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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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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