Catherine Kassouf is co-owner of The Browsing Room Bookstore and Cafe, one of the only shops still open in The Galleria at Erieview in Downtown Cleveland. She remembers the moment she fell in love with reading when her aunt gave her a copy of "Little Women" as a gift.
Since that day, she always wanted to open a bookstore. She even wrote her secret dream on a piece of paper that she kept in her purse. More than 45 years later, she and her husband, James Kassouf — who is a Cleveland property developer and the owner of Erieview Tower — stumbled upon the location while walking through The Galleria at Erieview Tower. Right then, she knew it was the right spot for her dream.
Catherine is a Cleveland native who remembers The Galleria in its heyday.
“I have fond, fond memories of walking through The Galleria,” she said. “We had a place called East Ninth Street Grill, and there was a food court and if you could imagine, there were 66 shops.”
History of Erieview Tower and The Galleria
Walking through The Galleria at Erieview Tower these days is kind of eerie, pun intended. Besides the loud hums of air conditioning units and the squeals of the escalators, there’s not much going on. That’s far from the original vision the developers had for one of Downtown Cleveland's premier shopping centers.
In the 1940s and 50s, residents of major cities across the United States, including Cleveland, started leaving city centers for the suburbs, due to decaying infrastructure and housing. The city of Cleveland adopted an urban renewal plan called "Erieview" to bring residents back downtown. At the center of this plan was the Erieview Tower.
The smaller shops and the food court happened, but the department store never came to be.
Bob Brown is a city planner with almost 40 years of experience in Cleveland. He said the original plan was to bring a department store into the tower, but they couldn’t secure one.
“There was going to be a big department store at this end of the building, like a full-fledged department store,” Brown said. “The department store never happened, so this became a little shopping mall with the food court that was popular, and offices upstairs.”
The tower was sold to developers in 1985, who renamed it the Tower at Erieview and built a shopping mall, which opened in 1987. Brown said that while he was working downtown decades ago, the Galleria was a hotspot around lunchtime. But things declined in the 2000s, and the final nail in the coffin came with the pandemic, Brown said.
“Downtown Cleveland was always the employment center for the region, even as there was just suburban sprawl,” Brown said. “But as things began to move out and people work remotely, Downtown Cleveland, like a lot of the downtowns, has really hollowed out in terms of daytime employment.”
Is the modern mall dead?
The story of the Galleria isn’t unique, in Cleveland or across the country.
Alexandra Lange is an architecture and design critic who authored "Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall." Malls have been struggling since the financial recession in 2008, but rumors about the “death of the modern mall” are greatly exaggerated, she said.
“People are not wrong that malls are dying off," Lange said. “But there are a significant number — let's say 500 to 700 — that are still doing quite well because of all the reasons people liked malls in the first place.”
Retail experts say shoppers aren’t giving up on malls just yet. E-commerce has been the mall’s biggest threat, especially after the pandemic. However, growth in online sales is starting to plateau. Foot traffic in malls is also recovering, as numbers from 2023 were only 5.1% lower than pre-pandemic levels. In 2021, the gap was about 15%. Consumers are becoming more picky about spending online, Lange noted.
“During the pandemic, online shopping zoomed upwards,” Lange said. “But that number has already started going back down. People realized during the pandemic that, yes, there were a lot of things that it was convenient to order online, but there were a lot of things that were not convenient to order online.”
This inspires hope that both the Galleria and Downtown Cleveland as a whole can see success in the future. In August, the Cuyahoga County Port Authority signed off on a $55 million project to reimagine the tower, complete with a new shopping mall, luxury hotel, apartments and office space. Lawyers representing the Kassouf family and their development partner TurnDev said the project should be completed in two years.
Downtown’s population is growing. Data from the Downtown Cleveland Economic Development Report counts the population at 21,000 residents, 12% more than pre-pandemic levels. The residential and hotel components can help bring even more people downtown, Lange said.
"Combining housing with retail is smart because I think most of us want to be able to walk to pick up a gallon of milk or do a quick purchase or have a dry cleaner on site," Lange said.
Back at the Galleria, Catherine Kassouf, who also manages properties around Cleveland with her husband, said she plans to stay put as long as she can. She wants to continue to provide a quality bookstore for those living, working or even visiting downtown.
“Downtown Cleveland is coming back, because of the people who are committed to Cleveland,” Kassouf said. “Now you have people that are going to be living in Downtown Cleveland, so it's more lively. It's a living city now.”
Construction on the Galleria won't begin until late 2025, according to developers.
