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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Standing at 2227 Payne Avenue just east of downtown Cleveland is a building whose exterior is unlike any other in the city. Its two-story façade is deeply concave and dominated by five vertical panels of block glass windows beneath high-relief, Art Deco-style letters, perhaps ten feet high, reading “In Union There Is Strength”. In 1949, when the building was completed and the labor movement in America was approaching its postwar zenith, probably most people would have recognized the words as a rallying cry to join and support labor unions. Today, after decades of decline suffered by organized labor, probably most passersby are merely puzzled by these words.

In fact, the union which built this impressive headquarters, designed by local architect Milo Holdstein, was the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, once a pillar of the local and national labor movements. It was named the Sidney Hillman Memorial Building in honor of the founder and long-time president of the union, who had died in 1946 at the age of 59. However, the “Amalgamated,” or ACWA, which organized workers in the men’s clothing industry, began declining in membership and resources soon after this building opened, and, in 1999, fifty years later, the union, a mere shadow of its former self, abandoned the building, which has been, since 2004, the Norma Herr Women’s Center, an emergency shelter for homeless women.

Sidney Hillman and his colleagues founded the Amalgamated in 1914, following a revolt of more socialist-minded locals against the conservative leadership of the United Garment Workers, and by the next year, 1915, the new union was active in Cleveland. Apparently the first years here were difficult ones for the union; it made some headway among the smaller “shops,” or production units, but a Cleveland delegate to the 1918 national convention pleaded that a Bohemian and an Italian organizer be sent to Cleveland to help with the organizing (he claimed that 75% of the workers here were Bohemian).

A 1919 “general,” or industry-wide, strike resulted in a 44-hour work week, increased wages, and union security in many of the Cleveland shops, and a seven-week strike in 1921 against the Douglas Tailoring Co., which had shops in Akron and Canton as well as Cleveland, resulted in the union’s greatest organizing victory during its early years here. A young shop steward from the Douglas Co., Beryl Peppercorn, the son of a Jewish tailor from Austria whose family immigrated to Cleveland around 1900, was to emerge as the head of the local union; Peppercorn was not only the Manager of the Cleveland Joint Board of the Amalgamated from 1922 to 1958, but he was also instrumental in forming the first CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations) unions in Cleveland during the 1930s and in fighting Communist domination of these unions during the early 1940s.

Regardless of its successes in the smaller shops, the union’s welfare depended critically on its ability to organize the city’s three largest garment manufacturers, Kaynee, Joseph and Feiss, and Richman Brothers. Interestingly, all three were owned by Jewish entrepreneurs and developed national reputations for their progressive labor policies. Kaynee, which employed around 700 workers at its main plant on Aetna Avenue in the Slavic Village neighborhood, produced mainly boys’ clothing. Its factory contained, remarkably, a day care center, recreation room, dance hall, and movie theater, as well as medical and dental clinics, and an outdoor playground.

Likewise, the Joseph and Feiss Co., which employed some 2,000 workers at its West 53rd Street plant, combined scientific management and progressive welfare policies, resulting in well-lit and well-ventilated work spaces, work chairs and tables redesigned to maximize comfort and minimize injury, plus company-sponsored dances, choruses, athletic clubs, and more; in addition, Joseph and Feiss introduced the five-day, forty-hour work week in 1917, before Henry Ford did so in Detroit. Richman Bros., operating out of a 65,000 sq. ft. factory on East 55th Street, offered its thousands of employees two weeks (later three) of paid annual leave, paid maternity leave, interest-free loans in times of need, and many other benefits.

The union had made concerted efforts to organize both Joseph and Feiss and Richman Brothers since 1926, but it was not until 1934 that they could claim success at Joseph and Feiss. The firing of a worker for union activity resulted in a walkout, picketing by as many as a thousand employees, and finally, after intervention by Hillman, a vote inside the factory on whether the workers preferred the Amalgamated or the pre-existing company union – a vote won overwhelmingly by the ACWA. Later that year, the union called a strike at Kaynee, and after a two-month strike marred by violence and the company’s temporary closing of the factory, the company agreed in January 1935 to a contract providing union recognition, wage increases, and other benefits.

The one firm which the Amalgamated could never organize, despite thirty years of trying, was Richman Brothers. Management of this firm had always tried to achieve a work environment suitable for its big “family” of employees, and toward the end of the union’s efforts, in the early fifties, it complained that “the union plan has been one to crush our business. We think this is wrong…to put this kind of pressure on our family.” Beryl Peppercorn reported to the 1950 convention that Richman Brothers remained unorganized, but he was hopeful the new union label program would lead to falling sales for the firm and an eventual union victory. The union also shifted its organizing efforts to the company’s 64 retail outlets, which employed 800 workers, compared with 2,500 at the East 55th factory, and began picketing around half the stores in 1951.

This picketing prompted an amusing response from the Plain Dealer, whose editors wrote in June 1951 that “the ACWA organizers are by no means stupid. They realize that the Richman Brothers Co. would be a big, fat, juicy plum…The Richman Brothers Co. is not having labor troubles with its employees and never has had troubles with them. The union, its mouth watering for the juicy plum, is simply trying to gobble up a good thing.”

With the defeat of the union efforts at Richman Bros. in the early fifties, the Amalgamated began a process of slow decline not long after the Sidney Hillman Building was opened. New plant technology, changing markets, and much cheaper labor, first in the American South and then overseas, spelled the death knell of the local industry. In 1952 Aetna International bought a large share of Kaynee Co. stock and then sold it to Piedmont Shirt Co. of Greenville, S.C., which closed the Cleveland factory in 1958 (the building no longer stands). In 1969 Richman Brothers merged with F.W. Woolworth, which liquidated the Cleveland firm and closed the massive factory in 1992 (the factory still stands empty after many failed proposals for redevelopment). Finally, in 1995, Joseph and Feiss closed its doors after 150 years in Cleveland, and the main factory building was razed in 2003, though the office building was spared and redeveloped in 2017 as Menlo Park Academy, a charter school.

And as the industry declined locally, so did the union. It first merged with the Textile Workers Union in 1976 to form ACTWU, the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, which then merged with the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union in 1995 to form UNITE, the United Needle Trades, Industrial, and Textile Employees, and then, in 2004 merged with the Hotel and Restaurant Employees (HERE) to form UNITE HERE. A dissident group broke from UNITE HERE in 2009 to form Workers United, a union which represented around 150 workers in Brooklyn, Ohio, producing expensive men’s suits under the Hugo Boss label until that facility, too, was closed in 2019.

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Cleveland once ranked as one of the nation’s leaders in garment manufacturing, thanks in large part to the Cleveland Worsted Mills. An immense sight in its heyday, the plant suffered years of neglect and decline after its closure, until a fire destroyed much of the complex. Today the industrial giant is largely forgotten, but the impact it had on Cleveland and environmental laws has remained.

In 1878, Joseph Turner started the Turner Worsted Mill, renamed the Cleveland Worsted Mill in 1902. The Cleveland Plant, located at 5932 Broadway Avenue, handled every aspect of the worsted cloth process, from scouring and sorting wool to boiling the cloth. At the height of production in the 1920s, the mill ran more than 500 looms and consumed 25-35,000 pounds of wool daily.

As one of the leading employers of the area's large immigrant population, namely Poles and Czechs, the company expanded rapidly. In 1908 it completed a $200,000 addition, including a six-story brick steel factory building and a three-story office building. To ease employee concerns about safety, it constructed exterior stairways and elevator shafts in the new building and also added elevators in existing buildings. With the addition the facility became the second largest plant for worsted production in the country.

Despite its national recognition and financial success, the company had a difficult relationship with its employees. In 1934, the plant closed for almost three months due to striking over union discrimination. In 1937, complaints were made against the company for “terrorizing and intimidating employees” to keep them from joining the Textile Workers Organizing Committee and workers again went on strike for a few weeks. Striking broke out again in August 1955, brought on by a breakdown in talks between company officials and the Textile Workers Organization. Rather than continue talks, Cleveland Worsted Mills chose to liquidate its assets in January 1956.

Although the company was gone, disaster struck the plant again in 1993. In April, investigators found 100 barrels of potentially hazardous materials left improperly stored in the warehouse complex. The material was found to be flammable and reports state the building had no working sprinkler system. Investigators determined that the barrels would remain in the building until they knew what they contained and who was responsible for them as there was some dispute over who owned the property. While city officials were trying to determine who owned the property, an arson fire destroyed the complex on July 4. City fire officials were aware of the danger the barrels within the mill presented and had already devised a plan to fight the blaze they correctly figured was inevitable.

As a result of the fire, new laws were put in place with tougher punishments for environmental offenders. It became a crime for companies to walk away from a site without cleaning up contamination. Moreover, the courts could force them to pay for the cleanup, and any damage incurred was the company’s responsibility. Environmental nuisances were added to the state's nuisance abatement laws that allow the state to take over such properties.

The city spent $3 million to clean up the debris from the fire and fill in the land. A few years later, it became the Boys and Girls Club of Cleveland. The organization runs a recreational and educational site on more than five acres of the 12.5-acre complex.

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At the turn of the 20th century, Cleveland already had its own version of today’s Donald Trump. Oliver Mead Stafford may have come from money, but he also had a talent for making and raising it, while he ceaselessly strived to keep up with the Joneses—or more precisely, the Rockefellers, Wades and Hannas of the city. He led a range of successful businesses, sat on many influential boards, and was always a prominent, if not extravagant, philanthropist. Despite his efforts, some rather questionable, he never quite rose to the lofty heights of Cleveland’s more famous business elite. His family proved frequent sources of disappointment and concern for him, and soon squandered the fortune and sullied the legacy he diligently created. Today, his name still graces a successful insurance firm he started, and a work of art he proudly commissioned remains on the wall of a Cleveland church, but the driven and successful Cleveland businessman never quite emerged from the shadow of his illustrious neighbors, and he is now largely forgotten.

Stafford was born February 7, 1851, at the family house on the corner of Broadway and Forest Street (now East 37th). Although he would never serve, there was always a strong commitment to the military in the Stafford family. His father, Jonas, was a veteran of the War of 1812, and both of his uncles lost their lives in the Civil War. Stafford’s wife, Maude Evelyn Frankland Fish, was even a cousin of Lincoln’s irksome general, George McClellan. His youngest son Frankland left college in order to enlist during World War I, and Frankland’s own son would later be captured by the Japanese in the Second World War and spend the entire war as a POW at a camp in Java. The family’s strong military allegiance surely played a role in the discipline and mental toughness Stafford displayed in his own business activities.

Always an elitist, Stafford disdained higher education for mere commoners, and believed the path to success was found through experience, dedication and hard work. He arrogantly proclaimed these attitudes in a page-long ‘how-to-succeed-in business’ article for the Cleveland Plain Dealer in February 1912. Although he felt very few would benefit from extended education, he sent both of his own sons to Yale--ostensibly to capitalize on the connections they would make there.

As a young man, Stafford ventured west for a short time to serve as a teacher on the frontier, but soon returned to Cleveland where his father installed him in menial positions throughout the real estate firm, E. Fish & Company, hoping Oliver would work his way up and succeed him in the organization. This is a practice Stafford took to heart, and he later did the same with his own sons. He certainly benefitted from the head-start his father’s success provided him, but by the time Jonas had died in November 1873, in the same house Oliver was born in almost 23 years before, he was already establishing himself as one of the city’s up-and-coming businessmen.

Stafford had already struck out on his own by 1883, when he conducted a succession of real estate deals where he seems to have been uncannily proficient at buying properties at relatively low prices and quickly selling them for substantial profits—some might say, too uncannily, but nothing illegal was ever proven. He is perhaps best remembered as the president of the Cleveland Worsted Mills Company. He was instrumental in re-organizing the then, Turner Worsted Company in 1895, when it was valued at just under $43,000. He took over the company by 1902, and just a decade later Worsted Mills was worth $5 million. His tenure there often demonstrated the power he had attained and his willingness to wield it, sometimes questionably. In 1909, Cleveland’s reformist-minded mayor Tom L. Johnson accused him of stealing thousands of dollars of the city’s water to supply the factory, but the lawsuit was dropped when Herman Baehr defeated Johnson in the ’09 election and somehow agreed with Stafford that, though the city water supply had been tapped, it was for emergency purposes only, and was therefore acceptable. Stafford also threatened to close the hugely successful enterprise immediately if the woolen duty was lowered, as congress proposed, in 1905. The tariff, and the company, remained.

Besides running Worsted Mills, Stafford started the insurance firm OM Stafford, Goss & Bedell. When it merged in 1920 with another firm to become Brooks & Stafford Company, still operating in Cleveland today, it was the largest insurance business between Philadelphia and Chicago. He founded and served as vice-president of both the Broadway and the Woodland Avenue Savings and Trust banks, was a director of Canfield Oil Company, president of Market Street and Storage, president of the Cleveland Public Library, treasurer of St. Alexis Hospital, and was a charter member of the Cleveland Chamber of Commerce. He was also the long-time superintendent of the Broadway United Methodist Church. In 1924, he commissioned the artists, Armando Vandelli and Vittorio Guandalini, who had just finished restoring Leonardo’s Last Supper in Milan, to recreate the masterpiece on the wall behind the altar of the church. It was the only life-sized replica in the United States, and Stafford clearly intended it to be the enduring stamp of his legacy.

By the time of his death, just eight months before the stock market crash in 1929, the hopes of that legacy enduring were dim. His beloved son and chosen successor, Oliver Jr, had died in the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1919. Frankland replaced him in the family business, but would scandalize the city when his first wife divorced him on January 12, 1934, and he immediately remarried a former Worsted employee less than two weeks later. Although Stafford left an estate appraised at $886,313, little of it was left after a long probate battle finally ended in the 1980s. His Last Supper sits in the now-shuttered church, almost as ignored as he is—an ignominious end to Cleveland’s version of The Donald.

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In 1888, Charles Eisenman and Jacob Kastriner pooled their resources to create a company that would provide boys with quality shirts and washtogs. The company was originally named the Kastriner and Eisenmann company but underwent a number of name changes before finally in 1914 settling on Kaynee, a phonetic spelling of the founders' surname initials.

From the very beginning Kaynee offered employees a number of benefits and services that are unheard of in most companies of today’s world. There was a staffed day care free for all employees and workers could visit the children on breaks. In addition to a large cafeteria and kitchen for employees, there was also a recreation room for various indoor games and activities, most notably exercise. A large area was used primarily as a dance floor but could also be transformed into a motion picture theater. The company used this area to host a number of dances and concerts for their employees in efforts to promote company loyalty.

The company also invested in improving the welfare and education of all employees. Medical and dental offices were located on the premises, providing inexpensive and convenient healthcare for employees and their family. Employees could choose to participate in continuation school, the expense taken care of by the Kaynee Company, in order to further their education in avenues related to the business and work they were performing.

In 1915, the company donated a play area to the neighborhood, equipped with tennis courts, a baseball diamond, and sand boxes for younger children. The company looked to improve conditions under which children in the district grew up. This generosity was not altruistic as much as it was a strategic business decision. A company representative stated, “All that Kaynee does is done in the cause of better business. Children who are brought up in the open grow into better men and women, and the better men and women are, the healthier they are- the better employees they will make.”

Kaynee was also able to find a way to promote itself while simultaneously supporting children’s education and astuteness. From 1940 to 1953, Quiz Kids was a popular weekly show in which a panel of children were asked a series of trivia questions and gave very detailed answers without the help of calculators or notes. Kaynee used the show to promote their line of boys clothing in commercials and started a new Quiz Kids line. Kaynee also sponsored a contest for boys to write in why they wanted to be a quiz kid and the winner would be featured on the show.

Despite the plethora of welfare programs available to employees, problems arose. Workers began pushing for unionization at the behest of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. On November 8, 1934, workers began a strike for unionization. A majority of the employees refused to strike or join the union and was thus susceptible to attacks by strikers. Despite what union leaders claimed, a large number of employees did not walk out; the plant entrances were barred by the picket line and they were unable to begin work. On November 12, Kaynee announced the closing of its Cleveland plants and cancelled all orders placed for delivery. The decision came in the wake of brutal attacks on their employees when riding to and from work and even at their homes. The strike ended January 1935 when the two entities reached an agreement that provided collective bargaining, reinstatement of workers without discrimination, equalization of work, and a reconsideration of wage rates.

The company quickly resumed production and continued operations peacefully until the 1950s. Aetna International bought a large share of stock in 1952 and later sold it to Piedmont Shirt Co. of Greenville, South Carolina. Piedmont bought out the company in 1958 and soon closed both plants (the other being in Williamsburg, Kentucky), putting around 600 employees out of work. The company is still in operation today but is known as Rifle Kaynee and is based in New Jersey.

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The Richman Brothers Company was originally founded by Jewish-Bavarian immigrant Henry Richman Sr. and his brother-in-law and business partner Joseph Lehman in Portsmouth, Ohio, in 1853. In an effort to become closer to a bustling city, both to expand their operations and customer base, the two men relocated with their families and business to Cleveland, Ohio, in 1879. Originally named the Lehman-Richman Company, the operation took on the moniker the Richman Brothers Company in 1904 after both Henry Richman Sr. and Joseph Lehman had retired and transferred ownership of the company to Henry Sr.’s three sons Nathan, Charles and Henry Jr.

After having a presence in the region for nearly forty years, the Richman Brothers Company commissioned their first Cleveland factory to be built at 1600 East 55th Street after previously retrofitting their operations into several other pre-existing structures throughout the city. Designed by The Christian Schwarzenberg and Gaede Company and constructed by Hunkin-Conkey Construction Co., the building was designated the “Best Built Factory in Cleveland in 1917” by the Cleveland Chamber of Commerce. Later additions were added onto the structure in 1924 and 1927, which completed the 650,000 square feet of interior space still present on the site.

The factory quickly became a landmark on the East 55th Street landscape as a result of its domineering size, both inside and out. With fifteen-foot-high ceilings, large-scale windows, and even the world’s largest cutting tables at the time, measuring sixty feet long, the structure provided Richman Brothers’ employees with working conditions previously unheard of in the garment industry.

Not only were Clevelanders familiar with the building, so, too, was the federal government. After entry into World War I, the federal government approached the brothers with a proposition to turn the site over to a military occupation to be used as a hospital for returning injured soldiers. After only one year of owning the building, in 1918 the Richman Brothers readily agreed to allow the government to utilize the structure as needed, making Cleveland the first city in the country to place such a building at the government’s disposal without expense.

Their commitment to the war effort was just one element of the Richman Brothers’ reputable business practices. As a family owned and operated company, the Richman Brothers ensured that each person under their employ felt as though they were part of a family. The first industrial organization to do so, the Richman Brothers Company offered two weeks paid vacation for all employees. Similarly, the company also instituted paid maternity leave, set a thirty-six hour work week, utilized no time clocks, and offered corporate stock options. To assist employees during times of personal distress, The Richman Brothers Foundation was created which provided no interest loans to employees as needed. The brothers were viewed as such progressives that the federal government based many workplace regulation laws off of Richman standards.

The Richman Brothers also tirelessly fought to keep the unions out of their company. Pressures mounted around the middle of the twentieth century, which resulted in the company releasing a statement saying, “The union plan . . . has been one to crush our business. We think this is wrong . . . to put this kind of pressure on our family.” Confident in their business practices, the Richman Brothers believed the union to be unnecessary and felt it would restrict the benefits they were able to offer their employees.

While the name of the company implies that all three brothers were equally in control of the company, it is Nathan Richman who is credited with maintaining the company’s standards and growing the business into one of the largest men’s clothing retailers in the country. At the time of his death in 1941, two thousand employees gathered at the open-casket services to bid farewell to the last surviving Richman brother.

After Nathan’s death the company remained under the ownership of one of his nephews, who continued to successfully grow and expand the business. In 1969, the Richman Brothers merged with F. W. Woolworth Company, who kept the Richman brand viable for another three decades. As the industry changed sharply in the late 1980s, the bloated conglomerate Woolworth began to shutter some of its subsidiaries. In 1990, the Richman Brothers Company was deemed financially unstable and was completely liquidated by 1992. Since that time, the structure on East 55th Street has remained vacant with many unsuccessful reuse projects proposed to redevelop the site.

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If your ancestor was a Czech or Italian immigrant who lived on the west side of Cleveland, there's a good chance he or she worked at the Joseph & Feiss Company, or at least had a relative or close friend who worked there. A Cleveland business since the mid-nineteenth century, Joseph & Feiss was by 1930 the oldest garment manufacturer in the United States. It employed thousands of immigrants and second and third generation Americans at its mammoth plant on West 53rd Street. They worked there until Hugo Boss, the large German concern which had purchased the company in 1989, closed the Cleveland plant in 1998, transferring the remaining workers to another plant in the Cleveland suburb of Brooklyn.

Joseph & Feiss was founded in 1841 by Caufman Koch, a Jewish immigrant from Bavaria who moved his clothing business from Meadville, Pennsylvania to Cleveland in 1845--at a time when a lot of merchants, following the completion of the Ohio Erie canal a decade earlier, were moving to the fast-growing city on Lake Erie. In the early years, he operated a small shop at various locations downtown, procuring the garments he sold from immigrant tailors who worked out of their homes in nearby Cleveland neighborhoods.

One of those early contract workers was Frank Jindrak (1850-1926), a Bohemian immigrant who came to Cleveland with his parents in 1854 when he was just 4 years old. In 1860, when he was 10, his father pulled him out of school and put him to work at home making garments for Mr. Koch's business. This was the beginning of Jindrak's 60-year association with Joseph & Feiss. For the first ten years he worked out of his house, and, then when the company began to transition to the factory method of operation in 1870, Frank became a cutter in a factory for the next 50 years. The company honored him with a dinner in 1920, and there he told those present a story about the early years of the company. During the Civil War, when he was just a little boy, Frank would travel downtown to the company's offices then on Superior Avenue near West 6th Street, bringing with him clothing that he and his father had made. Caufman Koch would greet him at the door, take the clothing from him and say: "Well, Frank, what do you want now?" "All the money," young Frank would respond. Koch would then laugh and feign indignation: "Oh, no! You can't have it all. We need some of it for ourselves."

Frank Jindrak's story probably got some good laughs at that 1920 dinner. But, in addition to being humorous, it was allegorical for one of the most important issues for industrial businesses like Joseph & Feiss in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Labor-Management relations. Prior to 1909, Joseph & Feiss was a typical garment manufacturer of that era, paying its employees as little as possible and working them for as many hours as hard it reasonably could. But in that year, Richard Feiss, son of Julius Feiss (the "Feiss" in Joseph & Feiss), became factory manager. While living in Boston from 1897-1904 and obtaining his undergraduate and law degrees from Harvard University, Feiss had become a disciple of Frederick Taylor, the well-known industrial efficiency engineer of the late nineteenth century. When Feiss returned to Cleveland, he set out to manage the company's work force in a manner that would maximize productivity but at the same time create a humane work environment that would keep workers healthy and happy. According to Cleveland State University historian David Goldberg, Feiss accomplished this by joining together Taylor's principles of scientific management with Progressive era welfare capitalism, establishing a work environment at Joseph & Feiss that many at the time viewed as the most progressive in America.

Feiss, with the assistance of Progressive era reformer Mary Barnett Gilson whom Feiss made head of the company's employment and services department, redesigned the chairs employees sat on and the tables they worked upon to reduce injury and fatigue; provided employees with well-lit and well-ventilated work areas; sponsored employee dances, picnics, choral societies, clubs, orchestras, and athletic programs; provided medical and counseling services; established employee savings programs; awarded promotions based on performance; and increased wages. In addition, in 1917, Feiss introduced the five-day work week for employees at the company's plant, several years before Henry Ford, often cited as the first industrial employer in the United States to do so.

Perhaps it was progressive policies like the above that kept Joseph & Feiss a non-union shop in the decades of the 1910s and 1920s--a time when garment manufacturers in New York, Chicago, and elsewhere were fast becoming union shops. It wasn't until 1934, during the Great Depression and almost a decade after Richard Feiss was forced out of the company in 1925 by his father and older brother, that the American Clothing Workers of America, finally won the right to bargain for and represent the garment workers of Joseph & Feiss.

Joseph & Feiss would remain one of Cleveland's largest employers for another five decades, employing over 2,000 employees at its West 53rd Street plant throughout this period. Eventually, however, new plant technology, cheaper labor sources, and changing markets ended the company's 150-year run in Cleveland. In 2003-2004, several years after the plant closed operations, the main factory building was razed, leaving on the site today only the company's office building on West 53rd Street and its massive warehouse building near the intersection of Walworth Avenue and Junction Road. In 2015, the warehouse received new life when it was purchased with the intent to make it the new home of Menlo Park Academy, a public charter school for gifted children. After $17 million in repairs and renovations, the school opened its doors in the historic building in the Fall of 2017.

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Upon entering the Tower Press building from Superior Avenue, one can not help but notice "The H. Black Co." engraved in tile over its doors. The Black family, enterprising Hungarian Jewish immigrants, decided to produce ready-to-wear clothing based on European patterns. The business began in their own home, and by 1883 Herman Black founded the H. Black Company as a manufacturer of women's coats and suits.

Morris Black, Herman's son born in 1868, became a designer in his father's company in 1890 after graduating from Harvard University. In 1903, Morris succeeded his father as president of the H. Black Co. He would go on to become responsible for turning Cleveland into a national leader in the garment industry, second only to New York in importance. In 1907, Morris moved the H. Black Co. from its original location in the Warehouse District to a state-of-the-art facility on Superior Avenue - what is now known as the Tower Press Building.

Morris Black believed that factories should be productive as well as pleasant workplaces for his employees. Black and architect Robert Kohn built a factory that provided attractive surroundings, proper ventilation, and ample lighting for his workers. The building consists of a two-story central wing connected by two three-story wings forming a "U" shape. In the rear of the building is a tower, square at the base and rising to become an octagon. When the Tower Press building was constructed, the surrounding area was mostly frame houses or undeveloped land. By the 1930s, however, the area became an emerging garment district, home to notable garment companies such as Bobbie Brooks, Inc., Joseph & Feiss Co., Cleveland Worsted Mill, Richman Brothers Co., and Printz-Biederman.

Morris Black served as president of the H. Black Co. until 1922, when the company merged with the Printz-Biederman Co. Printz-Biederman was founded in 1893 by Moritz Printz, master tailor and head designer of the H. Black Co. Black, however, continued to have an impact on the garment industry as head of the Cleveland Garment Manufacturer's Association, where he attempted to stabilize the garment industry by making agreements with labor unions, allowing for the impartial arbitration of workers' grievances during strikes.

On June 6, 1911, the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) staged a massive strike. Four thousand of Cleveland's garment workers took to the streets to protest unfair working conditions. Workers demanded a 50-hour work week with Saturday afternoons and Sundays off, but employers rejected their demands. The often violent strike lasted four months but ultimately failed as manufacturers were still able to fill their orders using smaller, non-union shops. Though the ILGWU eventually gained recognition and conditions gradually improved, the decline of Cleveland's garment industry, which began during the Great Depression and climaxed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, led to the loss of most of these jobs.

In 1928 the H. Black Building was renamed the Evangelical Building, becoming home to a publisher of religious materials. It housed a variety of tenants in the succeeding years, but by 1987 the building was vacant and remained so until 2002. Since then, the building has been remodeled, providing 8,000 square feet of retail and office space on the ground level as well as apartments on the upper levels. The 130-foot-tall tower has been turned into five floors of living space. It takes a climb of over 100 steps to reach its top.

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