At the center of one of two remaining clusters of nineteenth-century commercial buildings on West 9th Street, a slender gray facade stands out in a row of brick-faced buildings. The five-story Hart Building is only nine feet wide, making it Cleveland’s narrowest downtown building. Named for William Hart, a Connecticut-born cabinetmaker turned furniture manufacturer-merchant, it exemplifies Cleveland’s golden age of cast-iron facades and Hart’s gradual rise from a poor teenage orphan to one of the city’s prominent business and civic leaders.
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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