The H. Black and Company Building is a historic former factory building located in Cleveland, Ohio, in the United States. It was commissioned by H. Black and Company, one of the largest manufacturers of women's clothing in the United States, and designed by noted New York City architect Robert D. Kohn. Completed in 1907, it won national praise for its design. The building was sold in 1928 to the Evangelical Press, and for a short time was known as the Evangelical Press Building. The commercial printing business of the Evangelical Press was spun off as a secular company, Tower Press, in 1934, after which the structure became known as the Tower Press Building. Vacant for much of the 1960s and 1970s, the building had two different owners in the 1980s and was nearly demolished. A new owner took over the building in 2000, after which it underwent an award-winning renovation and restoration. The structure was added to the National Register of Historic Places on January 24, 2002. The structure now serves as a mixed-use development for low- and moderate-income artists.
Constructing the building The ready-to-wear clothing industry in the United States grew significantly after the American Civil War. Although Cleveland never had a clothing industry as large as that found in New York City or Chicago, it was one of the largest regional clothing manufacturing centers and the textile industry employed a significant percentage of the city's residents. Cleveland's garment industry was originally located in The Flats, but had moved to the Warehouse District by the start of the 20th century.
H. Black & Co. was one of Cleveland's largest garment manufacturing firms. Herman Black was a Hungarian Jew who emigrated to Toledo, Ohio, in 1854. He married 21-year-old Eva Judd, a Polish Jewish émigré, in 1863. Their son, Morris, was born in 1868. The Blacks moved to Cleveland in 1882, and in 1883 Herman founded H. Black & Company. The firm specialized in fine fabrics and ready-to-wear clothing, and became one of the largest coat and suit manufacturers in the world by 1915. The company focused primarily on women's clothing, which was marketed under the named Wooltex. Herman died in 1896. Morris graduated from Harvard in 1890, entered the family business, was named president of the company in 1903, and joined its board of directors in 1905.
About 1905, H. Black & Co. decided to move from the Warehouse District to a new location at E. 19th Street and Superior Avenue. At the time, this part of Cleveland was most single-family homes. The company commissioned noted New York City architect Robert D. Kohn to design a modern factory building for the company, making only minimal design requests: First, that the factory embody progressive ideas about worker comfort, and second, that the building's water tower be freestanding. To assist Kohn in developing ideas for the factory, H. Black & Co. paid for Kohn to tour the United States for a year, visiting existing factories and gathering ideas. The Samuel Austin & Son Company constructed the building,; which was completed in the spring of 1907.
About the building The Mission Revival, H. Black & Company factory was wide. The two-story central wing, which faced Superior Avenue, was deep. On either side were three-story wings which stretched back . The frame was steel and the floors of reinforced concrete, It was the first reinforced concrete building constructed in Cleveland. The exterior and interior walls were plain brick. The mortar in the exterior walls was dyed purple (at a cost of $1 [$ in dollars] per thousand bricks), and the raked joint both deeply incised and wider than usual. The exterior windows facing the street featured sandstone lintels and mullions. Blue and green tiles were applied in geometric patterns to the exterior walls below the eaves. The rear walls generally lacked any adornment or architectural detailing except for the blue and green tiles, as the company contemplated adding an addition to the rear in the future. The hip roof was covered in red tile and pierced by sawtooth skylights.
The structure had of interior space. Each floor of the wings contained large dining, locker, and work rooms. Each of the main work rooms on the ground floor could accommodate 500 people, with another 200 workers scattered in other parts of the building. The walls and ceiling of the workrooms were white plaster, and the upper floors supported by concrete columns painted white. Two workmen were paid $60 ($ in dollars) to stencil a two-color, geometric "weaving" pattern onto the upper parts of the columns and the transverse beams. Elsewhere in the building, small blue and green tiles with a geometric design were mortared to the interior walls near the cornice line. To provide the maximum space for manufacturing, staircases were placed along the firewalls, and numerous foul air exhaust and fresh air intake fans pierced the walls and ceiling.
The building had a pressurized sprinkler fire suppression system. To provide pressure for this system, a five-story, , freestanding water tank was built at the rear of the central wing inside a brick and stucco tower. The ground floor of the tower contained a shipping room and toilet, while the second floor contained a storage room. Stucco panels adorned the sides of the tower, into which were set decorative colored tiles. A false balcony and parapet was added below the roof of the tower. Square below the balcony, the tower was octagonal above and a turret occupied the southwest corner.
The H. Black Building was widely praised nationally for creating a comfortable as well as beautiful workplace. Kohn strongly believed that a handsome building improved worker morale and productivity, and he was highly critical of architects who failed to adopt this view. "It is true of the mill engineer and unfortunately, of many architects that they consider the proper method of beautification of a factory building the application of pressed brick and a stone cornice to the exposed fronts of buildings otherwise stupid in mass, arrangement and fenestration." The Plain Dealer newspaper declared that the building was "positively pretty" after its construction, and nearly 90 years later was still calling it "graceful" and "one of the city's most distinguished early 20th-century industrial buildings." Architectural critic A.A. Kalish in 1924 called it "one of the most attractive factory buildings in America". The building's distinctive tower won special praise. Architect A.A. Pollard lauded its bold use of color and the use of bright stucco panels against the dark brick where the plain, broader masses of the tower needed adornment. He also praised the way the architectural lines of the upper tower were emphasized.
In November 1913, H. Black & Co. purchased a lot deep to its south. This parcel, which fronted on both E. 19th and E. 21st Streets, was intended for the plant's expansion.
History of the building Evangelical Press Building The Post–World War I recession of August 1918 to March 1919 and the Depression of 1920 to 1921 created significant economic distress for H. Black & Co. It merged with two other large local clothing manufacturers, the Printz-Biederman Co. and the M.T. Silver Co., in November 1922. The merged company closed the Superior Avenue factory. The city of Cleveland purchased the rear parcel (no addition was built there) in July 1924, and the May Co. purchased the plant itself the following September.
In February 1928, the Evangelical Association, a small Arminian Methodist denomination based in the Midwestern United States, purchased the empty H. Black & Co. factory from the May Co. for an undisclosed price. The denomination extensively renovated the plant, painting over much of the interior stencil and tile work and partitioning many of the larger rooms into offices. This left the building with just of interior space. The denomination moved its headquarters into the building on October 2, 1928. Taking up a large portion of the former workroom space was the Evangelical Press, the religious publishing arm of the Evangelical Association.
The renovated building now became known as the Evangelical Press Building. The church and press did not need all the space, however, and portions of the building were rented out to other tenants.
Tower Press Building Between 1928 and 1934, the Evangelical Press began taking on secular print work. By 1934, this had become the majority of the press's income. At about the same time, the Evangelical Association decided to move its headquarters to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. In October 1934, the Evangelical Press spun off its secular printing business as Tower Press, which was sold to the Evangelical Press's general manager, Charles J. Theuer. The Superior Avenue building was also sold to Tower Press, while the Evangelical Press followed its owner to Pennsylvania. The secular printing company took its name from the building's large water tower.
The building now became known as the Tower Press Building. Tower Press, like its predecessor, occupied only a portion of the structure, and over the next roughly 40 years a variety of tenants, such as an engineering firm, advertising agency, thermostat manufacturer, furniture store, and college took space in the rest of the building. In 1959, the Better Bedding Co. moved into the first floor.
In July 1963, A.S. Gilman and Tower Press, by then Cleveland's two largest printing companies, merged. Tower Press vacated its namesake building, although the merged company continued to own the structure. In 1971, the Nicole Corp., a manufacturer of lamp shades, rented the top two floors of the Tower Press Building.
Ownership changes and stalled developments of the 1980s and 1990s Some time in the late 1970s, real estate development company Weston Limited, owned brothers Edward J. and Anthony J. Asher, bought the Tower Press Building. Although much of the building had been empty in the 1960s and 1970s, the Ashers sought to rejuvenate the building by offering space at low rents to small businesses and artists. By December 1981, it had become "a beehive of shops".
In 1986, Weston Limited declined to renew the leases of its tenants. The company said it hoped to either renovate or sell the building, but neither happened and the building sat empty.
In December 1990, the Tower Press Building was purchased by a new company, Tower Press Building Inc., for about $1.2 million ($ in dollars). A joint partnership of local attorneys Murray Bilfield, Robert Meyers, and Martin L. Sandel, the company hoped to sell the eastern third of the building for $600,000 ($ in dollars). The firm hoped to use these funds to redevelop the decrepit western two-thirds of the building into offices. By 1993, however, no renovation had occurred, despite the sale of the eastern portion of the structure to local silkscreen printing company owner Dan Gray. The city of Cleveland now began entering into negotiations to turn the rear parcel on the block (which it had purchased back in 1924 and turned into a parking lot) over to the developers to help push the renovation forward.