ABOUT SHAKER SQUARE
The historic heart of one of Cleveland's largest residential areas

Cleveland's Shaker Square is the center of our city's largest east-side residential area  It is a transportation hub and the heart of a diverse neighborhood. Around the Square are more than 4,000 apartments: garden and high rise, rental and condominium — the largest cluster of multi-family housing in Cleveland — plus townhouses and many private and two-family homes. 

It is a place for everyday shopping and services, plus some hard-to-find items, for movie-goers, and anyone who wants a choice of casual or fine dining, from breakfast to dinner. Most restaurants have patios, a few have private dining rooms. Nearly all its businesses are locally owned, many are unique to Shaker Square.

Stroll the Square, shop and dine here. You'll enjoy the feeling of neighborhood — a welcome change from impersonal, "big box" shopping.

Shaker Square is in Cleveland Ward 4. Shaker Heights begins more than a quarter-mile east of the Square. The Square and many streets around it are in the Shaker Heights School District because of an agreement made in 1912. That also puts it in the Shaker Heights Library and Recreation District.

It is up the hill from University Circle and the Cleveland Clinic, and only 16 minutes from downtown on the two Rapid Transit lines that stop at the Square.

The Square was built in 1927-29 by the Van Sweringens, the brothers who developed Shaker Heights. The oldest shopping district in Ohio and the third oldest in the nation, it was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1976.
 

Time to re-envision Shaker Square

Shaker Square, built more than 90 years ago as a shopping center to serve those living in Shaker Heights, is now the heart of a major Cleveland residential and office area, and a transportation hub. It went through foreclosure in 2004 and is again in trouble, weakened by the reduced spending of an aging population and by long-term changes in shopping and dining habits. Then came the once-in-100-years pandemic.

It is time to re-envision Shaker Square and to invest in its transformation to a better future.

Photos: Robert Brown     12/7/2021