Alfred Atmore Pope had left his Millionaires' Row mansion in Cleveland in 1901 and moved to New York, but he remained keenly interested in the Forest City. After all, his parents had moved there from Maine on the eve of the Civil War, and it was there that he had struck out on his own as a young man, leaving his father's wool business to invest in the burgeoning iron industry. In only a decade he had risen to the helm of Cleveland Malleable Castings Company. Now he wanted to build a monument to his success. Even the Panic of 1907 did not deter Pope, who doubled down on his commitment, which he now also billed as a show of faith in Cleveland's future during an uncertain time.

Pope's "monument" would take the form of a skyscraper that he undertook on speculation. He turned to Henry Bacon to design this tribute to himself. The New York architect had prepared initial drawings for the Lincoln Memorial about a decade earlier, but the project's implementation still awaited congressional approval. Unlike in Washington, in Cleveland, backed by a "millionaire rolling mill master" on a mission, Bacon knew he wouldn't have to wait long to see the fruits of his labor.

Pope's monument began with a 42-foot-deep hole in the ground because he believed Euclid Avenue would eventually have a subway, and he wanted to have an underground entrance when that day came. To hold back the "quicksand" that reflected the site's nearness to Lake Erie, Pope's construction crews had to build a cofferdam and then pour thick reinforced concrete walls to keep the basement and subbasement dry. Above, they quickly assembled the building's steel superstructure and clad it with elaborately ornamented, white-glazed terra-cotta tile and enamel brick that would enable periodically washing off Cleveland's industrial soot.

Originally intending his monument to have two floors of retail space with eight floors of office space above, Pope instead found a single tenant to lease the entire $1 million Pope Building, a lessee that had a grand vision of its own that even a financial depression couldn't subdue. Who would make such a bold move during an economic depression and in a space so far east of Cleveland's business core? Samuel and Salmon Halle. The Halle Bros. Co. had started when its namesakes bought out a small furrier on Superior Avenue just west of Public Square in 1891. The Halles joined the shift of retailers eastward across Public Square to a Euclid Avenue storefront near the Arcade the next year, but with a growing mail-order and home-delivery business in addition to expanding into a full department store, they soon outgrew this space too.

With the lease of the 140,000-square-foot Pope Building in 1908, the Halles now had three times the space of their former location. Their move also influenced two other large stores to move eastward to upper Euclid Avenue. Within a year of Halle Bros.'s announcement, the Higbee Co. and Sterling & Welch Co. announced their own new stores on the sites of former Millionaires' Row homes across from the Pope Building. The Halle store's continued expansion led to the purchase of the building and plans to expand onto the adjacent lot following Pope's death in 1913. The Halles commissioned Bacon again, and he designed a mirror-image addition that was completed the following year. Close observers will note the vertical seam that marks where the newer building rose alongside the original one.

Halle's continued to grow in the 1920s, adding an identically styled terra-cotta clad Huron-Prospect Building (designed by Walker & Weeks) to the south of the main store that housed the Men's Store for the next three decades. Near the end of the '20s it also opened branches in Erie and New Castle, Pennsylvania, and Canton, Ohio. After weathering the Depression and War years, Halle's continued to grow, investing in its first suburban branch (at Shaker Square) and undertaking a modernization program that included the addition of escalators.

Downtown's fortunes began to turn in the second half of the 1950s, forcing Halle's to continue its aggressive planning to maintain its enormous downtown store's profitability. Walter M. Halle, Samuel Halle's son and by then the store's president, grew concerned about the impact of the CTS rapid transit line, which opened in 1954-55 and served downtown with a single station beneath the Terminal Tower (which incidentally benefitted Higbee's after its move to Public Square in 1930). Halle Bros. added its own free bus service from the Terminal on Public Square in 1956 and converted its Huron-Prospect annex into a parking garage in 1957, all while actively lobbying for a downtown subway to carry suburban shoppers closer to its store.  This hope — an echo of Mr. Pope's vision of a subway six decades earlier — collapsed once and for all after county commissioners twice rejected the plan in the late '50s.

Nevertheless, through ongoing effort, Halle's continued to hold its own into the late 1960s. In fact, for many Clevelanders born after midcentury, the 1950s and 1960s shaped their relationship with Halle's. The store introduced Mr. Jingeling, said to be Santa's keeper of the keys, as a popular Christmastime character who joined other child-friendly features such as the toy department, playground, and miniature golf course. Still, by the latter half of the 1960s, the convenience of suburban malls and inconvenience or even trepidation about trekking downtown led Halle's to press for new downtown apartments to create a captive market.

Although the Chesterfield Apartments opened in 1967 and Park Centre (Reserve Square) in 1969, the future of Halle's seemed shaky. Sterling Lindner, the successor to Sterling & Welch, closed in 1968 and the Allen, Ohio, State, and Palace Theaters fell dark the next year. In the decade after Chicago-based Marshall Field's scooped up Halle's in 1970, it made changes that irked some longtime tradition-minded customers—dropping the signature Halle Bros. logo in Old English font with a script font Halle's matching that of the Chicago store; ending the Mr. Jingeling tradition; and introducing cheaper lines of merchandise.

Ultimately, Field's dumped Halle's in 1981, and the store closed permanently the following year. Just as suddenly as Samuel and Salmon Halle had justified Alfred Pope's big gamble at a time when downtown had not yet "arrived," the building emptied. In the decades that followed, the Halle Building became what Pope had originally envisioned—an office building with a few small retailers (a food court and sundry services for office workers). It lived on as a department store only in public memory and, for a decade in the 1990s-2000s, as the fictional Winfred-Louder on ABC's The Drew Carey Show. Today it is an apartment building.

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Derrell Max Ellis (later known simply as Max Ellis) was born on March 10, 1914, in Wellington, Kansas. The youngest of four children, Max grew up in Iowa and studied theater at the University of Iowa, performing in plays in the 1930s written by fellow Iowa student Thomas Williams, later more famously known as Tennessee Williams. After graduating in 1939, and serving a short stint as assistant director of the Erie Playhouse in Erie, Pennsylvania, Ellis came to Cleveland in 1942 and became an actor at the Cleveland Play House. Founded in 1915, the Cleveland Play House is America's oldest professional regional theater. Ellis landed his first role the following year in the theater's production of "Arsenic and Old Lace." Described by one reporter as "portly, rotund and mustached," he soon became one of the most sought after and popular local actors at the Play House, performing in more than 200 roles over the course of the next two decades.

In 1956, Ellis was asked to take on a new role on a Cleveland local television show. An advertising agency had come up with a new idea for promoting Christmas shopping at the Halle Brothers department store downtown. It had created a story about a fictional elf, Mr. Jingeling, who had manufactured new keys for Santa Claus's toy treasure house after Santa had misplaced them. Jingeling was rewarded for his ingenuity by being named Santa's chief elf and keeper of the keys. The character of Mr. Jingeling had initially been performed by Tom Moviel, a Cleveland police officer, but once the decision to produce the television show was made, it was decided that a professional actor was needed for the role. The show began airing twice every afternoon every year between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Cleveland children soon learned that one of the best ways to get Santa's ear for that special holiday toy was to visit Mr. Jingeling on Halle's seventh floor.

In the year following the introduction of the television show, Max Ellis and his wife Myra, also an actor, moved from their apartment on East 86th Street, just down the street from where the Play House had then been located. They chose a home in the Moreland neighborhood of Shaker Heights. The house at 3427 Ashby Road was a modest Cape Cod-style house which had been built in 1942, during the decade in which many new houses were built on Ashby and surrounding streets in the northern part of the Moreland neighborhood. This neighborhood, located in the southwest section of the suburb and often called the Gateway to Shaker Heights, is notable--and distinguishable from much of the northern and eastern neighborhoods of Shaker--for its grid streets and moderately priced houses. In the mid-twentieth century, many people of moderate means moved into the neighborhood in order to have access to Shaker's exceptional educational system, the Shaker Rapid Transit, and nearby Chagrin-Lee-Avalon Shopping Center.

It is not known which, if any, of these traditional attractions drew the Ellises to Moreland. It may have simply been that they learned that the house had become available when its prior owners, John and Frances Ryan, also members of the Cleveland area acting community, suffered tragic deaths within 15 days of each other in September 1956. The Ellises purchased the house from the Ryans' estate in January of the following year. Max Ellis only lived at 3427 Ashby for seven years, but from an article appearing in the Cleveland Press in March 1964, it was obvious that the house was a source of pride for him. He described its interior in detail to the reporter who interviewed him and boasted of the addition to the rear of the house that he and his wife had added. Sadly, Max Ellis, just 50 years old, died suddenly in June 1964, just several months after this interview.

The Mr. Jingeling role that Max Ellis had performed for almost a decade was taken over by Earl Keyes, who had been the director of the Christmas season television show. Keyes, today perhaps the better known Mr. Jingeling, continued to play the role of the jolly elf for the next thirty years. Myra Ellis, Max's widow, continued to live in their home on Ashby Road in Shaker's Moreland neighborhood until 1969, when, after remarrying, she moved from the area. Today, the well-maintained house at 3427 Ashby Road still looks much like it did more than a half century ago when it was the home of the original Mr. Jingeling.

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Samuel H. Halle, who founded the Halle Bros. Co. department store with his brother, established his summer home far from the city in Kirtland, Ohio. Besides a summer house, the Halles added other extravagant amenities including a suspension bridge, a cottage, a horse stable, a vineyard, a rose garden, a swimming pool, tennis courts, and an air strip. The suspension bridge, built in the 1920s, was one-of-a-kind in Kirtland, and connected the summer house to a small cottage on the other side of the gorge. More than simply a leisure spot, however, it was a working farm. The Burnett family lived and worked the farm year-round.

The house sat on a large ravine. Easy to enter but very difficult to exit, the ravine became known as "Penitentiary Gulch." A local legend claims that the gulch was used to hold prisoners during the Civil War. True or not, the name "Penitentiary" stuck. Now a park, it is called Penitentiary Glen.

The Halle family used their summer estate to host parties, community celebrations, and important visitors. Each year the Halle family hosted and sponsored a "Pioneer Picnic" for the community that brought together people from all over Lake and Geauga counties. Samuel Halle continued to visit the summer home until his death in 1954. His five children inherited the property. The summer house burned down in the 1960s, and the horse barn, which had a hay loft and a considerably large tack room, was leased out in the early 1970s as a "Country Estate" under the Cleveland Trust Company's ownership. In 1975 Lake Metroparks purchased the property from the Cleveland Land Trust Company. The park district used the horse barn first as its headquarters. In the 1980s it was transformed into a nature center and continues to serve the public in this fashion today.

Visitors today can take a self-guided historic tour of the old Halle farm. Only two pillars on either side of the park's gorge hint at the onetime presence of the suspension bridge. All that remains of the Halles' summer home is its foundation. Remnants of the Halle gardens, landscaping, and orchards linger on in the park, and can be seen from the trails.

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Located at 2701 Park Drive, the Salmon Halle Mansion is one of the most elegantly designed houses in Shaker Heights. Its design reflects the same elegance and sense of style which Salmon P. Halle, co-founder of the Halle Brothers department store, brought to his famed Cleveland area business.

Salmon P. Halle (1864-1949) was a second generation Jewish-American, whose father Moses immigrated to Cleveland from Bavaria in 1848--the year of revolutions in Europe. Moses was a savvy businessman who in 1864, together with his brother Manuel, developed a successful wholesale notions business on Water Street (W. 9th St.) in Cleveland. Moses passed his business acumen on to his sons Salmon and Samuel who founded the Halle Brothers department store on Superior Street in downtown Cleveland in 1891. Salmon and Samuel built upon the business skills of their father, adding class and elegance to their retail business venture. Halle Brothers soon came to be known as Cleveland's most elegant department store and retained that reputation for most of the twentieth century until the store closed in 1982.

In 1927, Salmon Halle hired John William Cresswell Corbusier to design his new home on Park Drive (formerly known as Park Drive Way) in Shaker Heights. Corbusier was a noted Cleveland architect who specialized in the design of churches. During the years 1913-1928, Corbusier designed eleven churches in northeast Ohio--all of which are still standing, including the Church of the Covenant in University Circle and the Church of the Savior in Cleveland Heights.

The mansion which Corbusier designed for Salmon Halle is one of the most notable in Shaker Heights. Situated on almost four acres of land, the mansion is built in late French Renaissance/Neoclassical style. It has more than 15,000 square feet of livable area. The mansion features glass entrance doors flanked by lanterns, gable dormers with volutes (spiral scroll-like ornaments), quoins (cornerstones) and voussoirs (wedge-shaped elements that form an arch) above windows. There are quoins at the corner and iron railings. The windows and doors have wide stone surrounds set within smoothly dressed stone walls.

Members of the Halle family resided in the Salmon Halle mansion in Shaker Heights from 1929, when the two year long construction of the home was completed, until 1965, when Salmon Halle's widow Carrie died and the home was sold out of her estate.

On August 23, 1976, the Salmon Halle mansion was designated a Shaker Heights landmark.

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Imagine descending an escalator from USBank Plaza and boarding a subway bound for Tower City Center. Mayor Tom Johnson first proposed a Cleveland subway in 1905, and the idea surfaced repeatedly thereafter. After several failed attempts between the world wars, the city came closest to realizing this dream in 1953, when Cuyahoga County voters approved a $35 million bond issue for a downtown circulator subway by a two-to-one margin. The most discussed route would have traversed a loop from the Cleveland Union Terminal to Superior Avenue and East 9th Street, then to Euclid Avenue and East 13th Street, and back along Huron Road to its origin. Although popular with the public, freeway advocate and county engineer Albert S. Porter persuaded county commissioners to nix the plan in 1957.

Two years later, Playhouse Square area merchants had grown alarmed by the drop in business that afflicted many American downtown retailers by the late 1950s. With the bond issue set to expire in a matter of months, a group led by officers of the Halle Bros. Co. department store and the owner of the Hanna Building worked behind the scenes to reopen the debate. They got a big boost when the City Planning Commission wrote a subway into Downtown Cleveland-1975, a master plan to guide future development in the city's heart. The plan, which now featured a simpler hook-shaped route under East 14th and Euclid, prompted a bitter feud between downtown interests in Playhouse Square and those near Public Square. The former had long clamored for easier access for transit riders. The latter, especially the Higbee Co. with its advantageous basement entrance adjacent to the Union Terminal rail platforms, frowned upon the subway idea.

It may never be known exactly why the county commissioners voted down the subway again in 1959. Some alleged that a sizable bribe bought the decisive vote against the tube. True or not, it is clear that Porter succeeded in creating a situation ripe for defeat. Although Toronto had recently completed a similar subway that reinforced its downtown as a vigorous hub, Porter warned darkly of buildings collapsing into the "quicksand" beneath Euclid Avenue and stores with their utilities cut off for weeks on end. He insisted that no one who could drive on a new freeway would think of being packed in "sardine" fashion into a railcar.

In the 1980s the idea of a subway reemerged in the form of the Dual Hub Corridor, a combination downtown subway and at-grade rail link with University Circle along Euclid Avenue. As cost estimates soared, the idea was scaled back, and the RTA Healthline ultimately opened as a bus rapid transit system in 2008. Meanwhile, the issue of how to distribute transit riders all over downtown found resolution when downtown interests banded together with RTA to fund a system of free trolley buses whose digital overhead destination signs exclaim, "Smile and Ride Free!"

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Clevelanders of a certain age remember Euclid Avenue as a home for Cleveland’s department stores, but these stores were not always on Euclid Avenue. In the 1830s, most dry goods merchants conducted business east of the Flats on River Road in their warehouses, which functioned as storage spaces, showrooms, and offices. In the 1840s, the warehouse district expanded pushing retailers out to Superior along Ontario, Water (W. 9th), Seneca (W. 3rd), and Bank (W. 6th). Along Superior and its side streets, merchants constructed a commercial block specifically for retailers. Retailers were looking for inexpensive quarters to rent either in new office building’s ground floors or basements.

By the 1860s and 1870s, industrial enterprises displaced businesses that operated warehouses, pushing the wholesale district into areas that were currently retailer occupied. Rising rents and a lack of room to expand induced many retailers to seek new locations, leading to the emergence of new retail outlets on Euclid Avenue by the late 1870s. When the streetcar lines were built around Public Square in the 1880s, Euclid Avenue stores became even more popular. Massive, multi-level stores (consisting of various "departments") began to appear on lower Euclid Avenue around the turn of the twentieth century.

At the peak of Cleveland department stores’ popularity, Euclid Avenue was ranked among the largest retail districts in the United States and was compared to New York's stylish Fifth Avenue. Many popular downtown department stores lined Euclid Avenue and the south side of Public Square in the early to mid-1900s: Higbee’s, May Company, William Taylor Son & Company (later Taylor’s Department Store), Sterling-Lindner-Davis, and Halle’s. Heralded for their fanciful window displays and holiday traditions like Halle's "Mr. Jingeling" and Sterling-Lindner-Davis's magnificent 50-foot-high Christmas tree, the stores drew thousands of shoppers downtown. The development of Playhouse Square in the 1920s added to the crowds and excitement along that stretch of Euclid Avenue. A trip on the streetcar down to Cleveland’s department stores was for many Clevelanders an occasion that called for dressing up.

After World War II, however, the growth of suburbs and shopping malls started to draw business away from downtown and Euclid Avenue. Clevelanders who moved to the suburbs could now patronize stores near their homes without the need to travel downtown and customer loyalty to stores became a thing of the past. By the 1960s, the downtown department stores started closing, first Taylor’s in 1961 and then Sterling-Lindner-Davis in 1968. Downtown department stores tried to hold on by opening their own suburban branches, but by the turn of the twenty-first century most of these local companies had been bought out by national chains, with their flagship downtown locations converted to other uses. The last of the giants, Higbee's, was purchased in 1992 by Arkansas-based Dillard's and closed its Tower City store in 2002.

Although many downtown department stores are gone, they are certainly not forgotten. One notable department store, Higbee's, gained national recognition when it appeared in a scene of the classic holiday film A Christmas Story. Many building also still bear architectural fixtures that act as a nod to their department store pasts. If you look closely, you can still glimpse reminders of Cleveland's grand department stores in the soaring terra-cotta facade of the Halle Building, the clock on top of the May Company, or the bronze deco Higbee's plaques that adorn its old home on Public Square. Better yet, ask almost any Clevelander past a certain age about shopping on Euclid Avenue, and listen closely while they fondly recall childhood trips downtown.

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