In 1989 the Silver Grille restaurant at the Higbee Company’s downtown department store closed its doors. The 10th-floor space later became a special-event center managed by the nearby Ritz-Carlton hotel. This was a noteworthy transition because, in…

Parmatown was part of a national trend that emerged in the 1950s sparked by the father of shopping malls, Victor Gruen. Originally, like many malls of that time, Parmatown once looked more like it looks today as the new Shoppes at Parma before it…

The sweet smell of retail success was in the air in the early 1870s due to the example set by William Taylor and Thomas Kilpatrick. Their success prompted Lewis A. Bailey, Colonel Louis Black, and Charles K. Sunshine to combine their financial…

The history of the Taylor Building highlights the rise and fall of Cleveland's downtown department stores as well as the recent revitalization of Euclid Avenue. It was part of the wave of department store closings that signaled the beginning of…

Seven years after Victor Gruen's visionary Southdale appeared outside Minneapolis, consigning many an American downtown to a generation of retail decline, Severance Center opened in Cleveland Heights in 1963 as the first fully enclosed regional…

At their peak, Cleveland's downtown department stores anchored a lower Euclid Avenue that ranked among the largest retail districts in the United States and was compared to New York's stylish Fifth Avenue. Massive, multi-level stores…