Imagine walking into this building located on Cleveland State University's campus near East 24th Street and Chester Avenue, and negotiating with a salesman to buy a Buick! Before it saw institutional use, this building constructed in 1924 was the Ohio Motors Building. It was a car showroom and service building, which sold and serviced Buick automobiles and, later, Lincoln-Mercury automobiles.

In the early 1940s, one year after Pearl Harbor was bombed and the United States entered World War II, the building's top floor was converted to a school to teach women hired by two local aircraft factories how to "help build the bombing planes that will rain destruction on Berlin and Tokyo."

In the 1950s, Fenn College, CSU's predecessor, bought the Ohio Motors building, renovated it, and renamed it Stilwell Hall in honor of Fenn College Board of Trustees' chairman Charles J. Stilwell. Ever since its acquisition by Fenn College, the building has been home to the Fenn School of Engineering. When the school was renamed the Washkewicz College of Engineering in 2013, Stilwell Hall was rechristened Fenn Hall to preserve the Fenn name's long association with the engineering program. The "Foxes' Den Lounge" located in Fenn Hall in what was formerly the auto showroom is the lone reminder of a time when the campus mascot was the Fenn "Foxes" rather than the CSU "Vikings."

For over half a century, Fenn Hall has provided training for area engineers and provided Fenn College — and now Cleveland State University — with much-needed classrooms, labs, a library, and an auditorium.

While Fenn Hall is located closer to Chester Avenue than to Euclid Avenue, it nonetheless is connected not only to Cleveland's early retail automobile industry, but also to Cleveland's nineteenth-century millionaires. Fenn Hall sits on a portion of what formerly were the grounds of the Tom L. Johnson mansion.

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Parker-Hannifin Hall was once a mansion owned by George Howe, Cleveland businessman and Cleveland Police Commissioner. Parker Hannifin Hall is one of the last surviving Millionaires' Row mansions. It is a small reminder of a bygone time when ornate palaces stood on both sides of Euclid Avenue as far as the eye could see.

A few years after George Howe died in 1901, the Gage Gallery of Fine Arts made the house a beehive of activity in the fine arts world. George Gage served as the buying agent for many wealthy Clevelanders who later donated art works to the Cleveland Museum of Art. After Gage died, the Vixseboxse Art Gallery spent nearly half a century on the site before moving to Cleveland Heights.

The mansion was purchased by Cleveland State University in 1983 and restored with funds donated to the University by private individuals and area corporations. In 2005, the mansion was renamed Parker-Hannifin Hall in recognition of a large donation made to the University by the Parker-Hannifin Corporation. The building now serves as the home of the University's College of Graduate Studies and the Office of Research.

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The Cleveland State University Student Center is located on land that was in the nineteenth century the site of the Perry-Payne homestead. The property consisted of two mansions. One directly across the street from Trinity Cathedral was owned by Nathan Perry. The other immediately to the west was owned by Henry B. Payne, the first U.S. Senator from Cleveland.

Cleveland State University has had two student centers since it opened in 1966. The first student center, known simply as University Center or "UC," opened in 1974. Designed by the noted Cleveland modernist architect Don Hisaka, the building was an L-shaped concrete structure embracing a tall glass atrium whose noisiness led students to nickname it the Birdcage.

But it was another feature of the UC that proved to be its undoing: its fortress-like concrete wall overlooking Euclid Avenue. In the wake of the tumultuous late Sixties, with its antiwar protests and urban riots, it is hardly surprising that Cleveland State, like many other universities, opted to build bunker-like campus buildings atop solid concrete platforms. In facing inward on the central plaza and turning its back to Euclid Avenue, the UC symbolized the worries of its time.

The passage of three decades created a fresh approach to the campus. The University spoke of the city as its campus and began to undo the insularity of its 1970s campus by envisioning new or renovated buildings that would turn welcoming, glassy faces toward the street. To that end, the renowned firm Gwathmey Siegel & Associates Architects LLC of New York designed CSU's curvy new Student Center, which opened in 2010. The same firm planned major projects for many American universities, including Cincinnati, Cornell, Duke, Harvard, and Yale; oversaw the renovation of the Guggenheim Museum; and even built Hollywood icon Stephen Spielberg's home in East Hampton, New York.

For CSU's Student Center, Gwathmey Siegel arrayed the bookstore, dining, lounge, computer access, and conference spaces around a bright, airy, three-story atrium. The one nod to the past in this otherwise futuristic building is its inclusion of two 1930s murals created for the Valleyview Homes in Tremont by Federal Art Project artists during the Great Depression and saved by the late CSU art professor Walter Leedy when the housing project was facing demolition. From top to bottom, the forward-looking Student Center is now the center of life on the Cleveland State University campus.

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The New Amsterdam Hotel was a seven-story brick and stone residential hotel built in 1901 by "Chewing Gum King" William J. White. It stood on the southwest corner of Euclid Avenue and East 22nd Street until being razed in 1969 to build a Holiday Inn that in turn became CSU's Viking Hall dorm before it was demolished to build the university's Center for Innovation in Health Professions.

The hotel was but a small expression of one of the city's most flamboyant characters. Born in Canada, White came to Cleveland with his parents at age six. He became a candy maker and, around 1880, made his mark as the inventor of modern chewing gum. Earlier gums had been flavored, but White discovered a brilliant new way to keep flavor in gum long enough to make it commercially viable to sell it for other than purported medicinal uses. His first flavor was peppermint, which he learned stayed in the gum longer than any other flavor. Ever the eager salesman, White gave a box of his Yucatan brand gum (made in his factory on Detroit Avenue) to every U.S. congressman. He even sailed to England on his own purpose-built steam yacht and presented his gum to King Edward VII. Eventually his company became a subsidiary of the Trenton-based American Chicle Company.

White was apparently as adept in marketing himself as he was in marketing chewing gum. In the 1890s he became one of Ohio's representatives in Congress, serving from 1893 to 1895. The energetic and versatile White also had his less fortunate experiences. He went broke not once but twice. Perhaps the yacht and his 52-room Thornwood mansion on Cleveland's lakefront had something to do with that. Even more unfortunate, in 1923 "the Chewing Gum King" slipped on ice outside his factory. He died not long after.

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While the CSU College of Law has been a part of Cleveland State University since 1969, its history as a Cleveland-area law school dates back to the late nineteenth century. In 1897, Cleveland Law School was established, becoming Ohio's first evening law school. It also became the first law school in Ohio to admit women and one of the first in the state to admit minority students.

In 1946, Cleveland Law School merged with John Marshall School of Law, which had been founded in 1916 by several Cleveland attorneys. The new Cleveland-Marshall Law School moved into the Ontario Building at 1240 Ontario Street, where it remained for several decades until the law school building was demolished to make room for the Cuyahoga County Justice Center.

In 1969, Cleveland-Marshall officially affiliated itself with Cleveland State University, becoming the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law. The new CSU college held classes in several buildings on campus, including Rhodes Tower and the Chester Building, before it moved into its own building on the corner of East 18th Street and Euclid Avenue in 1977. The building was dedicated that year by Prince Charles of England. A major addition to the building, including a state of the art law library, was added in 1997. In 2022, the CSU Board of Trustees voted to approve changing the school's name, dropping its namesake, who was a U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall but also a slaveholder.

The Cleveland-Marshall College of Law sits on grounds that were at one time occupied by the Millionaire Row mansions of two of Cleveland's most prominent nineteenth-century businessmen—E.W. Oglebay, the co-founder of Oglebay-Norton Mining Co., and Truman Handy, president of Mercantile Bank and promoter of the early railroad industry in midwest America.

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In the days of horse-drawn carriages and booming industry, one street in Cleveland showcased the elite among the city's citizens. Millionaires' Row, a length of Euclid Avenue, was where prominent figures such as John D. Rockefeller, Marcus Hanna, and Charles F. Brush built their mansions. The largest among them was built for Samuel Mather, chairman of Pickands, Mather & Company, one of the four largest shippers of iron ore in the country. He held the position of officer or director for over two dozen iron, banking, and transportation corporations. For years Mather was among the richest citizens in Cleveland and contributed more than $8 million to community-based organizations.

When it was completed in 1910, the 45-room Mather Mansion was the most expensive home in Cleveland and was the largest home ever built on Euclid Avenue. It was among the street's most luxurious mansions, with handcrafted stone, brick and woodwork and a third-floor ballroom with a 16-foot ceiling that could easily hold 300 guests. Mather Mansion's scale and opulence reflected its owner's attempt to arrest the declining desirability of Millionaires' Row as commercial and industrial buildings encroached. Mather commissioned Charles Schweinfurth, who had previously designed the Rockefeller Park Bridges and at least twelve homes on the street, to design the mansion. Mather was already a supporter of Schweinfurth's work, having given the architect $1 million to cover the cost of building nearby Trinity Cathedral.

As the commercial district of Cleveland pressed further down Euclid Avenue, the elaborate homes began to lose their grandeur in the wake of skyscrapers and large retail stores, and Mather's home proved to be the last built on the storied street. Between 1923 and 1951, many of the homes on Millionaire's Row were demolished to make way for parking lots and commercial buildings. In the mid-1950s, the homes between Mather Mansion and East 30th Street were demolished to make way for the Innerbelt Freeway. Even more homes were torn down in the following decades to accommodate the expansion of Cleveland State University's campus.

Yet, lying just out of the way of the interstate highway and at some distance from the core of CSU's emerging campus, Mather Mansion survived. Upon Samuel Mather's death in 1931, the residence passed to the Cleveland Institute of Music and in 1940 the property was transferred to the Cleveland Automobile Club (an affiliate of AAA). In 1967 Cleveland State University acquired and renovated Mather Mansion, and six years later the house became one of the first Cleveland buildings to be listed on the National Register of Historic Places. By 1975, Mather Mansion was among only seven remaining Millionaire Row's homes, allowing a rare glimpse of the magnificence that once dominated Euclid Avenue. In 2009-10 it served as the temporary home of the University's History and Philosophy departments.

In 2014, the university abandoned plans to renovate the Tudor mansion into a boutique hotel and instead allocated $2.7 million to renovate the mansion into the new home for the Center for International Services and Programs, a program to teach English as a second language.

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Trinity Cathedral, the seat of the Episcopal Diocese of Ohio, stands across the street from Cleveland State University at the corner of Euclid Avenue and East 22nd Street. The current building—the fourth location for Trinity—was designed by “Millionaires’ Row” architect Charles F. Schweinfurth and built in 1901-07 of Indiana limestone in the Gothic style. It is connected to an older parish house built in 1895 and Trinity Commons, constructed in recent years.

The first of Trinity Cathedral’s forerunners, Trinity Parish, was organized on November 9, 1816, at a meeting convened by Phineas Shepard at the old Carter Tavern at Superior and Water (W. 9th) Streets. The first Trinity Church, located at St. Clair and Seneca (W. 3rd) Streets, was consecrated in 1829, making it the first church within what would become the city of Cleveland. However, a fire in the spring of 1854 destroyed the first Trinity Church. The second Church, located on Superior Street (Avenue) near Bond (E. 6th) Street, was consecrated in 1855 and held services there for the next fifty-plus years.

When Schweinfurth was commissioned to design the cathedral, he submitted two plans – one for a Romanesque building and another for a Gothic structure. Episcopal diocesan leaders selected the English Gothic design featuring perpendicular-style American Gothic Revival architecture. The cruciform plan accommodates a nave, chapels, a clergy room, a chapter room, a choir room and hall, and a parish house. Charles Brush supervised the installation of the cathedral’s electrical system during construction, though gas light was originally used when the building was competed and consecrated in 1907. More than 600 angels peer down on the congregation while 57 carved figures surround Christ in the nave. Interior furnishings, some moved from previous locations, conform with the design; altar, pulpit, and lectern are marble and wood in character. Stained-glass windows feature the life of Christ, Mary, and the Nativity.

The majority of the funding for Trinity Cathedral was donated generously by its wealthy parishioners such as Samuel L. Mather, a prominent Cleveland industrialist, whose family mansion is one of the last extant remnants of Millionaires’ Row. In addition to funding the building of the cathedral, when Trinity was consecrated in its current location, prominent pieces like the baptismal font (originally sponsored by Samuel J. Mather himself), as well as items from churches surrounding the old location, were moved as well, helping to provide a sense of continuity. Trinity’s sense of permeance is accompanied by a devoted open relationship with the community that surrounds it, due in large part to the fervent belief that the “Cathedral is the Church for the masses of the population… It knows no difference between wise and foolish, rich and poor, because it is the church for everybody.”

The belief that the church was for everyone is most readily shown in Trinity’s long involvement with the citizenry of Cleveland. The church has a long history of community outreach and social activism, reaching out through the Church Home for the Sick and Friendless as early as the 1850s. The cathedral transcended its socially prominent Millionaires' Row connection to embrace racial integration in the 1960s and has more recently ministered to the homeless; adopted a modern, ecumenical liturgy; and championed openness toward members of the LGBTQ+ community in a time of denominational dissension.

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Desiring to place a public institution of higher learning within thirty miles of every Ohio resident, Governor James Rhodes proposed the establishment of a state university in Cleveland following a unanimous recommendation from the Ohio Board of Regents in June 1964. The result was House Bill No. 2, a bipartisan effort introduced to the House during a special session convened by Rhodes in November. The bill easily passed through the legislature and on December 18, 1964, Rhodes signed it into law. The new university assumed responsibility for Fenn College, making the campus its nucleus, and on September 27, 1965, classes officially began at Cleveland State University.

Fenn College was a small institution of 1,675 full-time students with only a few buildings comprising its campus including the 22-story Fenn Tower. CSU's first year saw enrollment jump to 3,416 full-time scholars and in order to accommodate the dramatic influx of students, military-style Quonset huts were erected for class instruction. Recognizing the need to expand, in March 1966 the Board of Trustees announced design plans for University Tower, Main Classroom, and the Science Building. Three years later under President Harold Enarson the Cleveland-Marshall Law School became part of Cleveland State, remaining at its location on Ontario Street until 1972 when the building was sold to make way for the new Justice Center. In 1977 Cleveland-Marshall's permanent building was completed on campus with Prince Charles presiding over the dedication of the school's new home. That same year CSU's second President, Walter Waetjen, announced the College of Urban Affairs would replace the Institute of Urban Studies, becoming the university's seventh college when its doors opened. Now called the Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs, it ranks #2 among schools of its kind in the country.

The 1980s in many ways proved to be a turbulent time for the young university. Over a period of several months in 1982 three people were slain on campus by Frank Spisak Jr. who was eventually apprehended in September and sentenced to death the following summer. The decade would close in controversy after a salary dispute led to the firing of administrator Raymond Winbush. The incident heightened racial tensions on campus and led to the student occupation of Fenn Tower in protest of his dismissal. Recruiting violations by the Men's Basketball program and the eventual demise of head coach Kevin Mackey added to the decade's despair, though the team would become a rallying point for the university in 1986. That year Mackey's Cinderella squad took the NCAA tournament by storm, advancing to the Sweet 16 before falling to Navy.

CSU had more to cheer about in 1991 as the long-awaited 13,610-seat Convocation Center was finally completed. Later renamed the Bert L. & Iris S. Wolstein Convocation Center, the venue has hosted a diverse array of events ranging from monster truck shows to a presidential debate. The new Convocation Center, however, could not prevent the turmoil that plagued the 1980s from spilling over into the 1990s as disputes between the administration and faculty led to the faculty unionizing while declining enrollment numbers forced the Board of Trustees to consider major cutbacks. Then, as the decade wound down and the world braced for Y2K, the PeopleSoft program the university used to manage financial aid records crashed unexpectedly. The fallout from this episode nearly forced CSU to close its doors and it took a number of years for the university to fully recover.

A new era was ushered in at CSU in 2001, however, when Michael Schwartz became Cleveland State's fifth  president. Under President Schwartz the university moved away from its open enrollment policy in implementing admissions standards, the honors program was established, and campus revitalization efforts commenced. These efforts included the construction of a new student center, increased campus housing, renovation of the law school building, and installation of the now iconic "CSU" letters on Rhodes Tower. Schwartz stepped down in 2009 with Ronald Berkman picking up the torch in his place. President Berkman, a unanimous selection by the Board of Trustees, has continued to improve CSU, notably orchestrating the construction of The Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

In 2014 Cleveland State celebrated its 50th  anniversary and while the first five decades may have been trying at times, CSU has transformed itself from an inward facing commuter campus to an outwardly directed anchor of the emerging Campus District. Beginning with a handful of buildings tucked away between East 24th  Street and the Innerbelt Freeway, Cleveland State now boasts eight colleges, over 200 academic programs, and an enrollment of some 17,000 students.

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The origins of Cleveland State University date to 1870, when the Cleveland Young Men's Christian Association began offering free evening classes in French and German. After a decade of sporadic course offerings, the YMCA's evening educational program became firmly established in 1881. In 1906, the YMCA combined its newly created day school with the evening program under the name Association Institute. Fifteen years later, it was renamed the Cleveland YMCA School of Technology.

The need to achieve accreditation led the YMCA to reorganize its educational program in 1930. At that time, the school was renamed Fenn College, in honor of Sereno Peck Fenn, who had served as president of the Cleveland YMCA for 25 years and as a board director between 1868 and 1920. College lore holds that another motivation for the name change was students’ desire for a more prestigious-sounding diploma.

With several private colleges in Cleveland, including Case Institute of Technology and Western Reserve University, Fenn College focused on serving students for whom college otherwise would be financially unattainable. It offered a low-cost, high-quality education and became the second college in Ohio, after the University of Cincinnati, to adopt a cooperative education program. This model of alternating classroom study with paid employment was required for all day students and optional for evening students. Fenn also operated Nash Junior College, the first such program in the state, for a few years in the 1930s.

In 1937, Fenn College purchased the 22-story National Town and Country Club building at Euclid Avenue and East 24th Street. The tower had been conceived during the height of Cleveland’s Roaring Twenties prosperity. Composed of many of the city’s leading businessmen and professionals, the club broke ground only days after the 1929 stock market crash. Designed by George B. Post—the architect of the New York Stock Exchange and the Cleveland Trust Company—the building reflected the Art Deco style with strong Mayan motifs. 

Its lower floors contained resort-like amenities, including six bowling alleys, an English pub, formal dining rooms (one of them paneled with Macacauba wood from East Africa), a Turkish bath, a natatorium, a gymnasium, and handball and squash courts. Upper floors served as guest rooms for members and their guests from out of town. The tower’s crown featured a terrazzo-tiled solarium that even provided “ultraviolet ray equipment” to counter Cleveland’s dreary winters.

The club held only one event in the building before the Great Depression forced its dissolution, leaving the tower vacant until Fenn College acquired it. Renamed Fenn Tower in 1939, the former club provided much-needed classroom and office space and gave the college a prestigious Euclid Avenue address. Variously nicknamed the "Skyscraper Schoolhouse" and the "Campus in the Clouds,” the reconfigured Fenn Tower contained classrooms, a library, a gymnasium, a pool, student lounges, and other amenities—all within its vertical confines.

Throughout its history, Fenn College never operated at a deficit. By 1963, however, increasing operating costs, competition from the new Cuyahoga Community College, and rumors of a possible state takeover placed the institution under severe financial strain. That year, the college released A Plan for Unified Higher Education in Cleveland–Northeastern Ohio, calling upon the state to charter a public university in Cleveland, using Fenn College as its nucleus.

In his 1962 campaign for governor, James A. Rhodes proposed that every Ohioan should live within 30 miles of a state university. At the time, the nearest such institution to Cleveland was Kent State. On December 18, 1964, Governor Rhodes signed legislation creating Ohio's seventh state university, Cleveland State University, and announced the appointment of a board of trustees with James Nance as its first chairman.

For the next forty years, as CSU expanded westward along Euclid Avenue, Fenn Tower continued to serve a variety of functions, including classrooms, offices, and a class-registration and health center. In 2006, this once self-contained skyscraper “campus” for commuters became a residence hall, marking CSU’s first step toward developing a substantial residential student population.

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After a stint distributing records for jukeboxes, Hank LoConti opened the original Agora club on February 27, 1966, at 2175 Cornell Road, in the former Ripa Hall, which had been home to an Italian hometown society for immigrants from Ripalimosani, Italy. With its location in Little Italy just across the railroad tracks from Case Institute of Technology and Western Reserve University, the original Agora was a simple venue intended primarily for students. The Agora grew steadily from the start, opening the nation's first in-house recording studio in 1968 and producing many live albums. As LoConti later reflected, from there the Agora “grew to the magnitudes no one had ever dreamed.”

As word spread and crowds began to swell, some residents in famously-protective Little Italy decided the Agora – with its raucous fans and loud music – didn’t fit with their vision for the neighborhood. A large group of locals formed one night to publicly voice their disdain for the college students’ unwelcome invasion. Moved by the group’s grievances but also pleased with the Agora’s rising success, LoConti arranged for a second lease at 1724 East 24th Street near Payne Avenue, opening a new club in July 1967, likely intending to reduce crowds on Cornell Road. For the next 18 months, LoConti operated two Agoras, nicknaming the original "Agora Alpha" and the new club "Agora Beta." Agora Beta would become the stuff of legend.

Throughout the 1970s, the Agora’s reputation grew as it began to host increasingly prominent acts and even expanded for a time into a chain with clubs in a dozen other cities. Deanna R. Adams’s book *Rock 'n' Roll and the Cleveland Connection* compares the Agora to other famous venues of the era, describing it as Cleveland’s counterpart to San Francisco’s Avalon Ballroom and New York’s Bottom Line. The Agora’s floor plan allowed fans to experience live performances up close, fostering an electric atmosphere that artists and audiences loved. Artists like Bruce Springsteen, Meat Loaf, Alice Cooper, Roxy Music, Southside Johnny, and more came back to Cleveland time and again to play the Agora.

WMMS, Cleveland's leading rock radio station – and a national cultural force in its own right – also played a crucial role in the Agora's success. Disk jockeys like Kid Leo championed emerging rock acts and used their platforms to create buzz around upcoming shows at the Agora. WMMS’s Buzzard brand became synonymous with Cleveland’s rock identity, frequently broadcasting live performances from the Agora, and giving the club a regional and even national audience. Meanwhile, "Onstage at the Agora" became an internationally syndicated television show years before MTV brought rock music to the living room. At the Agora, attendees experienced a sense of community that went beyond entertainment, reinforcing Cleveland’s image as a “music town.”

As Cleveland underwent economic challenges and transformations in the 1980s, so too did the Agora. A fire broke out at the Agora in 1984 and forced the location to close. Due to a dispute with the property’s landlord, Cleveland State University, LoConti eventually opened the Agora in its present – omega? – form at East 55th and Euclid Avenue, formerly WHK Auditorium. Despite the apparent setback, the Agora, along with WMMS, continued to build its reputation as a proving ground for up and coming acts and bring a sense of cultural relevance to the city. Where once young Clevelanders had bemoaned having “no place to go,” the city now had rock and roll bragging rights.

The Agora’s legacy was ultimately recognized in the early 2000s, as Cleveland began to understand the importance of preserving its musical heritage. By this time, the Agora had solidified its reputation as a historical landmark, a status that attracted both financial support and media attention. The Agora was claimed to be “one of the hottest places to catch rock shows of every style and persuasion.” Seating an impressive 2,700 people in its theater and ballroom, the Agora was as welcoming as it was entertaining. The City of Cleveland acknowledged the Agora’s role in shaping Cleveland’s identity through renewal projects and official landmark status, recognizing it as more than just a concert hall but as a space where generations of Clevelanders have gathered to celebrate music and community. This support from the City of Cleveland, coupled with Cleveland’s broader efforts to promote its cultural assets, has allowed the Agora to continue evolving while honoring its roots.

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