In the wake of the Civil Rights movement, the Hough Riots broke out in Cleveland in 1966, bringing attention to the predominantly African American community’s need for change. Growing racial tension between blacks and whites crippled Hough, like similar racially transitioning neighborhoods in many cities in the 1960s. Father Albert A. Koklowsky, pastor of Our Lady of Fatima Parish, heard the plea for reform.

Father Koklowsky was born in Clifton, New Jersey, and attended St. Joseph’s Preparatory Seminary in Holy Trinity, Alabama, in 1929. He was ordained in the Order of Missionary Servants of the Most Holy Trinity in 1944. Father Koklowsky worked at parishes in North Carolina (1946), Mississippi (1953-1958), and Puerto Rico (1958) prior to being transferred to Our Lady of Fatima.

Our Lady of Fatima Church was founded in 1949 and was built where the former League Park movie theater stood across Lexington Avenue from League Park. The first pastor to serve the church was Rev. Raymond Smith. In 1958, the Missionary Servants of the Most Holy Trinity took charge of Our Lady of Fatima Parish. Father Koklowsky was transferred to Our Lady of Fatima Parish in 1963 to serve the members of the growing Spanish-speaking Puerto Rican population that St. Agnes Church was not able to serve. The two parishes later merged to form St. Agnes–Our Lady of Fatima.

Father Koklowsky’s goal for the Hough community was to help rehabilitate housing and assist African Americans with job training and placement. Sister Henrietta Gorris C.S.A. and several nuns from the Sisters of Charity assisted Father Koklowsky. They began their work in Hough by educating the residents with techniques on how to keep their houses and themselves clean. They later began to work on housing projects on Lexington Avenue.

The first renovation that Father Koklowsky worked on was an apartment complex attached to Our Lady of Fatima’s rectory. Father Koklowsky turned the apartment complex into a convent and community center. This project would provide new housing for Sister Henrietta and three other nuns belonging to the Sisters of Charity of St. Augustine. He would later refurbish housing on Lexington Avenue for members of the community. These residents would pay rent to HOPE Inc.

Father Koklowsky started HOPE Inc. in 1965, a private non-profit developed for projects that the city of Cleveland was unable to assist. Father Koklowsky’s weekly column in the Catholic Universe Bulletin provided the goals and visions he had for Hough to be achieved through HOPE Inc. This column was entitled “a voice from the slums” and would feature the story of a different person in the community each week. The readers of the column learned how they could help those who lived in Hough.

The column readers assisted Father Koklowsky and Our Lady of Fatima by donating and raising funds to restore houses or initiate public programs. The parish also utilized the publicity generated through the Plain Dealer to gain funds and create connections with contractors and lawyers, who donated their time to assist Father Koklowsky and Our Lady of Fatima with their project.

Father Koklowsky was transferred to Sacred Heart Chapel in Lorain, Ohio, on September 1, 1969. He left behind the foundations of housing rehabilitation through his private non-profit HOPE Inc., which was underfunded. HOPE Inc. clung to life until the 1980s when it faded into obscurity, but was far from completing its task of revitalizing Hough.

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Many would argue that the heart of Cleveland's historic Polish community lies at St. Stanislaus Church and in Slavic Village on the southeast side of the city. But there is so much more to Cleveland's Polish community than this one church and that one branded neighborhood. In search of housing located close to where they found work in Cleveland's booming late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries industry, Polish immigrants clustered in at least six distinct neighborhoods in the city, each of which they colorfully named either after the church which they built there or to remember a city in Poland dear to them. One of these Polish neighborhoods was Josephatowa, located on the northeast side of the city--very near to where Asiatown is today. It was named after the St. Josaphat Roman Catholic parish established there by Polish immigrants in the early twentieth century.

Polish immigrants began arriving in numbers in this neighborhood in the early 1890s, finding work at a number of factories and mills that were built near the tracks of the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern, and Pennsylvania Railroad lines. One of these was the mammoth Otis Steel Works (later purchased by Jones & Laughlin) which in the second-half of the nineteenth century built a complex of mills, warehouses, and office buildings that eventually stretched for more than a half mile along the lakefront from East 25th Street to East 40th Street. Poles who worked at Otis Steel, or at other nearby factories or mills, first found housing on Lakeside and Hamilton Avenues, much of it built and first occupied by other ethnic groups, including Irish, Germans, Slovenians and Croatians. From there the colony spread to other streets south of Lakeside.

In the early years, Poles worshiped with Lithuanians at St. George Lithuanian Catholic Church at the corner of East 21st and Oregon (Rockwell) Avenue. But when that parish moved to a new location further east, Poles living in the neighborhood sought and in 1908 received permission from the bishop to form their own parish. At first named after St. Hedwig, the parish was soon renamed St. Josaphat to distinguish it from the identically-named Polish parish founded in Lakewood's Birdtown neighborhood in the same year. For almost a decade after the founding of the parish, masses were held in the chapel at St. John's Cathedral. Then, in 1915, the parish's second pastor, Rev. Joseph Kocinski, undertook to construct a church building on several lots which the parish had purchased several years earlier on the east side of East 33rd Street, between Superior and St. Clair Avenues. The new church, which was designed to seat 800 at church services, was completed in 1917. One of its stained glass windows depicted a fifteenth century battle scene in which a Polish army defeated the German Teutonic Knights. That stained glass window was said to later become a source of irritation for one of Cleveland's bishops who was of German descent.

Like many other Catholic parishes founded by East European immigrants, St. Josaphat had periods of growth and decline. Early in its history it experienced a precipitous drop in membership when a number of Polish immigrants returned to Europe, followed by others who departed to attend St. Stanislaus in the Warszawa neighborhood to the south. But the church persevered, reaching a peak population of approximately 1,000 parishioners in the late 1930s. But then, as large employers like Otis Steel moved their operations away from lakefront, as small industrial shops "invaded" some of the residential streets, and as people began to move from the neighborhood to the suburbs, the church suffered a decline in its membership from which, this time, it did not recover. In 1966, the elementary school closed and three decades after that, in 1998, the church itself was closed by the diocese.

St. Josaphat might have met the fate of other shuttered inner city Catholic Churches, which struggled to find a new use after closing, but fortunately that was not the case. In the same year that it closed, a Croatian immigrant, Alenka Banco, who had grown up in the neighborhood, happened to drive by the church while furniture was being removed. Intrigued, she contacted the diocese and learned that the church was for sale. A patron of the arts who had already opened two art galleries in Cleveland, Banco made an offer to purchase the church. While, according to church officials, it had received higher dollar offers for the property, Banco’s offer was deemed the best, and was accepted, because she proposed to devote the church property to a community use. Banco moved into the former rectory on the property and, with a business partner, began making repairs and renovations to the church building which she renamed Josaphat Arts Hall. In late 2005, she opened Convivium33, an art gallery, in the former church building. One Cleveland journalist with an eye toward turning a phrase said that the historic Polish church had been purchased, and saved, by an angel.

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The Episcopal congregation of St. Paul's in Cleveland made its third stop on its eastbound journey at the southeast corner of Case Avenue (East 40th Street) and Euclid Avenue in 1876. Founded in 1846 at the American House Hotel at Superior Avenue and West 6th Street, St. Paul's held services in rented rooms until it completed a frame church at Sheriff (East 4th Street) and Euclid Avenue. In 1851 St. Paul's built a brick Gothic church on the same site that served the congregation until 1876, when prominent members convinced church officials to build on the site further east on Euclid Avenue in the middle of Millionaires' Row.

The new Victorian Gothic structure was designed by architect Gordon Lloyd of Detroit and built by Andrew Dall of Cleveland. Berea sandstone was used to complete the cruciform plan with a 120-foot bell tower complete with exaggerated turrets and pinnacles. The interior features decorative wood trusses in an inverted ship's keel style and Tiffany stained-glass windows. Neighbors' homes at the intersection included John D. Rockefeller on the southwest corner and Jeptha H. Wade and Sylvester T. Everett on the north side of Euclid.

The first service in the new St. Paul's was held on Christmas Eve, 1876, where the city's aristocracy would come to worship. Notable socially prominent patron services were routine at St. Paul's including weddings and the funeral of Marcus Hanna attended by President Theodore Roosevelt. St. Paul's tower bell tolled to summon Cleveland's nabobs to services but the sound proved too much for some neighbors. "Some arrangement was made," wrote reporter S. J. Kelly of the Plain Dealer, in which an annual $100 contribution to the church would silence the bell for more than 15 years. In 1902, an enthusiastic bridegroom handed the janitor five dollars and the bell pealed thereafter!

The church served the congregation for 52 years until it moved again eastward to Cleveland Heights. St. Paul's sold its magnificent building to the Cleveland Catholic Diocese which re-dedicated it as the Shrine of the Conversion of St. Paul on October 2, 1931. In 1932 a convent was built on the grounds and Cleveland Bishop Joseph Schrembs invited the Franciscan Order of the Poor Clare nuns, a group that had come to Cleveland about a decade before from Austria, to establish the devotion of Perpetual Adoration and to "pray for the needs of the city" at St. Paul, a devotion which continues today. The millionaire neighborhood dissolved in the 1930s and St. Paul Shrine assumed various ministries during its ensuing 85 years as a Catholic institution.

The neighborhood surrounding the former Millionaires' Row was heavily populated during and after World War II, and the Shrine drew many worshipers to its services. In 1949, the Diocese declared St. Paul a parish to serve the community north and south of Euclid Avenue. In the early 1950s, many Puerto Rican migrants arriving in Cleveland were drawn to St. Paul's by Fr. Thomas Sebian, a Spanish-speaking priest in residence there. Along with Our Lady of Fatima Parish in Hough, St. Paul Shrine contributed to the expansion of the Puerto Rican community on the East Side before many Puerto Ricans re-centered on the Near West Side in the 1960s. The St. Paul Shrine congregation peaked in 1978 with more than 700 members, who represented a diversity of people. Continued change in the neighborhood brought varied worshipers while St Paul's maintained its vibrancy as a "way station for shorter term parishioners" and a place for those struggling with addictions or homelessness. St. Paul's welcomed the gay community and other marginalized communities to its services, leading one close observer to liken it to the "Island of Misfit Toys."

The Shrine of the Conversion of St. Paul was decommissioned as a parish in 2008 yet remains a Shrine for Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament and a destination for faithful from around the city and the world. In fact, some of its nuns, trained through St. Paul's missions to India, are now cloistered at St. Paul's. The Shrine of the Conversion of St. Paul remains an anchor on Euclid Avenue drawing worshipers from millionaires to the homeless.

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In the wake of the Second Battle of Fredericksburg and the Battle of Chancellorsville in May 1865, Bishop Amadeus Rappe made a proposal to the Cleveland City Council. Bishop Rappe, the first bishop of the Diocese of Cleveland, proposed the building of a hospital to care for the streams of wounded soldiers returning to the city. The city council appointed a committee to investigate the proposal, and the committee immediately encountered resistance. Newspaper editorials attacked the idea of a Catholic-run hospital in a city that was nine tenths Protestant. Bishop Rappe made his proposal a second time, and this time he specified that the Sisters of Charity of St. Augustine would provide nursing care if the city would provide funding. Despite continued anti-Catholic rhetoric, the Sisters emphasized that they intended to care for patients of all faiths and those who were unable to pay would have their care paid for by the city. Eventually, city council agreed to the proposal and a site was purchased on Perry Street (now East 22nd) for $10,000. Taxpayers paid $42,000 of the $72,000 building cost. On October 5, 1865, St. Vincent Charity Hospital opened its doors.

A century later, St. Vincent undertook a project that for some undermined its relationship to the community. The hospital had outgrown its space, and the only place to expand was into the surrounding low-income neighborhood that city officials had come to see as urban blight without value. St. Vincent greatly expanded its campus in the early 1960s at the same time the city inaugurated the Erieview urban renewal project. Some 1,800 mostly low-income households were displaced over several years to build the Erieview Tower, One Erieview Plaza, and the Federal Building. The hospital campus was almost entirely rebuilt in the St. Vincent Urban Renewal Area. Only 600 of the 1,800 families received public assistance to relocate. The hospital that was created to serve the poor ironically displaced the people it served. Progress and urban renewal were defined as the removal of low-income families.

In November 2022, the hospital drastically scaled back its operations and services, ending both inpatient and emergency care. Two years later, the Sisters of Charity of St. Augustine announced the final closure and planned demolition of the entire hospital campus – save for a small faceless building on East 22nd Street. Not unlike the hospital's major expansion in the 1960s, these changes coincided with larger forces shaping the Central neighborhood. Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority had recently announced their own plan to demolish and replace the Olde Cedar apartments, one of the largest and oldest public housing developments in the United States. Similarly, the simultaneous sale of large plots of hospital land, the planned demolition of the nearby Juvenile Justice Center, and an ambitious reconfiguration of the I-90 Inner Belt promise to reshape the area, once again, from the top down.

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