The Hart & Co. Building is located at 1235 West 6th Street in the Warehouse District and currently contains the Hat Factory Lofts and Richardson Design. The Hart & Co. Building was commissioned in 1888 by Elbert Irving Baldwin, one of the city’s oldest dry goods merchants, who came to Cleveland in 1857. The building’s first tenant was E. L. and F. W. Hart & Co., which leased the building until 1900. Hart & Co. was one of the most prominent millineries in a millinery market that ranked third in the nation (behind New York and Chicago) by 1895. Hart & Co. made hats for women and imported hats and materials from Europe. Hart & Co. sold straw, felt goods, feathers, flowers, ostrich plumes, ribbons, silk, velvets, ornaments, and other goods for making hats; many of these items the company sold made their way to the “far west and extreme south.” Furthermore, in 1897 it was reported that thousands of milliners (most of whom were women) came to Cleveland each year from Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, and Pennsylvania to see the latest spring hat designs.

On April 15, 1899, catastrophe struck Hart & Co. At noon, a fire erupted in the building occupied by Comey & Johnson behind the Hart & Co. Building. The fire threatened the entire block bounded by West St. Clair Ave and West Lakeside Avenues and West 3rd and West 6th Streets. Eventually, the fire spread to the Hart & Co. Building; by 1:00 p.m. the building was “doomed.” The heaviest loss was suffered by Hart & Co. whose building was a wreck, with damage estimated at approximately $75,000. In 1899, the building was rebuilt and redesigned by F. S. Barnum and Co. and Hart & Co. moved and rented out the Brush Building. It is unclear whether the entire building was destroyed or if only parts of it were destroyed. What is certain is the building suffered significant damage from the fire.

In 1900, the building was sold to Adams & Ford, a wholesale dealer in rubber goods that primarily made boots and shoes. In 1941, White Tool & Supply Co. bought the building and used it as a warehouse until 1983. White Tool & Supply Co. seemed especially prosperous in the 1950s. In July 1951, it was reported that the company sold more than $3,000,000 of tools, equipment and machinery each year. Business likely declined from the 1960s to 1980s as many of the businesses in Cleveland (and elsewhere) saw a decline due to deindustrialization and urban decline. Additionally, other factors that led to the decline of the machine tools industry included the failure to modernize/innovate, the failure to sell internationally, bigger companies buying smaller companies in the industry, and the dismantling of the iron and steel industry, which was linked with the machine tool industry. Hence, many buildings in cities became vacant/abandoned and left to deteriorate. The solution many cities implemented due to the crisis of deteriorating structures was demolition. From the 1940s to 1970s, approximately one-third of the buildings in the Warehouse District were cleared and replaced with surface parking. By 1980, 40 percent of the structures in the Warehouse District were gone.

In 1971, in response to demolition in Cleveland, the Cleveland Landmarks Commission was formed. The Landmarks Commission’s mission was to find architecturally and historically significant buildings in Cleveland and label them as landmarks to prevent their demolition. In April 1977, John D. Cimperman, head of the Landmarks Commission and Cleveland City Council member, revealed a plan for the Warehouse District that focused on reusing buildings through renovations and creating urban housing. Cimperman was aware of the historic value of the Warehouse District: it contained early commercial skyscrapers and much of the early wealth acquired in Cleveland was earned in the district. Cimperman summed up the situation best when he stated, “We need luck money, and cooperation, but saving and restoring this area is [a] must.” In 1982, the Warehouse District gained further protection from destruction. That year, Cleveland City Council established the Warehouse Historic District and the National Park Service approved listing the Warehouse District in the National Register of Historic Places. However, in 1983, White Tool & Supply Co. left the Hart & Co. Building, leaving its fate in question.

Luckily, on January 8, 1984, the Cleveland City Planning Commission approved an Urban Development Action Grant proposal for the building and in March, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development approved the application. This meant funds of $800,000 and a $2 million mortgage were approved to help restore and repurpose the building. The renovation was undertaken by the Old Cleveland Properties division of the Dalad Group and turned into an apartment building with thirty-three loft-style suites. The first floor was used as a commercial space where a restaurant and tavern were expected to be installed. Additionally, the developers tried to keep elements of the industrial history of the building but also made it look like a cozy residential space. In June 1985, the Hat Factory Lofts opened. Thus, the Hart & Co. Building began its life as the first legal housing unit in the Warehouse District. 

The transformation of the Hart & Co. Building into the Hat Factory Lofts was the first step in the spread of adaptive reuse in the Warehouse District. The Hat Factory Lofts was one of twenty-one buildings the Dalad Group planned to develop in the Warehouse District. Additionally, there were plans to establish pedestrian walkways and courtyards in the district to make it pedestrian friendly and to transform it into a mixed-use neighborhood. In 1987, Old Cleveland Properties undertook a $3 million renovation of the Hoyt Block, a four-story Victorian building. This led to the creation of eighty thousand square feet of retail space at ground-level and upper-floor offices. In 1988, Old Cleveland Properties made fifty-six apartments out of upper-story space in the Hoyt Block. In 1990, only three buildings in the Warehouse District had apartments: the Bradley Building, Hat Factory Lofts, and the Hart Building. Hence, the adaptive reuse of the Hart & Co. Building paved the way to revitalize the Warehouse District and served as part of the national trend to use adaptive reuse to save struggling cities like Baltimore, Minneapolis, and Pittsburgh. In the end, the Hat Factory Lofts tips its hat to the building’s first inhabitant, Hart & Co., through its name and architectural features, continuing to provide a sense of Cleveland’s past as the city continues to live on.

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William Hart (1811–1892) was born in Norwich, Connecticut, and migrated to the former Western Reserve with his parents and seven siblings in 1821 or 1822. Hart’s first experience in Cleveland was sleeping in the family’s covered wagon a couple of blocks west of Public Square, where they stopped on their way to the place they settled in Lorain County. About two years later, Hart’s parents both died within days of each other, orphaning eight children. In 1825, the same year that the Ohio & Erie Canal construction began, 14-year-old William moved to Cleveland to work as a cabinetmaking apprentice to Asabel Abel. After his apprenticeship ended, he opened his own small workshop and store at 49 Water Street near present-day Lakeside Avenue in 1834. That same year, he married and took up residence a block east of the shop on Bank Street.

The young cabinetmaker worked hard to provide for his younger siblings as well as for nieces and nephews that he and his wife adopted. Hart’s fortunes rose alongside Cleveland’s in the years after the canal launched the city’s upward arc of development, and in 1843 he moved just south to a larger building at 59 Water Street. By mid-century, William Hart & Co. was one of the six furniture wholesale houses that lined Water Street. However, soon thereafter, he suffered some setbacks. First, he nearly severed his arm in a circular saw accident in 1850, leading sympathetic voters to elect him City Treasurer, then a light job that enabled him to remain focused on his furniture business. Two years later, a fire destroyed his building and entire stock.

Undeterred, in 1853 Hart reopened briefly on Bank Street while he completed a larger four-story building at 103-105 Water Street (today 1370 West 9th Street). In 1868, two years after partnering with his son-in-law Hezekiah P. Malone to become Hart & Malone, he expanded to encompass the nine-foot-wide space between his building and the newly built Crittenden Block to its south. This became 107 Water Street (now 1374 West 9th Street). To match its cast-iron facade, he covered the old building with ornamental tinwork. This was at the height of the popularity of cast-iron facades, which also covered similar buildings erected in other cities in the 1850s-80s, perhaps most notably in New York’s SoHo and Tribeca districts. Hart also added a mansard roof on the fifth floor that further unified the two buildings. Today the facades appear more distinct because the older building’s tin facade was later removed to expose the brick.

In 1874, Hart & Malone was on the leading edge of an eastward shift of retailing when it moved from Water Street to 2 & 4 Euclid Avenue at the southeast corner of Public Square, lending higher visibility in what was on the cusp of becoming the heart of downtown. Hart & Malone probably struggled amid the economic downturn after the Panic of 1873. In 1875, Hart, who had already retired a few years before, left the business in the hands of an assignee and moved to Bradford, Pennsylvania, where he invested in the oil business, only to lose much of what remained of his onetime fortune. Meanwhile, his furniture store moved a block south to 15 & 17 Prospect Street just east of Ontario Street, where it continued to unload its remaining stock until it closed in 1877.

After the departure of the furniture business, the Hart Building saw a succession of business uses. Among the longest-running was the Cleveland office of Chicago-based Fairbanks, Morse & Co., a manufacturer of scales, engines, pumps, and windmills, which occupied the building in the 1880s to 1910s. After business declined on and around West 9th Street following World War II, the Hart Building became a part of efforts in the 1970s and '80s to revamp Cleveland’s so-called Warehouse District, including the ill-fated Lawrence A. Halprin plan for Settlers Landing. Jacobs Investments bought the Hart Building in 1984 and renovated its upper floors as apartments. As the district revitalized, the ground-floor space at 1370 West 9th became an antique store in 1988 and then housed two art galleries in succession in the 1990s to 2010s. Since 1995 the Hart Building’s five residential units have been condominiums. Its 1868 addition remains as a rare remnant of a time when the Warehouse District had many tall, narrow commercial blocks.

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More than 130 years after his death, Phineas Taylor (P. T.) Barnum remains a household word. Despite being a philanthropist, newspaper publisher, writer, legislator, and abolitionist, he is best remembered as a co-founder of the “Greatest Show on Earth,” a circus he didn’t launch until he was in his 60s. But long before that, at age 32, he birthed Barnum’s American Museum, a wildly popular mashup of live beasts, clowns, acrobats, jugglers, magicians, and musical acts. Less savory, but every bit as popular, were the museum’s human oddities—albinos, giants, little people, the physically malformed—as well as any number of hoax exhibits: a creature with the body of a monkey and the tail of a fish, a 10-foot human corpse, George Washington’s 161-year-old nursemaid. Located on Broadway in lower Manhattan, the museum’s outside was garnished with giant images of animals and other exhibits. From the roof, attendees could go aloft in a hot air balloon. To Barnum it was all about hot air. He was, after all, the godfather of hucksterism—the self-described “Prince of Humbugs.”

From its inception, Barnum’s creation was known as a “dime museum,” a live entertainment cousin of circuses, minstrel shows, music halls, burlesque and, eventually, vaudeville. In fact, many of vaudeville’s most famous names (Harry Houdini, the Griffin Sisters, Maggie Cline) began their careers in dime museums. Still, it was freaks and fakes that most likely attracted the masses. In his own way, Barnum also sought to educate the unwashed, to offer what he called a “moral education” proffered through lectures, concerts, and the importation of exotic (translation: “savage and inferior”) humans. This mission—concurrently enlightening, amusing, and horrifying audiences—was more or less unique to dime museums.

Barnum’s first connection to Cleveland came in November 1851, when he brought the uber-famous Swedish soprano Jenny Lind to Cleveland. More than one thousand people paid $4 (about $150 in today’s money) to see and hear her at Kelley’s Hall on Superior Street at the corner of Bank Street (now West 6th). By 1871, however, Barnum had a protégé—an adept and highly ambitious showman named Frank Drew. And it is because of Frank Drew that Cleveland got its first dime museum.

Frank M. Drew was born in New York City on June 30, 1852, and, like Barnum, seemed born for show business. An actor and circus performer, Drew was a cousin of theater legend John Drew Jr. and the eventual uncle of acting greats John, Ethel, and Lionel Barrymore. Drew’s father (also named Frank) was an actor who often performed at Cleveland’s Park Theater.

After splitting with Barnum in 1881, Drew opened his first dime museum in Providence, Rhode Island. By 1884, he had moved to Cleveland and opened Drew’s Dime Museum at 189 Superior Street, just east of Bank Street and around the corner from the Academy of Music. By the late 1880s, he would also launch dime museums in Columbus, Ohio, and Indianapolis.

Housed in the Commercial Building, a multi-use structure, Drew’s Cleveland museum was largely featureless on the outside. The interior, however, was ever so Barnumesque. A “thin dime” admitted enquiring Clevelanders who, upon reaching the building’s third floor, might come face to face with Felix Wehrle (“The Elastic Skin Man”), Eugene Ward (“The Footless Song-and-Dance Man”), Jo-Jo (“The Dog-Faced Man”), R. J. James (“The Ohio Fat Boy”), or even “The Fairy Dwarf Sisters.” Inert creatures—e.g., a two-headed cow—drew abundant stares. Drew also offered what was, at the time, mainstream entertainment: black-face (minstrel) acts, trained animals (generally old, toothless, and tired), and a variety of laugh generators. The Four Mortons, a popular family act, performed at the museum early in their careers, as did comedy legends Sam Bernard and Weber & Fields.

But true to dime museums’ dual mission, Drew also hosted plays, concerts, lectures, and other forms of what Walt Disney would later dub "edutainment." For example, Drew hawked displays of animals and exotic humans as “cultural explorations,” as well as living proof of westerners’ supposed superiority over “lowly beasts and primitive cultures.” Such attractions in this era of scientific racism included the February 1884 appearances of “Cetewayo’s Zulu Princess and Suite” and nine Australian Boomerang Throwers: “ferocious, treacherous, uncivilized cannibals and savages."

Fortunately, other forms of enrichment were less dubious: In August 1884, four of the seven survivors of the tragic 28-man Greely Expedition to Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic shared maps, curiosities, and stories. In January 1887, visitors were treated to a demonstration of clog dancing, followed by a concert featuring the Beethoven Quartet. And October 1889 brought to Drew’s a demonstration of shadowgraphs (silhouettes made by casting shadows from a bright light source) along with a visit from quarrelsome puppets Punch & Judy.

In late 1889, Drew closed his museum and became manager of the Star Theater on Euclid Avenue (opened two years earlier as The Columbia and now the site of PNC Center). In 1903, Drew also assumed management of the Cleveland’s Colonial Theater at Erie and Superior Streets. He eventually retired to Gerard, Pennsylvania, and later to St. Petersburg, Florida, dying in 1949 at the astonishing, stupendous, amazing, incredible age of 95 or 96.

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Samuel L. Mather, the grandson of one of the founding fathers of the Connecticut Land Company whose investment had led to the establishment of Cleveland, co-founded the iron-ore mining and shipping firm of Pickands, Mather & Co. in 1883, which helped him amass a new fortune on top of his already formidable wealth. Pickands Mather had kept offices for only a short time in the Perry-Payne Building on Superior Avenue when Mather commissioned the Chicago architectural firm of Burnham & Root (already known locally for its Society for Savings Building) to design a headquarters office building on land that he and John Hay had purchased on the northwest corner of Superior and Water Street (now W. 9th).

The aptly named Western Reserve Building occupied a triangular parcel on the crest of a steep hill descending into the flats along the river. The land had once been home to the Carter Tavern, a hewn-log inn that early Western Reserve of Connecticut settler Lorenzo Carter had built in 1803. Following Carter's death in 1814, Phineas Shepard operated the inn for an unknown span of time, and it was the site of the meeting in 1816 that organized Trinity Parish, later Trinity Episcopal Cathedral. After it closed, deeds show that Carter's children Alonzo and Laura sold the land to the Oviatt family in two transactions in 1825 and 1830. By 1828, the Oviatts had replaced the old two-story inn with a three-story brick building that stood until Orson M. Oviatt razed it for a new four-story commercial block called the Franklin Buildings in 1835. The Franklin Buildings housed various dry-goods houses and professional offices, including the men's clothing store of George A. Davis, who owned the block from 1851 until his death ten years later.

The Franklin Buildings later housed Western Union Telegraph Company, which added "innumerable adornments of fencing and wires which surmount[ed] the electric ridden structure," according to an account in the Plain Dealer in 1886. Three years later, Hay and Mather, the executors of Amasa Stone's estate, purchased the property in the estate's name and set out to redevelop it. (Hay's and Mather's wives Clara and Flora were Stone's daughters.) Following on the heels of the Perry-Payne Building, the announcement of a new building to replace the Western Union block was a welcome news to those who feared Euclid Avenue's inroads. As the Plain Dealer pointed out in 1889, "Enough is now promised in the way of new buildings to save the street from becoming what it had at one time threatened to do—a street for banks and the wholesale trade plentifully mixed up with saloons."

Mather’s new eight-story pressed-brick and sandstone Western Reserve Building, which opened in 1892, is considered a transitional skyscraper. Like Burnham & Root’s Monadnock Building in Chicago and Cudell & Richardson's Perry-Payne Building, it had traditional load-bearing masonry exterior walls but also incorporated some interior steel framing, a recent innovation. On the ground floor, the Western Reserve Building featured pink sandstone piers capped by Romanesque capitals and a large Romanesque arch framing its Water Street entrance. Its upper floors had either rectangular, segment arch, or full arch windows, some of them in oriel bays. Samuel Mather had an elaborate cherry-paneled office inside. 

In addition to Pickands Mather, the Western Reserve Building housed American Steel & Wire, Cleveland-Cliffs Iron, Island Creek Coal, and other shipping, mining, and manufacturing concerns. The building’s uses reflected business leaders’ desire to locate offices in the Wholesale District (later renamed the Warehouse District) close to Cleveland’s harbor. The riverside location was also attractive to the U.S. Weather Bureau. On May 1, 1892, Cleveland’s weather observatory and signal station opened there, 135 feet above the street, giving it a commanding view of the lake and river. From this lofty perch, signalman and weather observer W. B. Stockman hoisted flags to alert ship captains and downtown pedestrians to impending changes in the weather. The station had previously operated on top of the six-story Wilshire Block on Superior Avenue a block and a half west of Public Square. Now it was another beneficiary of Mather’s eagerness to be closer to the harbor.

In 1903, the Western Reserve Building was expanded northward along Water Street with an interior lightwell that may have drawn inspiration from Burnham & Root’s Rookery Building in Chicago or perhaps from a similar feature inside the Perry-Payne Building. The expansion increased the original building's size by about 40 percent. The building flourished into the 1920s, but like other buildings west of Public Square, it faced increasing competition from newer ones that rose to the east along Euclid Avenue. In 1924, Mather sold his interest in the Western Reserve Building to the Union Lennox Company, a firm named for the mammoth Union Trust Building that had recently replaced the Lennox Building on the northeast corner of Euclid and East 9th. Soon after, Pickands Mather moved its headquarters into the Union Trust Building. With the loss of its identity as a hub of the city's iron-ore business and the rise of newer, larger skyscrapers, the Western Reserve Building's future was in question.

The Western Reserve Building changed hands twice during World War II and, under Louis E. Goldman, it underwent a modernization in 1947 that covered its Romanesque arch entrance with a blocky granite façade. Despite this effort to renew its appeal, over the next three decades, the building stood sentinel over a part of downtown that was gradually decaying and receding in civic importance. Toward the end of that time, Goldman was no longer able to attract tenants, so the building sat mostly vacant. The exception to the rule was the opening in 1970 of the Cleveland Urban Learning Community, an experiment by St. Ignatius High School that took advantage of cheap rent to place its headquarters in the Western Reserve Building.

The Cuyahoga River’s east bank had been a natural place for Samuel Mather to envision an office building housing his iron mining and shipping business in the early 1890s. Although seemingly less natural, Herbert W. Strawbridge, chairman of the Higbee Company department store, felt a similar pull toward the western edge of the derelict Warehouse District nine decades later. Several years earlier, Strawbridge had visited San Francisco’s Ghirardelli Square, a shopping, dining, and entertainment complex filling the shell of its namesake chocolate manufacturer’s former factory. As Higbee’s downtown store sales slipped, Strawbridge recalled Ghirardelli Square. Then he hatched a daring plan to buy a swath of property overlooking the river and create a similar venue. Settlers’ Landing, as it would be named, would evoke Cleveland’s start along its river and, like Ghirardelli Square, reuse existing buildings as much as possible. More importantly, Strawbridge reasoned, Settlers’ Landing could draw large numbers of tourists and suburbanites back to a sagging downtown—and hopefully to Higbee’s.

Among the properties that the newly formed Higbee Development Corporation bought through agent John H. Bustamante was the Western Reserve Building, which Goldman was doubtless thrilled to unload in 1973. Strawbridge then hired Lawrence Halprin, the man behind Ghirardelli Square, to plan Settlers’ Landing. Higbee Development sank $4.5 million into a full renovation of the Western Reserve Building in 1974-76. The results drew a mixed response locally. Some decried the sandblasting that pitted the delicate sandstone facade. Others looked askance at the similarly insensitive treatment of the building’s interior. To avoid removing any leasable space, Higbee Development enclosed the historic lightwell to add an interior fire escape, heating and cooling ducts, and new restrooms on each floor. Halprin’s designer Angela Tzvetin created a modern lobby with “domed brick vaults” and spiderweb-like iron designs between their pillars, leading one architectural critic to dub the “corny” concept “early wine cellar.” The same critic went so far as to suggest that the Western Reserve Building was “second-rate Burnham and Root” that would have been better off bulldozed.

When the Western Reserve Building reopened in 1976, it seemed that the building had a new relevance as the Flats transitioned from maritime to leisure uses, but renewal was slow and difficult. Higbee’s operated a sandwich shop off the lobby while it searched (ultimately in vain) for a full-service restaurant to assume the space. At the time of the opening, only 1,220 of 53,840 square feet of office space was leased. Then Higbee’s plans for Settlers’ Landing collapsed after a major fire consumed some of the buildings the company had hoped to renovate. Despite efforts to promote the building, including hosting an exhibit and slideshow as part of the 1977 sesquicentennial of the opening of the Ohio Canal, the Western Reserve Building underperformed expectations. Coupled with Higbee’s expenses from opening new stores at Euclid Square and Randall Park malls, its renovation of Pickands Mather’s onetime headquarters building contributed to record quarterly losses that year. By 1981, the building was reportedly at 97 percent occupancy, but Higbee’s needed an infusion of cash, so it sold the building to another syndicate headed by developer John Ferchill.

Though Settlers’ Landing had flopped, the Flats and Warehouse District boomed in the 1980s. Nightspots, restaurants, and loft apartment conversions reinvigorated an area that earlier downtown planners had largely forsaken in their fixation on Erieview. It was too late for Higbee’s, which sold out to Youngstown developer Edward J. DeBartolo and the Little Rock-based Dillard’s chain in 1987 (though the Higbee’s name survived another five years). As for the Western Reserve Building, it flourished anew. Among the firms based there was Those Characters from Cleveland (now CloudCo Entertainment), a subsidiary of Cleveland-based American Greetings that formed in 1981 to develop and license characters developed by the card company such as Holly Hobbie and Strawberry Shortcake. That year saw Cleveland artist Elena Kucharik’s creation of the Care Bears, making the Western Reserve Building the birthplace of one of the 1980s’ popular culture icons.

Ferchill and his partners undertook yet another renovation in 1990 and built an eight-story addition to the north that doubled the size of the 1892/1903 building. The sandstone- and microcotta-faced addition featured a new arched entry, while the syndicate uncovered and restored the long-hidden one on the original building. After initial success, the enlarged building gradually languished again. By 2016, it was two-thirds vacant and in foreclosure, leading Ferchill to sell it the following year to WRB Partners (comprised of developer Fred Geis, real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield, and others). During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Western Reserve Building clung to its original function as an office building in a new era marked by the loss of downtown office-based work and a spate of office to residential conversions. In addition to attracting a global co-working company, WRB Partners added to its amenity-driven approach to combatting the loss of traditional dedicated office work by doing what Higbee’s had tried and failed to do fifty years earlier: entice a restaurant operator. In 2023, the popular Cleveland Heights-based Luna Bakery opened its third cafe on the building’s ground floor.

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The historic land upon which the Perry-Payne Building at 740 W. Superior Avenue stands, and much of the land that surrounds it in Cleveland's Warehouse District, was first commercially developed by the Nathan Perry family. Nathan Perry Sr. (1760-1813) was an innkeeper in western New York's Genesee County when, in 1796, he was hired by Moses Cleaveland to provide food supplies to the surveying party that founded Cleveland. Almost a decade later, he, his wife Sophia, and their children moved here. In 1806, Perry purchased six acres of land northwest of the Public Square. On that land, which had frontage on Superior, St. Clair and Water (West 9th) Streets, Perry opened a trading post in a cabin that stood less than fifty feet from where the Perry-Payne Building stands today. 

Nathan Perry, Sr. was one of Cleveland's first merchants. Less than a decade after arriving in Cleveland, however, he died unexpectedly. Four of his six acres, including the land upon which the Perry-Payne Building stands, passed to his son Nathan Perry Jr. (1786-1865), who transformed his father's trading post into a dry goods store and, in 1819, replaced the cabin with a two-story brick commercial building, one of Cleveland's first. Nathan Jr. operated his dry goods business in that building until 1826, when he sold the business but retained ownership of the building and the land upon which it stood.

In addition to running his dry goods business, Nathan Perry Jr., as early as 1814, had been making shrewd purchases of land in Cleveland, and, by 1830, he had become one of the city's wealthiest landowners. In that latter year, he moved his family from the simple frame house they had lived in on Water Street, just north of his dry goods store, into an early-era mansion on Euclid Avenue. It stood where Berkman Hall stands today on Cleveland State University's campus, just east of East 22nd Street.

In 1835, Perry decided to lease some of his land near the corner of Superior and Water to two hardware merchants, William Cleveland and Elisha Sterling. The terms of their two leases—drawn up by a young Cleveland lawyer named Henry B. Payne—required them to construct two three-story brick commercial buildings on the land they leased. Each of the two brick buildings they built had two storefronts. The buildings with their four storefronts became known as the "Central Buildings" because the corner of Superior and Water was then the center of Cleveland's commercial business district. It was in these buildings that William Bingham, George Worthington, and other prominent early Cleveland merchants, who were mentioned in the Plain Dealer article of April 15, 1888, got their business start.

As important as the Central Buildings were to the enlargement of Nathan Perry Jr.'s real estate portfolio, lawyer Henry B. Payne, who drafted the leases that required they be built, would soon become even more important. In 1833, Henry B. Payne was a law student in Hamilton, New York, when he was impelled to travel to Cleveland to help nurse his best friend, Stephen A. Douglas, who was suffering from a severe illness. Douglas, who later became the Illinois Senator whom Abraham Lincoln famously debated in 1858, left Cleveland after recovering. Henry Payne chose to stay. Payne completed his law studies here and, in 1836, when Cleveland officially became a city, Henry Payne became its first solicitor. In August 1836, Payne, who had in 1835, as noted above, served as Nathan Perry's lawyer, married Perry's only daughter, Mary, who thereafter became known to all in Cleveland as Mary Perry Payne. 

Henry Payne practiced law in Cleveland for more than a decade before he decided to leave the practice. In 1849 he joined forces with Alfred Kelley and Richard Hilliard to build Cleveland's first railroad, the Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati ("CCC"). In the process, he became that railroad's first president. In 1855, Payne turned his attention to government service and was appointed to the City Waterworks Commission. It built Cleveland's first waterworks system. Then, in 1862, he took on the work of chairing a city sinking fund board which reportedly stabilized Cleveland's finances for years. Henry Payne also became active in local and state politics. He served in a number of Democrat party positions, before being elected in 1874 to the United States House of Representatives. A decade later, in 1885, he was elected Ohio's first United States Senator from Cleveland.

It was during the second year of Henry Payne's term as a United States Senator that local newspapers reported that Senator Payne was planning to build a new commercial building on Superior Avenue that would be named the Perry-Payne Building.  Different reporters and different historians writing in different eras have speculated differently as to the reason why Henry Payne named the Perry-Payne Building as he did. They all, however, may have been looking to the wrong person for an answer to their question.

When plans were made to build the Perry-Payne Building, the land upon which it was to be built was owned by Mary Perry Payne. The decade of the 1880s was one in which American women were beginning to acquire greater property rights, including the right to own, develop and dispose of real property in their own name. Henry B. Payne was uniformly said to be a progressive person of kind disposition who had a very loving marriage with Mary Perry Payne. Given all of the foregoing, there is no reason not to believe that Mary Perry Payne, probably with her husband's full support, was the person who chose the name of the building that was to be built upon her land. So perhaps the question that we should ask today, even if it was not asked by newsmen in 1887, or by historians thereafter, is: Why did Mary Perry Payne choose to so name her building? While we do not know the answer to that question with any degree of certainty, it might be as simple as that was where she first met Henry Payne.

In proceeding with their plans to build the Perry-Payne Building, Henry and Mary Perry Payne selected Cudell & Richardson, one of Cleveland's most prominent late nineteenth-century architectural firms, to design it. Cudell & Richardson, in additional to this historic building, also notably designed the following buildings still standing in Cleveland: St. Stephen Roman Catholic Church on West 54th Street; Franklin Circle Christian Church at 1688 Fulton Road; Belden Seymour Block at 2513-2525 Detroit Avenue; Franklin Castle at 4318 Franklin Boulevard; the George Worthington Company Building at 802-832 W. St. Clair Avenue; the Root and McBride Building at 1220 West 6th Street; and the Bradley Building at 1212-1224 West 6th Street. Additionally, Cleveland's Cudell Commons Park and the city's Cudell neighborhood are both named after Frank Cudell, one of the two named partners in that architectural firm.

The building Cudell & Richardson designed for Henry and Mary Perry Payne was described in a June 19, 1887 Cleveland Leader article. It was to be constructed "of brown stone and granite, in the Rennaissance style of architecture. The side and rear walls will be of brick. . . . The floor joists will be of iron and the floors fire clay tile. . . . [T]he stairs will be made of iron and cement or marble. Iron balconies will be provided on the fifth and seventh floors." The article stated that the building would be "eight stories high in the middle and seven on either side, with a basement. It will have a frontage of 138 feet, a depth of 100 feet, and will be 120 feet high." The article noted that the first floor of the building would be designed for the offices of banks, and the upper floors would have a total of 46 offices with an average size of 18 x 26 feet.

Other articles noted that the interior of the building would feature an eight-story interior court illuminated by a sky light. (The design of this light court, as well as the building's front facade, were reminiscent of Chicago's Rookery Building designed by Burhnam and Roots.) Other interior features of the Perry-Payne Building were its modern elevators and mail chutes that carried mail from all of the building's upper floors down to a first floor mail room. Designed with interior iron support columns, the Perry-Payne Building is notable architecturally as a transitional building between earlier buildings with masonry support walls and later buildings, including the Society for Savings Building erected just one year later, having interior steel support beams which enabled them to be built to great heights and led to them becoming known as "skyscrapers."

Construction of the Perry-Payne building commenced in the summer of 1887 after all of the old commercial buildings on the site had been razed. While construction was expected to be completed in 1888, financing difficulties encountered by Henry and Mary Perry Payne appear to have delayed completion of construction until the summer of 1889. The first tenants of the Perry-Payne Building included Bingham Hardware and National City Bank, who opened their offices in the new building on July 1, 1889.  When the Perry-Payne Building opened, it was the tallest and most grand commercial building in Cleveland, and it attracted many of the largest iron ore, coal, and shipping companies in Cleveland as tenants. It also attracted a number of Cleveland law firms, including a new firm named Squire, Sanders and Dempsey (today, Squire, Patton and Boggs), which has since become one of the city's largest and most historic law firms. 

In the first two decades of its existence, even as larger and grander commercial building went up in downtown Cleveland, the Perry-Payne Building continued to attract more than its fair share of Cleveland's coal, iron, and shipping-related businesses, as well as a number of law firms and insurance companies. However, almost all of its core tenants departed after 1913 when Marcus Hanna's son Dan completed his construction of the enormous 15-story Leader Building on the corner of Superior Avenue and East 6th Street. Thereafter, for decades, the Perry-Payne Building survived with much less than full occupancy.

During its early years, ownership of the Perry-Payne Building remained with the Perry-Payne family and their descendants through the Perry-Payne Company formed in 1899, several years after the deaths of Henry and Mary Perry Payne. However, in 1945, that company sold the Perry-Payne Building to another corporation that was unrelated to the family. The building had many new owners in the years that followed and these new owners struggled to find and hold onto tenants. Then, in 1965, the State of Ohio leased the entire building for a number of its agencies with offices in Cleveland. This, however, only temporarily solved the building's occupancy problems for, in the summer of 1979, the State agencies departed when the new Frank J. Lausche State Office Building, directly across the street, opened.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, the owners of the Perry-Payne Building struggled anew with occupancy problems. In 1994, however, a new partnership purchased the building, hired an architectural firm known for its restoration work, and proceeded to restore the front facade of the Perry-Payne Building; renovate the remainder of it; and convert it into an apartment building with 91 apartments and 8,000 square feet of retail space. As of the writing of this story in 2024, the Perry-Payne Apartments remain a prestigious address in downtown Cleveland's Warehouse District.

If Mary Perry Payne were alive today and learned that her Perry-Payne Building had been converted into an apartment building, she might say that it really didn't matter, so long as Clevelanders today believe, as she and her husband and Clevelanders of her generation more than a century ago believed, that the Perry-Payne Building stands at a place of historic memory.

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William Charles Scofield, the person for whom the Grand Arcade Building at 408 West St. Clair Avenue was built, was one of Cleveland's most prominent industrialists in the second half of the nineteenth century. He and John Alexander, reputedly the first person to refine oil in Cleveland, co-founded the Great Western Oil Works which, in the 1860s, was one of the chief competitors of John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company. When, in 1872, Standard Oil Company engaged in anti-competitive acts and forced virtually all of Cleveland's oil refiners, including John Alexander and William Scofield, to sell their refineries to it at discounted prices, Alexander retired from the refinery business and returned to England. Scofield, however, did not. He not only survived the so-called "Cleveland Massacre," but thrived after it.

In 1872, the same year that he was forced out of the oil refining industry by Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company, W. C., as Scofield was known, entered the iron manufacturing industry, purchasing the historic Otis Iron Works on Whiskey Island. He renamed it Lake Erie Iron Company, expanded its operations to include a new facility for the manufacture of nuts and bolts on land located between East 63rd Street and Addison Avenue close to the tracks of the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railroad, and made it a very successful business. In 1874, two years after the Cleveland Massacre, Scofield formed a new partnership, built a new oil refinery on Willson Avenue (East 55th Street), north of Broadway and near the tracks of the Atlantic and Great Western Railroad, and re-entered the oil refining business, operating once again as Great Western Oil.

In 1882, W. C. Scofield decided to construct the Grand Arcade. Yet, it wasn't his first presence on St. Clair or even the first building he had erected on that street. After immigrating from England and arriving in Cleveland in about 1844, he and his wife Ann had settled on St. Clair Street, where their first two children were born. In 1850, they had moved east to Hamilton Street as the neighborhood northwest of Public Square (today known as the Warehouse District) began its mid nineteenth century transformation into a commercial district. Despite moving his residence, Scofield retained a presence on St. Clair, starting up several small manufacturing businesses there in the 1850s and early 1860s.

In 1864, the same year in which he formed his partnership with John Alexander, William Scofield had expanded his business presence on St. Clair by purchasing the former homestead of pioneer Cleveland grocer and wholesale liquor merchant Nelson Monroe, which was located nearly directly across the street from where the Grand Arcade would be built almost two decades later. The offices of the Great Western Oil Company were located on this property from 1864 to 1868. In 1878, Scofield had further solidified his presence on St Clair by building the four-story brick and stone Scofield Block on the property. A number of industrial tenants, including Scofield's Lake Erie Iron Company, soon moved their offices into that building.

So why did W. C. Scofield decide in 1882 to build the Grand Arcade across the street from the Scofield Block built just four years earlier? It is not clear from recorded sources why he did so, but it may have been to expand his influence in the industry in which he was most personally and financially invested—coal and iron. Whatever the reason, in February 1882, Scofield purchased the lot on the northwest corner of St. Clair and Academy (West 4th) and hired Cleveland architect Levi T. Scofield to design an office building for that lot which had 100 feet of frontage on St. Clair and 97 feet of frontage on Academy. Levi Scofield, who does not appear to have been a relative of W. C. Scofield—at least not a close relative—is best known to Clevelanders today as the architect of both the Soldiers and Sailors Monument on Public Square and the Schofield Building on the southwest corner of East 9th Street and Euclid Avenue.

Like some of the other buildings Levi Scofield designed, the Grand Arcade was designed to be grand and notable. Years after it was built, it was referred to by at least one newspaper as Cleveland 's first "modern" office building. Designed in the Neoclassical Revival style with elements of Neo-Grec, it is a brick and stone building that stands six stories tall (five floors above ground with a raised basement). Its exterior walls fronting St. Clair Avenue and West 4th Street are decorated with pilasters, capitals, belt courses, entablatures, ornamental swags and other details formed from cut sandstone and unglazed terra cotta. The construction cost of the building was $100,000 ($3 million+ in 2024 dollars).

One of the most notable features of the Grand Arcade's original design was its approximately 100 by 20 foot, five-story-tall interior court which had an ornate triangular prism-shaped glass skylight above it. All of the building's interior offices had direct access to this court from iron balconies and descending stairs. Regrettably, that interior court no longer exists. Although no record has been found that documents when it was removed, it likely occurred during one of the several renovations of the building that took place between 1902 and 1962.

Another mystery associated with the Grand Arcade is: Why did W. C. Scofield decide to call this building an "arcade?" That term traditionally refers to a building with a covered passageway lined with retail shops on both sides. An article in the Cleveland Leader, on December 7, 1912, noted that "the building actually is not an arcade and received its name from the court and its many balconies opening from the inner office suites." However, there is no indication that the newspaper had obtained that explanation from W. C. Scofield who was still living at the time the article was published, and there may have been a reason, other than the explanation offered by the Leader, why Scofield used the term. There were, in fact, retail shops located on the first floor of the building in the decades of the 1880s and 1890s and some of these could have had interior storefronts and entrance ways on the court.

When the Grand Arcade opened in 1883, it notably drew as its first tenants a large number of companies from the coal and iron industries, some of which had previously been tenants in the Hilliard Building on Water (West 9th) Street which had been known since 1875 as the Coal and Iron Exchange Building. According to information gleaned from the 1884-1885 Cleveland Directory, the Grand Arcade in its first full year leased office suites to 14 iron manufacturing companies and five coal companies. However, when the Perry-Payne building opened in 1889, all of the iron manufacturing tenants, except Scofield's Lake Erie Iron Company, and all but two of the coal tenants left the Grand Arcade.

It appears, again from a survey of tenant listings in Cleveland directories, that W. C. Scofield attempted to address the departure of coal and iron companies from his building by seeking, in the 1890s, to attract oil and railroad companies. For a time he was successful in that effort, helped by the fact that so many railroads and streetcar companies had located their offices in buildings on St. Clair between Seneca (West 3rd) and Water (West 9th) that that stretch of St. Clair was known as Railroaders' Row. But just as the opening of the Perry-Payne Building in 1889 had impacted the Grand Arcade's efforts to attract and keep coal and iron companies as tenants, the opening of additional new downtown office buildings in the 1890s, including the Society for Savings Building and the Arcade in 1890, the Western Reserve Building in 1892, the Garfield Building in 1893 and the New England Building in 1896, similarly impacted the Grand Arcades's efforts to attract tenants from other industries. By 1899, only one oil company and just three railroad companies remained as tenants in the Grand Arcade. In that same year, W. C. Scofield, who was already in his late seventies—although he would live to be 95 years old—turned over ownership and control of the building to his sons Charles and Frank. They, likely with their father's blessing, took a new approach to dealing with the building's growing occupancy problem.

In 1902, the Grand Arcade was remodeled and transformed from an office building into what was then called a "power block," i.e., a building occupied by a single tenant. It was a good decision for the Scofield family which would continue to own the Grand Arcade and lease it to a series of single tenants until they sold the property in 1955. From 1902 until 1912, the building was leased to North Electric Company, a telephone manufacturing company. Then, from 1913 until 1926, it was leased to Clawson and Wilson, a wholesale drug company headquartered in Buffalo, New York. Finally, from 1926 until 1961, the building was occupied by the Standard Drug Company, a Cleveland retail and wholesale company, which used it as a warehouse and purchased the building from the Scofield family in 1955. Standard Drug sold the Grand Arcade in 1961 to a realty company. The following year, the building was purchased by the non-profit City Mission which remodeled and converted it into a homeless shelter.

After occupying the building for almost three decades, the City Mission sold the Grand Arcade in 1991 to a for-profit limited partnership which restored and renovated the building, converting it to a new residential use, first as market-rate apartments and later as condominiums. In the second phase of the project, three other historic Warehouse District buildings were added to the Grand Arcade condominium development—the Waring Building, built in 1855 and located on St. Clair adjacent to the Grand Arcade; the Klein-Marks Building, built in 1881 and located on West 6th Street just north of the Waring Building; and the Blair Building, built circa 1868 and located just north of the Klein-Marks Building.

From Cleveland's tallest office building and most prestigious address; to a "power block" for single commercial tenants; to a wholesale drug warehouse; to a shelter for Cleveland's homeless; to market-rate apartments; and finally to residential condominiums, the Grand Arcade has endured more use changes than most of Cleveland's other historic buildings. Through it all, the Grand Arcade, much like the nineteenth century industrialist who built it, has not only survived, but has thrived.

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