1945: The Hollenden Hotel Facelift

At the Hollenden Hotel, where Cleveland’s powerful and plebeian classes ate, drank, slept, caroused and occasionally croaked, the old went out and the new came in. Furniture was stacked in the hotel’s lobby, ready for apparent sale and replacement with fresh sets. The chairs, dressers and mattresses, like those who used them, were merely temporary inhabitants. Built on Superior Avenue in 1885, the Hollenden hosted five presidents and thousands of eclectic visitors during its history.

In 1945, the Knights of St. John held an annual meeting there in May. In June, R.V. Clay, an executive from the Hanna Coal Co., suffered a heart attack and died in one of the rooms at age 57. It was just a few days after Pamela Brenton promoted her “streamlined non-fad system of health and youth”— including “glamour cocktail” recipes and a session on how to improve vision without glasses — in one of the hotel’s ballrooms. In October, the Garfield-Perry Stamp Club held its annual stamp sale there, and later, a Dale Carnegie representative hawked an October session in the Assembly Room called “Increase Your Income; Conquer Fear!”

But it did little for the eventual fate of the historic hotel. After suffering from high vacancy, it was closed and demolished in 1962. The 1,000-room structure was replaced with the remade 400-room Hollenden House hotel. But even that modest offering proved only temporary and was bulldozed in 1989. The 27-story Fifth Third Center stands at 600 Superior Ave. today.