They could not only see a range of materials and furnishings in what the Plain Dealer called "a doll's house for grown-ups" but also obtain expert advice on construction, furnishings, home management, and even landscaping and gardening techniques. WTAM also broadcast a regular biweekly program from the exhibit to explore such topics. Clubs were also welcome to reserve space for their meetings.

In its first year, the Home in the Sky attracted 300,000 visitors. As novel as the Home in the Sky was, however, the Builders Exchange wanted to ensure that there was always something new to see so that Cleveland’s would make return visits. In May, as Clevelanders’ attention turned to the outdoors, it debuted a “summer cottage” and horticultural exhibition on the 18th floor and partnered with a number of local organizations to offer an eight-day gardening clinic. To make the garden as useful as possible, the exhibit builders hauled in tons of soil donated by gardeners all over Cuyahoga County and representing common types in the Cleveland area: “Raw Parma subsoil that has not seen the light of day for 6,000 years is there. Then there is well worked clay loam from the W. G. Mather estate, prize winning garden soil from Lakewood, the much maligned but fertile soil of downtown Cleveland, sands of Euclid Avenue, clay of the Heights. Your soil will be represented,” one newspaper article assured. The exhibit also displayed a flagstone terrace, a hedgerow, shrubs, and a backyard garden with “onions, spinach, beets and other homely vegetables.”

For a time, updates continued. In the fall of 1930, the Home in the Sky received a top-to-bottom refurnishing, this time by Higbee’s. The following spring, it opened a new exhibit called Sky City, a model streetscape lined by rows of homes exhibiting “building products in their proper settings.” It also featured the “Court in the Sky,” a courtyard to showcase different floor materials. In 1934, Kinney & Levan assumed responsibility for furnishing the Home in the Sky, along with the newest addition to the Builders Exchange exhibit, the American Institute of Architects Cleveland Chapter–designed “House of Tomorrow.” However, coverage of the Home in the Sky exhibit dropped precipitously thereafter. Occasional mentions suggest that it remained open but was not promoted. In 1941, the Builders Exchange moved to Euclid Avenue and East 18th Street and Sherwin-Williams took over its former space to house some of its operations formerly handled at its Canal Road facility. It is not recorded how the Builders Exchange dismantled the Home in the Sky.

The Home in the Sky was surely one of the nation's most ambitious demonstration houses because of its novel location atop a skyscraper. But downtown Cleveland also saw several other demonstration houses in the 1930s. Four of them appeared on the grounds of the Great Lakes Exposition in 1936. Two of those served as commemorative replicas of the log cabins that had once housed early settler Lorenzo Carter and future President James A. Garfield. (Local interest in commemoration had led civic leaders to build a log cabin on Public Square for the city’s 1896 centennial and would later inspire a replica of Carter’s cabin in the Flats on the occasion of the U.S. Bicentennial in 1976.) In contrast, the other two were showcases for the home construction and real estate industries. Nestled between City Hall and the Cuyahoga County Court House were a small brick demonstration house built by Cleveland Builders Supply Co. and a large wood-frame, columned mansion constructed by the Cleveland Lumber Institute and furnished by the Halle Bros. Co. The Halle House invited visitors to see how they could recapture the flavor of colonial Virginia in their own homes by shopping Halle’s. In 1939, yet another demonstration house, this one sponsored by the American Legion, opened to the public on Euclid Avenue at East 21st Street in front of the Legion’s headquarters (now the site of CSU’s Student Center). Known as the Low Cost Demonstration Home, the diminutive Cape Cod measured only 28 x 26 feet and surely reflected the harsh reality that a decade of depression posed for the building trades.

Two decades later, the city’s building trades had a new reason for downtown demonstration homes. Unlike in the context of the Great Depression, when the Builders Exchange attracted Clevelanders to the city center in hopes of inspiring them to build new homes on the suburban periphery, by the 1950s, civic leaders were grappling with the consequences of outward population movement for the central city. In 1955, on the cusp of federal urban renewal, the National Retail Lumber Dealers Association unveiled Operation Demonstrate on the Mall, adopting the slogan “Live Better Where You Are.” The organization split in half and hauled two “age-blacked shells” of houses from Charity Avenue (a street that would in a few years be obliterated for the St. Vincent urban renewal project) to the Mall, where they were rebuilt and renovated to become Operation Demonstrate’s Traditional House and a Contemporary House. After the demonstration ended, the houses were put up for sale, to be moved by the buyer. Ultimately, the houses were loaded onto a barge at the foot of East 9th Street and ferried fifty miles west to Huron, Ohio.

The Home in the Sky, along with other demonstration houses, was a symbol of the ascendancy of the idea of housing as a consumer product. Fearing the effects that the Great Depression (and, later, urban decay) might have on homeownership, those with a profit stake in the private housing market used demonstration houses to entice the public into a marketplace with countless materials and products that might make the American Dream their reality. In that sense, a visit to the Home in the Sky was not unlike how people today browse Zillow, watch HGTV, or visit the Home & Garden Show at the I-X Center for home buying, remodeling, landscaping, and gardening inspiration.

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