The Hanna Building was named after the famous U.S. senator from Ohio and oil and coal baron Marcus Alonzo Hanna and built by his son Daniel Rhodes Hanna. Hanna is perhaps best known for having endorsed William McKinley for president in 1896, spending $100,000 of his personal funds to support McKinley's campaign. McKinley won the election, and as a token of gratitude, McKinley aided Hanna in becoming a senator. Hanna's bronze bust is a prominent feature in the building's lobby.
The building, whose architect was Charles A. Platt, was built from 1919 to 1922, cost $5 million, and occupied land that previously held the Euclid Avenue Presbyterian Church at the corner of East 14th Street and Euclid Avenue. The building's unique interior featured a semicircular lobby with entrances on both streets and stylized silver-and-gold decorative elements. The building's restaurant on the first floor was fashioned in a beautiful Pompeian style, and the rest of the building was used for offices. It is said that the building contained all the variety of businesses required to build a city and maintain it.
The Hanna Building of the 1920s demonstrated that Cleveland had its own version of Broadway. The building opened around the same time that the Playhouse Square movie palaces started operating, and its restaurant catered to Jazz-Age theater goers and nightlife seekers. As much as it served the emerging entertainment scene, the Hanna Building was an anchor of business. Soon after opening, it ranked second in Cleveland in elevator use with 8,223 people using its lifts on a single day when a citywide count was taken.
The 1930s were a difficult time with the building losing half of its value and much of its occupancy. The average vacancy rates for office buildings nationally before and during the Great Depression were 8% in 1926, 12% in 1929, 20% in 1932, and 28% by 1934. The situation at the Hanna was so bad at one point that the owners contemplated turning the building into a warehouse before reconsidering. The Hanna Building Corporation also reduced the Cleveland Railway Company's rent from $123,000 to $108,000 in 1930 as an incentive to keep the company as a tenant. However, in the second half of the 1930s, vacancy began to decrease to 11.4% by the end of 1938 and the situation began to stabilize. So while the Hanna saw an increase in vacancy during the early 1930s, by the end of the 1930s vacancy rates declined to just above the national average of 10%. T.W. Grogan became the building's manager by 1939 and would later become its owner.
In contrast to the holding pattern of the 1930s, the 1940s saw new improvements, with the Hanna Building receiving ten brand-new elevators costing $600,000 and taking slightly more than eighteen months to install. The new elevators symbolized a renewed faith in economic development and growth. By 1951, the Hanna reached peak occupancy at 98%, making that the most prosperous year for the building since it opened. Furthermore, T.W. Grogan became the building's owner after purchasing it for $5 million in 1958.
The 1960s saw the Hanna Building become the unofficial travel capital of the area. This is due to the rise of commercial jets, which were much faster than commercial aircraft driven by props and thus became popular very quickly. In the early 1960s, the T.W. Grogan Company adopted the slogan "Come to the Hanna building and go any place in the world." By 1967, travel related companies had a combined 25,000 square feet of office space out of a total 247,000 square feet, which meant that these firms had the largest amount of office space rented by any group of related businesses. By the end of the decade, the building was home to 16 airline offices, 5 travel agencies, 2 car rental agencies, a steamship line office, and even a Vermont tourist information center.
Although Cleveland's downtown was beginning to decline as a business hub, the Hanna continued to enjoy attentive ownership. In 1980, the building was modified with the original light fixtures that it was supposed to have but was never outfitted with due to Daniel R. Hanna's divorce. In 1985, Cuisines took over the Hanna Pub restaurant on the first floor and decided to return the restaurant to its original Pompeian style as a result of a newfound appreciation for 1920s-style architecture. The first floor of the Hanna Building always had a restaurant with the Hanna Restaurant being there in the 1920s, followed by Monaco's in the 1930s. The Continental Room and Child's in the 1940s, Clark's in the 1950s, The Hanna Pub in the 1960s, and finally Cuisines. With each switch, the restaurant's style was changed to reflect the decade but now it was back to what it was when it was first built.
The Hanna Building was built almost a century ago, with the intention that it would be an office building, which it remains to this day. Many office buildings built around the same time as the Hanna have been transformed into hotels or apartments in recent years, but apart from the transformation of the Hanna Building Annex to apartments, the Hanna is used for the same purpose that it was built to serve. Such continuation is a testament to the building's maintenance, as it was never left to deteriorate and lose its attractiveness for offices. With so many downtown properties having been converted to other uses, it seems that the Hanna, now owned by Playhouse Square Real Estate Services, appears well-positioned to retain its longtime focus as demand for downtown offices begins to rebound.
]]>In 1910, Daniel Rhodes Hanna, a wealthy industrialist and son of legendary political kingmaker Marcus Hanna, bought the Cleveland Leader, an historic, but struggling, daily newspaper. The Leader's offices were at the time located in a small two-story building on the south side of Superior Avenue, just west of that street's intersection with East Sixth Street. Directly across Superior, a massive five-story building was slowly going up. Built in two phases, and stretching all the way from Superior Avenue to Rockwell Avenue, it was the new home of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the city's leading morning newspaper.
Over the next three years, "Dan" Hanna would invest heavily in the newspaper industry in an attempt to increase the circulation of the Leader and make it, as it had once been in the nineteenth century, a viable competitor of the Plain Dealer. In 1912, he purchased the Cleveland News, giving him control of an afternoon, as well as a morning, daily. Then, from 1913 to 1914, he engaged in a nasty and costly circulation war with the Plain Dealer. And finally in 1913, he tore down the Leader's two-story building and replaced it with an elegant, state-of-the-art 14-story building, which not only dwarfed the new Plain Dealer building across the street, but became the largest office building erected in Cleveland to date.
Despite the magnitude of Hanna's efforts, and the long shadow which the new Leader-News Building cast — literally — on its competitor across the street, the Cleveland Leader continued to struggle in the newspaper industry and, in 1917, it went out of business. But, though the newspaper itself disappeared from the city, the building Hanna erected did not. Later renamed "The Leader Building," it has now stood on the corner of East Sixth and Superior for more than a century, and, though no longer downtown Cleveland's largest office building, it remains one of its most elegant and historic.
The Leader Building was erected in 1912-1913 on grounds that were already steeped in Cleveland history. Since 1854, most of the site had been home to Trinity Episcopal Cathedral, the place where many of the city's pioneer merchants and industrialists first worshiped. In 1902, after the Episcopal Diocese had relocated to its present-day site on the corner of Euclid Avenue and East 22nd Street, the Wardens and Vestrymen of Trinity sold the church's property on Superior Avenue to Ralph King, then downtown's largest real estate developer and a patron and future President of the Board of Trustees of the Cleveland Museum of Art.
In 1905, King built a small two-story structure — call it the first Leader Building — on the site of the old Trinity Cathedral, wedging it in between the Arcade Building to the west and the Samuel Raymond mansion, by this time a boarding house with a one-story commercial addition attached to its front, to the east. This first Leader Building was standing for only five years when Dan Hanna bought the Cleveland Leader and then arranged for the construction of the second and much larger Leader Building, which would cover all of the grounds once occupied by Trinity Cathedral and its Parish House, as well as those of the Samuel Raymond mansion on the corner.
The new Leader Building was designed by Charles A. Platt, a New York architect whom Eleanor Roosevelt once referred to as "an architect of great taste." Platt designed the Sara Delano Roosevelt townhouse in New York, which is now an historic landmark, as well as many other buildings across the country, a number of which remain standing, including the Smithsonian's Freer Art Gallery in Washington, D.C. Platt's plan called for the Leader Building to occupy nearly all of the large site at the corner of Superior Avenue and East Sixth Street. The rectangular-shaped Beaux-Arts style building with a limestone block exterior takes up 150 feet of the site's 160 feet of frontage on Superior Avenue and 215 feet of the 220 feet of depth on East Sixth Street. It has a total of more than 300,000 square feet of interior space, almost 250,000 square feet of which over the years has been built-out for offices. The interior of the building is constructed with many notable quality materials, and features marble walls, maple wood floors, a grand lobby with columns, wrought iron screens and other ornamentation, and bronze elevators said to have been designed by Tiffany.
When the Leader Building first opened in 1913, it housed the presses of the Cleveland Leader and the Cleveland News in its basement. Its first floor was entirely occupied by the business offices of the two newspapers and the fourteenth (top) floor by the staffs of the two separate editorial departments. The remaining 12 floors were leased to a variety of business tenants, including the prestigious law firm of Squires, Sanders and Dempsey, which rented the entire 12th floor. After the Cleveland Leader went out of business in 1917, the Cleveland News continued to occupy the basement, and first and 14th floors of the Leader Building until 1926, when it moved to a new and more modern newspaper plant building at East 18th Street and Superior Avenue. The basement, which formerly held printing presses, became home to the Colonnade Cafeteria, which served building tenants and others working downtown for the next 60 years.
As the years passed, the Leader Building became known not for the newspapers once printed there, but instead for the many law firms that continued to locate there. In the early years of the twenty-first century, however, a glut of available office space in the downtown area developed and tenants began to leave older buildings like the Leader Building. In 2014, with its occupancy rate declining, the building was sold to K & D Properties, a local company specializing in real property management. In 2016, K & D, in response to a demand for more residential units in downtown Cleveland, restored the Leader building and converted its upper floors into luxury apartments. It was a process that, in the last decades of the twentieth century and the early decades of the twenty first century, gave new life to many of the city's historic downtown buildings, including the historic Leader Building.
]]>