Cleveland Trust Company Building

Cleveland Trust Company began in 1894 with $500,000 capital and John G.W. Cowles as president. In 1903, it merged with Western Reserve Trust Co. and outgrew its rented office space. The bank built a new headquarters at the corner of E. 9th and Euclid that opened in 1908. The bank eventually closed, but the building remains. After years spent unoccupied, the building now houses a supermarket, hotel, and apartments on the upper floors.

Renowned architect George B. Post, who also designed the New York Stock Exchange, won a contest for the opportunity to create the building. It was built in Beaux-Arts style with three stories of white granite facing. The building’s rotunda is the dominant feature with an eighty-five-foot dome ceiling. There are Tiffany-style glass panels and fluted columns as well as marble floors and walls. Artist Francis David Millett completed the thirteen murals that adorn the walls just below the dome.

Years later, the bank hired architect Marcel Breuer to add two towers framing the rotunda; only one was built. The collapse of the real estate market in the 1980s substantially hurt the bank, then known as AmeriTrust and one of the biggest institutions in the country. Society Corporation bought out AmeriTrust in 1991 and the building later closed in 1996. It was empty for nearly twenty years.

In 2013, the building and adjacent tower were converted to a hotel and apartments. A Cleveland grocery-store chain turned the rotunda and an adjacent building into a 27,000-square-foot supermarket, which was completed and opened in 2015.

The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1973.