Downtown Cleveland - Financial District

Financial District

Cleveland's financial district, the area around East 9th street from Lake Erie south to Prospect Avenue, serves as corporate or regional home to many firms in the financial, business, legal, communications and publishing sectors of the city's economy.

The district is home to the headquarters of the Eaton Corporation, a Fortune 500 company, and the Cleveland regional offices of PNC Financial Services. "Big Four" accounting firm Ernst & Young was founded in Cleveland (as Ernst & Ernst) and still occupies offices, in what is now the Huntington Bank Building, to which it moved during the mid-1920s when the firm expanded its practice nationwide. Additionally, the headquarters of global and national law firms, including Jones Day and Baker Hostetler, are headquartered in the financial district. The forty-story Erieview Tower, part of the largely unbuilt Erieview Urban Renewal Project of the 1960s, is also located in the district with its attached mall, The Galleria, which was added to the Tower in the 1980s. Another landmark skyscraper, the "silver chisel" One Cleveland Center is located in this district as well. The Plain Dealer, Cleveland's major daily newspaper, is headquartered here, and WKYC, the local NBC affiliate, built a new digital broadcast center on Lakeside Avenue on the northern end of the district. Other stations headquartered here include WOIO, the CBS affiliate, and WUAB, the MyNetworkTV affiliate, both owned by Raycom Media and housed in Reserve Square on East 12th Street. There is a large cluster of high-rise downtown housing in this area, largely concentrated in the East 12th Street area, with an addition, "The Avenue District" (see below), set to begin construction in 2006. The Financial District also serves as home to the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist, the seat of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Cleveland.

A notable pair of buildings which currently sit vacant are the former Cleveland Trust headquarters building on Euclid Avenue at East 9th Street, with its famed rotunda, and Ameritrust Tower which served as headquarters of Cleveland Trust's successor, Ameritrust, until its acquisition by Key Bank. The rotunda has a large stained-glass window on its ceiling, and was purchased by Cuyahoga County, which, as of 2007, planned to reuse it as the centerpiece of the county's new administration center. The County had planned to demolish the tower and build a new tower with a connection to the rotunda. As of November 2007, Cuyahoga County Commissioners decided to abate the asbestos and sell the Ameritrust Tower to a possible developer. The County has valued the site at $35,000,000. In November of 2012, University Circle Inc. announced a series of five free concerts to be held in the rotunda as a means of showcasing both the building and the vibrant cultural and arts offerings of the nearby University Circle area.