In 1973, architectural critic Ada Louise Huxtable described "a huge, bleak, near empty plaza with a complete set of non-working fountains and drained pools, focusing on a routine glass tower by New York architects Harrison and Abramovitz, known to Clevelanders as the 'jolly green giant.'" She lamented that the plaza was flanked by "vast, open parking lots." Huxtable was referring to Erieview Plaza and Erieview Tower, together the focus of the Erieview urban renewal project, which she derided as a "monument to everything that was wrong with urban renewal thinking in America in the 1960s." Erieview attracted more than architectural criticism. Some Clevelanders also argued that the project set back the downtown district it was intended to revitalize. Plain Dealer columnist Philip W. Porter called Erieview "the mistake that ruined downtown." Porter wasn't alone. Even in the 1960s, some downtown interests worried that Erieview, which some considered a "surrogate downtown," might siphon energy away from the downtown shopping district. Would Erieview workers continue to walk several blocks to Euclid Avenue to shop on their lunch break, or would they demand amenities in a new, self-contained city-within-a-city?

Erieview was born of the same concerns about downtown stagnation that gripped many U.S. cities by the 1950s. Pittsburgh’s Gateway Center became a national model for downtown renewal, and Cleveland leaders formed the Cleveland Development Foundation (CDF) in 1954 to emulate Pittsburgh’s Allegheny Conference on Community Development. CDF weighed whether to launch its urban renewal effort (with federal dollars matching municipal expenditures in a 2:1 ratio) in downtown in a subsidized version of Pittsburgh's privately financed downtown renewal or start in east-side neighborhoods. Local architect Richard Hawley Cutting even drew a plan, pro bono, that he pitched to CDF. Called Erie View, it featured a geometric assemblage of modernist towers and plazas along the lakefront to the east of East 9th Street. CDF, whose chairman was Republic Steel president Tom Patton, rejected that urban renewal and, in 1956, proceeded instead with another, dumping Republic Steel slag in Kingsbury Run and building the euphemistically named Garden Valley, which offered substandard housing and exacerbated residential segregation.

A succession of failed downtown projects (among them the collapse of a plan for underground parking beneath the Mall, voters' rejections of a convention center expansion, and county commissioners' denial of a downtown subway) led to a series of secret meetings in the spring of 1959. Weary of the slow pace of neighborhoods-first renewal and impatient with the CDF-commissioned $100,000 downtown plan due out later that year, CDF president Upshur Evans, Cleveland Chamber of Commerce president Curtis Lee Smith, and Cleveland Urban Renewal and Housing Director James M. Lister convened to strategize how to catalyze downtown revitalization. They consulted with Chase Manhattan Bank's David Rockefeller in the hope he might invest in Cleveland. He refused but reinforced their belief that only a large, coordinated plan was worthwhile. They turned to Newark-based Prudential Insurance to try to interest the company in a regional headquarters along Lake Erie. They too demurred.  

Undeterred, the trio bypassed the Cleveland Planning Commission and went straight to Mayor Anthony Celebrezze, who saw in their idea a project he could sell. Unveiled in January 1960, the plan, christened Erieview, promised the nation's largest downtown urban renewal project, a reflection of city leaders' desire to make up for lost time. They pronounced the 125-acre renewal area (roughly bounded by the Memorial Shoreway, East 9th Street, Chester Avenue, and East 17th Street) “blighted,” sealing the fate of many small businesses and manufacturers and some single-room-occupancy hotels. The city commissioned prominent modernist architect I. M. Pei to design the Erieview plan, which looked like many other plans of its era – a Tetris board of low-slung, interlocking buildings wrapping around open plazas punctuated by taller towers. The tallest of them was plotted between East 9th and 12th Streets with an open plaza and reflecting pool. It was not the first time Cleveland saw a grand scheme to reorient its downtown toward the lakefront. Pei’s conception reprised, updated, and extended eastward the early 20th-century Group Plan designed by the “City Beautiful” architect Daniel Burnham of Chicago.

Developers John Galbreath and Peter Ruffin planned to build one or more office towers in Erieview, including the focal building at its heart. The 529-foot-tall, 40-story Erieview Tower was designed by the New York firm of Harrison and Abramovitz. Firm partner Wallace Harrison was best known for his work on Rockefeller Center and the United Nations, but the Erieview design more closely resembled the firm's 45-story Socony-Mobil Building (1956) in New York, also developed by Galbreath and Ruffin. Erieview Tower was a simplified version of its predecessor, substituting black and green glass curtain walls for black windows and silver patterned aluminum walls. Yet both buildings were later panned by some as "ugly" designs. True to its nickname, the greenish tower did loom, giant-like, over the wide-open expanse of Erieview Plaza whose fountains and reflecting pool doubled as an ice rink in winter. Widespread clearance left mostly parking lots surrounding Erieview Plaza for years.

Erieview was billed as an antidote for an ailing downtown, on one hand, and as an outlet for downtown's expected office boom, on the other. While these aims may appear contradictory – one intended to reverse decline and another to accommodate anticipated growth – they actually reflected the complex situation facing downtowns in the 1960s. Suburban retail competition was causing downtown shopping to wither, but at the same time many firms were eager for more spacious, modern office space. Erieview initially spurred overdue renovations by several leading downtown department stores. That their efforts ultimately failed to save them owed less to Erieview than to the effects of population decline, suburban retail growth, and the city's failure to cultivate a strong convention trade. Office expansion promised a counterpoint to retail slippage. After Erieview Tower, the 32-story Federal Building (1967), two major hotels (today’s Westin and Doubletree) and a half-dozen major office towers, including headquarters for Diamond Shamrock (1972) and Eaton (1983), opened incrementally over the next two decades.  

No sooner had Erieview been fleshed out than it started to clear out. Downtown employment dropped by one-third in the forty years after 1970, and by the 21st century the main demand was for more living space. Boosters had long predicted a return to the central city. Erieview added three apartment towers (including Reserve Square) between 1967 and 1973, but it would take another four decades before downtown became a true residential magnet, aided by conversions of old office buildings using historic preservation tax credits. In 2010, the Downtown Cleveland Alliance rebranded the Erieview area, nearly one-third vacant, as a "live–work–play" concept dubbed the Nine-Twelve District. As renovators exhausted the supply of historic buildings, midcentury properties were just crossing the fifty-year threshold to qualify as "historic." In 2018, developer James Kassouf bought Erieview Tower, newly listed on the National Register, with plans to convert twelve vacant floors into apartments. Downtown's northeastern quadrant once had hundreds of units of low-rent housing, but these held no place in the vision of Cleveland’s boosters. They yielded to civic aspirations for a new downtown of gleaming office towers. Although Erieview, recast as Nine-Twelve, is reemerging as a neighborhood, its upmarket housing inventory ensures that it can’t rightly be said to have come full circle.

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Beginning in 1955, Longwood (Area B) was the first urban renewal project in accordance with the General Plan for Cleveland of 1949. The small, yet densely populated, neighborhood of about 56 acres was bordered by Scovill and Woodland Avenues to the north and south; and by East 33rd and East 40th Streets to the west and east. The project served as a model for subsequent urban renewal projects in Cleveland, though not always a positive one. Opposition and criticism to the project was visible since the beginning and would continue through the following years. Roadell Hickman stated in a Plain Dealer editorial in 1987, “Longwood became Cleveland’s Cabrini-Green, the notorious Chicago public-housing project. Both began with a vision to save a neighborhood but became a symbol of what was destroying it.” Longwood and Cabrini-Green did have some differences, however. The Cabrini-Green project in Chicago was intended to be public housing, whereas Longwood was not intended to be public housing, but rather low-cost housing.

The General Plan for Cleveland was formed as a flexible blueprint for city growth up until the 1980s. Longwood (Area B), among the other urban renewal projects in Cleveland, was a response to growing blight and decay in inner city neighborhoods. The city government of Cleveland was proactive about maintaining and developing its inner city since the beginning of the 20th century. A city planning commission was established in 1915, and in 1933 Cleveland established the Metropolitan Housing Authority. Local businesses and corporations also took action and formed the Cleveland Development Foundation in 1954 with a revolving fund of $2 million to invest in urban renewal. Businesses and corporations in Cleveland believed that by creating a better inner city in close proximity to jobs, they could attract middle class workers that relocated to the suburbs.

In 1955, the Longwood neighborhood had a total of 295 dilapidated buildings that housed around 1,500 families. The project called for the total clearance of the area, with the exception of a few churches and city buildings. The area consisted of five privately owned developers and called for the construction of 836 new dwellings throughout the neighborhood, as well as shopping centers and an improved street plan. Various city agencies touted the project as an almost immediate success story through multiple newspaper articles and city publications. The land was acquired, leveled, and rebuilt relatively quickly and new residents were moving in as early as 1958. Any small success of the project was covered in the local newspapers to paint a clear picture that Longwood was right on track to become the model that the city government hoped it would be.

Despite the proclaimed success of the project by city publications, problems and critics were prevalent and visible from the beginning. Critics claimed that the project was far too expensive and was taking too much time to fully complete with the quality that was initially envisioned. The project, as well as most urban renewal projects, also disproportionally affected African Americans, which caused many residents to speak out against it. According to Renewing Inequality, of the 1,100 people displaced by the project by 1961, 99% of them were people of color. Tenants also consistently made claims of mismanagement, pest problems, and poorly built structures. According to Residents also had to be relocated for the duration of the construction of the project and some found themselves in a worse situation than they were before having to move out of Longwood. Tenants also picketed and protested their grievances several times, with the first tenant strike occurring in 1958. Tenants in a small section of Longwood (Area B) called Longwood Village organized a strike with grievances that included high rents and rent increases, racial discrimination, rats, and property mismanagement. The primary cause for the strike, being rent prices, was never resolved on account of rents being set and controlled by the Federal Housing Administration. Everyone involved, however, did agree that the rents were too high to be considered low cost housing. The rent strikes reveal a major concern with urban renewal that civic and business leaders did not foresee. Longwood was still surrounded by other slums and dilapidated neighborhoods and the new housing was not affordable. Middle-class suburbanites did not want to move into the inner city and the inner-city community could not afford the new housing. Eugene Segal, a reporter for the Plain Dealer, stated, “If one group can’t afford the new housing and the other won’t have it, whom are we building for?”

The housing developments in Longwood (Area B) changed ownership multiple times over the decades following the project. Excessive vacancies in the housing developments caused the owners to default on their mortgage payments in 1963. To stop them from foreclosing, the Cleveland Development Foundation set up a subsidiary called the Longwood Housing Association to take advantage of a new Federal Housing Administration amendment and get a loan. The loan paid off banks and money lenders first, then a portion of it was used to pay developers to help recoup their losses, and what was left was paid to the city of Cleveland which was only about half of what the Cleveland Development Foundation initially paid in advance to the builders of the project.

The grand ambitions of the Longwood (Area B) project were unfortunately never realized. Financial, management, and vacancy problems continued to plague the neighborhood into the 1990s. A new type of subsidized housing was built in the early 2000s, which replaced Longwood Apartments. The new housing development was named Arbor Park Village and was intended to include educational classes, recreational activities, and resources to help people find better jobs. Though flaws persisted in Longwood (Area B) in the decades following the project, perhaps Arbor Park Village can fulfill some the original promises that were made.

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Standing before a crowd of 200 community members in the fall of 1968, City of Shaker Heights Mayor Paul K. Jones offered his assurances to constituents gathered at Shaker Heights High School Auditorium. An urban renewal plan had sparked public debate over the future of Shaker Heights’ Moreland neighborhood, and the role that the City would play in shaping its landscape. Mayor Jones urged those in attendance to support the passage of bond issues totaling $7.25 million in an upcoming November election to help the “maturing city regain its youth.” The proposed development, however, went beyond cosmetic adjustments for an aging infrastructure. Both homes and commercial structures would need to be razed for the construction of a new service center and townhouse project. Over 200 families would be displaced. 


The urban renewal efforts were dependent on the public’s approval of three bond issues by a 55 percent majority vote. A $4 million bond would finance the construction of a service center on Chagrin Boulevard between Ludgate and Menlo Roads. The installation of 41 traffic signs, the relocation of city utilities for townhouses, and the widening and improvement of over a dozen streets was attached to the passage of a $3 million bond. A $250,000 park improvement bond funded the creation of a semi-public green space for the townhouse site, as well as providing for the creation of additional public spaces in Shaker Heights’ southwestern region. The proposed park and townhouse project, which would later be named Sutton Place, encapsulated the goals of this urban renewal effort: to physically recreate the Moreland neighborhood as a way of stabilizing property values and promoting the “re-integration” of white residents. 


The projects, and their supporting bond issues, grew from an ambitious and highly controversial redevelopment plan created by Leonard Styche and Don Hisaka for the City of Shaker Heights. Their focus on the Moreland neighborhood was prompted by efforts to stabilize the community. During the 1960s, homes in Moreland had been placed on the resale market at an alarming rate and the community transitioned from nearly all white to over two-thirds African American. Concurrent efforts to shape and support these urban renewal plans were spearheaded by the Shaker Communities Housing Office. 


Funded by both the City’s government and school system, the organization was established in 1967. Four housing coordinators were hired from the membership of the Moreland, Ludlow, Lomond and Sussex community organizations in order to aid realtors with selling properties in their respective neighborhoods. The Housing Office worked in collaboration with and generally towards the same ends as the community organizations. The group expressed concerns that if the Moreland community became exclusively African American, then other neighborhoods would follow “one by one.” While the community associations were a positive force in advocating for integration and promoting diversity as a value of Shaker Heights’ collective identity, their work during the late 1960s often focused on attracting white homeowners to the Moreland neighborhood. Support of the park-townhouse project was one such effort.


The gathering at Shaker Heights High school was not the first public meeting over the proposed redevelopment efforts. Since the Styche-Hisaka Plan was announced in February of 1967, objections, suggestions and revisions had been discussed at length by local community associations, block clubs, the Housing Office, concerned citizens and government representatives. Plans for a Civic Center in the Moreland neighborhood had been scrapped, and new emphasis was placed on diverting traffic flow away from residential neighborhoods and creating green spaces at the request of the public. The Mayor also promised that the City would assist with the relocation of those impacted by the urban renewal efforts.


A revised master plan was now on the table for a public vote. A representative of William Gould & Associates, the architectural firm employed to design Sutton Place, manned a slide projector to accompany Mayor Jones’ pitch to the concerned citizenry. Maps and photos offered those in attendance a glimpse at a possible future for the Moreland neighborhood’s townhouse and park space. The housing stock and grid layout, both of which developed outside of the control of the Van Sweringen Company during the 1920s, would be revamped with curvilinear streets and low-density housing. 


The proposed Sutton Place development not only aimed to aesthetically unify the area with surrounding Shaker Heights neighborhoods, but to act as a physical barrier between the City of Cleveland and the inner suburb. The neighborhood grid was reshaped with a cul-de-sac that encircled the townhouse and park, and blocked incoming northern traffic from Kinsman Road in the City of Cleveland. In addition to new traffic patterns, 85 homes on six acres would be replaced with 15 townhouses that half-encircled open park grounds. While not yet approved by voters, the City began its efforts to acquire properties within the area beginning in January, 1966.


With support from the City’s community organizations, Shaker Heights voters overwhelmingly approved all three bond issues on November 5, 1968. The demolition of properties on Sutton (East 150th Street) and Colwyn (East 152nd Street) Roads began in January, 1969. Only one house remained at the western edge of the proposed development by November. Through its efforts to provide assistance with relocation, the City tracked 85 of the 140 families displaced by the townhouse project. Forty families relocated within Shaker, and 16 moved to Cleveland. Twenty-six single family homes and 59 duplexes were removed from the grounds. In their place, a townhouse complex emerged. 


Sutton Place grew from a proposal in the Styche-Hisaka Plan to provide alternative housing options that retained “the characteristics of a fine residential community” for potential middle- and upper-class homeowners. A planned townhouse development offered “the amenities and advantages of home ownership and the conveniences of apartment living.” Designed by William Gould & Associates for Alcoa Constructions Systems, Inc., the project was an experiment in using aluminum for residential construction. Structural components, as well as windows and exterior siding, were forged of aluminum to create durable, energy efficient and weatherproof residential housing. 


The City of Shaker Heights Planning Commission approved plans for the Sutton Place Townhouse Development on July 20, 1970. Construction began soon after. While the City acquired the grounds, the townhouses were built and sold under Alcoa Construction Systems, Inc. Plans for the two-story townhouses centered on the park space. Living and dining areas opened up to patios at the rear of the entrance, which faced outwards towards the semi-public grounds. Thirty townhouses comprised the park-townhouse development at completion, and prices ranged between $35,500 to $37,000 (corresponds to $235,000 in 2018). The townhouses opened for display to the public in May, 1971. 


The construction of mid-priced, modern townhouses in Shaker Heights was an effort to promote integration in the Moreland neighborhood. Prior studies by the Moreland Community Association noted that white families were willing to rent in the neighborhood, but not buy homes. This was attributed to the unmodern look and interior layout of the aging housing stock. Joseph Laronge, Inc., the real estate company handling sales of Sutton Place for Alcoa, noted, “we plan Sutton Place to be a special way of living, we hope to have true integration here in a way that will make this a model community.” The new housing, however, predominately attracted upper-income, professional African Americans. The park and townhouse project still succeeded in its goals. The landscape had been reshaped and clearly delineated as a Shaker Heights community. The upper Moreland neighborhood was visually and physically set apart from the City of Cleveland at its western and southern boundaries. The neighborhood’s population density fell, and urban housing stock was replaced with green space and contemporary residences. Despite the successes of the Sutton Place project, public debate over the redevelopment and re-integration of the Moreland neighborhood continued.

Upon opening its model home to potential buyers in 1971, the Sutton Place townhouses also attracted picket signs of the Cleveland Association of Real Estate Brokers (CAREB). The African American association demanded the right to have a real estate agent on premises at Sutton Place, and to present qualified candidates for sales. Alcoa had previously extended exclusive selling rights to the white-owned Joseph Laronge, Inc. While CAREB was eventually invited to be on site during sales, and an uncharacteristic 50-50 split of commission was proposed by Joseph Laronge, Inc., the offers were refused. CAREB rejected on the grounds that African American real estate agents would not be able to go into a white community and sell new housing under similar conditions. They demanded full commission. While this request was denied by Laronge, the protest by CAREB reflected a larger, ongoing public debate over both the City’s urban renewal plans and reintegration efforts in the Moreland neighborhood. The role of the City and the community associations in both refashioning the physical landscape and promoting the reintegration of white residents in African American communities increasingly came under fire from the public during the 1970s and 1980s. These debates eventually advanced a more nuanced, balanced and self-reflective approach to advocating for integration in white and African American neighborhoods by the City of Shaker Heights and its neighborhood community associations. The City of Shaker Heights has continued to promote integration and pursue redevelopment projects that diversity housing stock within its southern neighborhoods. A new townhouse development, The Van Aken Townhouses, opened for sale in 2018 and is planned to include 33 new-construction townhomes near the intersection of Sutton Road and Van Aken Boulevard.

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As you look around Cleveland – attuned to the city's built landscape – you may not know it, but you are looking at many structures designed by the renowned architect Charles Frederick Schweinfurth. He envisioned the most expensive private residence, Mather Mansion, built on the acclaimed Millionaires' Row and erected his masterpiece Trinity Episcopal Cathedral. Schweinfurth's "sound mentality and intellectual discipline of a high order, supplemented by a thorough mastery of technical knowledge" sounded through in the design of the Union Club, and the stone bridges that accent the Cultural Gardens. Not only did Schweinfurth design these beautiful architectural works of art, he lived and thrived in the urban landscape that he was charged with making so aesthetically pleasing. During his successful tenure as one of Cleveland's master architects, Schweinfurth also conceived his own private residence on East 75th Street, formerly known as Ingleside Avenue.

What became the Schweinfurth residence was originally proposed for one of his clients W.K. Vanderbilt. In his book Cleveland Architecture 1876-1976, Eric Johannesen notes that "Vanderbilt was chairman of the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern Railroad" and a member of the famed robber baron family. Nevertheless, these plans fell through for unknown reasons and Schweinfurth took control of the property and set forth to design a home that truly expressed his own stylistic flare. In 1894, Schweinfurth's Romanesque Revival unostentatious home was completed. Schweinfurth occupied the home from 1894 until his death in 1919. In 1915 he "enlarged the original house … to provide [for an] additional dining area and space for servants and guests, as well as [a]…small conservatory." Over time, the lots down E. 75th Street were procured and the wealth of Euclid Avenue flowed off of the main artery onto the side streets. But then the area took an unimagined turn.

White flight to the suburbs changed the character of the neighborhood. The mansions and other grand homes were either boarded up, torn down, or chopped up by slum landlords eager to make a quick buck at the expense of the new predominantly African American clientele. The Schweinfurth home, no longer a private residence, continued after 1930 as the William L. Wagner & Son Funeral Home. The City of Cleveland turned away from the Midtown Corridor, leaving the people and structures to splinter into vermin riddled streets. A resident of E. 75th recalled looking out his "'window at the neighbor's house and watch[ing] the ground under the garbage cans writhe with rats.'" The Hough Riots of 1966, which were in no small way a response to the lack of investment in the area, did not propel the City of Cleveland or private investors to revive the area that "when Cleveland was a boom town… was the neighborhood in which to live." Banks only perpetuated the problem. Local banks redlined the neighborhood because it was overwhelmingly "occupied by persons at the bottom of the economic heap." It was not until 1970—when R. Van Petten and his partner Dale H. Smith purchased the former Schweinfurth property after convincing an African American bank to sign a loan agreement—that a twinkling of resurgence gleamed on the horizon.

Van Petten and Smith labored away, restoring the residence to its original simple elegance, while the rest of the street continued to suffer from urban decay. The new owners hoped that their personal investment in the area would encourage others to follow, but the home for decades remained an "oasis-in-the-desert." In the 1970s, Van Petten and Smith started a preservation movement in the Midtown Corridor that never quite caught. Once investment and economic recovery acts were implemented in the Midtown Corridor, new construction became the answer. Today the winding roads of infrastructure and the expanding Cleveland Clinic campus has architecturally sterilized much of the neighborhood. The former Schweinfurth residence remains an "architecturally lonesome" part of the Ingleside Historic District.

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When exactly Hickox Alley (today, East 3rd Street between Euclid and Prospect Avenues) first came into existence, originally as a walkway between Abram Hickox's blacksmith shop and his home, is unclear.  Hickox purchased the original two-acre lots upon which his place of business, his house, and the walkway were located during the period 1810-1815—about the same time that Euclid Street (later renamed Euclid Avenue) was being laid out. There is no known extant map, or other documentary evidence, substantiating the walkway's existence or its particular configuration in this era. By the time Cleveland's first directory was published in 1837, 72-year-old Abram Hickox  had sold off the northern part of his land fronting Euclid Street—where his blacksmith shop had once sat, and was listed in that year as living at 27 Prospect Street, employed as the village sexton.

During the years 1837-1838, after he had conveyed his land on Euclid Street, Hickox, along with others, petitioned Cleveland council to designate the walking path between Euclid and Prospect  a village street. The council responded in 1838 by adopting an ordinance "which established an Alley from Euclid Street to Prospect Street entitled Hickox Alley." The ordinance contained a legal description of the village's newest alley, including its width (one rod or 16.5 feet) and its peculiar circular area with a post in the middle, the only evidence of which left today is a bend in the alley approximately 150 feet south of Euclid Avenue.

Two years after Hickox Alley was thus officially established as a public byway in Cleveland, the First Wesleyan Methodist Church built a church on the same southwest corner where Abram Hickox's blacksmith shop had recently stood. The Wesleyan Church was notable as the first church built on Euclid Avenue, but also because its members had recently separated from the First Methodist Episcopal Church over the slavery issue then raging in America. The Wesleyans were staunch anti-slavery advocates. Apparently as a result of the new church's position on this important national issue, Hickox Alley, at least for several years thereafter, became known to many in the village as "Nigger Alley," and was expressly noted as such in Cuyahoga County tax records. For reasons unknown, the derogatory racist name for Hickox Alley was removed from county tax records after 1842.

New change came to Hickox Alley in the years following Abram Hickox' death in 1845. The probate of his estate lasted nearly two years, and it wasn't until 1847 that his remaining lands along the Alley—essentially the southern half between Euclid and Prospect—were disposed of by partition amongst his four daughters. Shortly after receiving their inheritance, all of the daughters sold their shares to developers, who, after acquiring some of Hickox's formerly owned lands along the alley, developed it into a residential street in the early 1850s. For the next thirty years, Hickox Alley appears to have been a vibrant working-class neighborhood street off of Euclid Avenue's early Millionaires' Row.  It was home to Clevelanders—many of whom were of Irish or German immigrants—who worked as confectioners, carpenters, tanners, coopers, tailors, shoe makers and in other blue-collar trades. Sixteen houses sat on the alley and by 1880 when the population peaked, according to the federal census taken in that year, there were 62 working-class residents living on it.  

While the population of Hickox Alley may have peaked in 1880, its future as a residential street had already become precarious at least ten years earlier, when lower Euclid Avenue began its transformation from a residential neighborhood to a commercial district. During the period 1870-1890, a first generation of four and five story commercial buildings went up on lower Euclid Avenue, many located near Hickox Alley, including the four-story Hardy Block (1875) on the west corner of the alley, and the five-story Savings and Trust Company bank building  (1885) on its east corner. Hickox Alley's status as a downtown residential street became more precarious in the decade of the 1890s as Euclid Avenue underwent yet more change. Its first generation of commercial buildings, which had been erected primarily for office use, were now being converted to primarily retail use, a use which had warehousing needs. In that decade, many of the houses on Hickox Alley were replaced by warehouses and small factory shops. For example, the Cushing family which leased a building on Euclid Avenue to George H. Bowman Company, a purveyor of fine china and glassware, purchased additional land along the west side of the alley and, in 1890, erected a three-story warehouse there, taking down several houses on the alley in the process. Similarly, and also in 1890, Chandler and Rudd, an early downtown grocer, purchased land on the east side of the alley upon which it erected a warehouse, also eliminating houses in the process. Finally, also in 1890, a six-story tin factory was built on the west side of the Alley near Prospect Street, eliminating yet more residential structures there. As a result of the redevelopment of much of the alley primarily in this decade, by the time the twentieth century arrived, there were few residential houses left, and few people living, on Hickox Alley.

In 1904, new and different change came to Hickox Alley. A group of theatrical people purchased several of the remaining houses on the east side of the alley, razed them, and built in their place a quaint, English Inn–styled clubhouse, which became known as the Hermit Club. Because the Hermit Club quickly became associated with the popular theater district then located on nearby Sheriff (East 4th) Street, its erection sparked an interest in a different type of commercial development on the alley in the early twentieth century—clubs and restaurants. While traffic on the alley no doubt increased as a result of this development, it did not in any way stave off the decline of residential life there. In 1905, the last house there, which had been owned by the Samuel and Mary Eason family since 1864, was torn down to make room for an eight-story printing company office/warehouse building. With this most recent change, residential life on Hickox Alley, for all practical purposes, came to an end.

A final change came to Hickox Alley, which after 1905 became known as East 3rd Street—about the same time that the Hermit Club relocated to the new Playhouse Square theater district in 1928. Within several years, all of the other clubs and restaurants on the Alley closed and it became exclusively a place for the warehousing and other commercial needs of nearby retail businesses on Euclid and Prospect Avenues. In more recent decades, some of those long-standing retail businesses on Euclid and Prospect Avenues, and warehouses on the former Hickox Alley, have been converted to residential apartments and attendant parking garages as Cleveland's lower Euclid Avenue undergoes yet another transformative change in the early twenty-first century. Today, the sidewalks on each side of the alley which in the nineteenth century provided pedestrians access to houses there, and in the twentieth century to popular clubs and restaurants there, are gone, and East 3rd street, with its curious bend 150 feet south of Euclid Avenue which hides Prospect Avenue from direct view, is now a place which few pedestrians enter for any lawful purpose, and which is frequented mostly by the city's homeless and, occasionally, by nearby building employees who surreptitiously exit back doors along the alley in order to have a quiet smoke.

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Detroit Shoreway is a west-side community bounded by Edgewater State Park, Interstate 90, W 45th Street, and W 85th Street. The neighborhood emerged from the annexations of Brooklyn Township, the Village of West Cleveland, and Ohio City into the city of Cleveland during the latter half of the 19th century. With the development of Cleveland as a port city and its designation as a passage to western cities via railroad in the 1850s, the Detroit Shoreway area was shaped by the influences of industry, commerce, and immigration.

Always in a state of transition, the unique character of the Detroit Shoreway neighborhood can be attributed to the preservation of its past in an era of redevelopment. The historic commercial center of the neighborhood was reestablished with the rehabilitation of the Gordon Square Arcade (c. 1980), while a cultural arts district has more recently been developed around the renovation of both the Cleveland Public Theatre (c. 2006) and Capitol Theatre (c. 2009). Numerous projects for the rehabilitation and creation of mixed-income residential properties were also undertaken by local organizations and churches. Newly constructed condominiums and eco-friendly townhouses now mingle with the architecture of churches, homes, theaters, and storefronts that reflect the neighborhood's days as one of Cleveland's manufacturing and commercial centers.

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