The 1890 Arcade in downtown Cleveland was the first indoor shopping center in the country. It featured a 300-foot, five-story, dome skylight of 1,600 glass panels framed in iron connecting two nine-story towers. Its architecture mimicked the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan, Italy. Financed by John D. Rockefeller, it was dubbed Cleveland’s Crystal Palace.
The Arcade is located at 401 Euclid Avenue, wherein its heyday an unprecedented amount of wealth resided there due to the universe around Rockefeller’s oil empire. “The Avenue” as it was known, exceeded the valuations of New York’s Fifth Avenue in the late 1800s, earning another nickname: The Showplace of America. And The Arcade was the cherry on top so-to-speak.
