Hundreds of eager, curious Clevelanders gathered on a snowy Monday evening to see firsthand just what Dave Ferrante has built in the new home for Visible Voice books in Ohio City. And what they saw was a stunner.
The 6,000-square-foot, two-story shop is a temple to books, and the arts, with a sandwich cafe, a theater space, five rows of auditorium-style seats, and 300% more books on display for sale than the original space in Tremont.
“This is the pinnacle of 23 years in the making,” Ferrante said in a speech Monday night. “Books. Music. Food. What’s more to life than that?”
And books there are. Visible Voice has some 15,000 in its collection, all now splayed out on beautiful wood shelves around the labyrinthe store.
Visitors took immediate note.
“This is definitely a destination bookstore,” Miesha Headen, who owns her own bookstore in Lorain, said while browsing the Philosophy section. “People will come from out of town to get that, like, Harry Potter experience, if you know what I mean.”
Up on the second floor, which houses Children’s literature and a room full of vintage magazines (Scene for $3 an issue!), was Matt Weinkam, the head of Literary Cleveland. “To go from idea to this is just extraordinary,” he said. “This scale, this level of thought, of detail—there’s not a lot around here like this.”
Your average bookseller understands that, for many, around a fifth of their profit comes from non-book sales—from selling bagged coffee to literary calendars. As does Ferrante, who said he’s positioned the store’s café and its stage (for hosting poetry nights, say, or jazz quartets) to act as Visible’s main moneymakers.
“Hey, if it was easy, it’d just be a bookshop,” Trey Kirchoff, the former Coffee Coffee Coffee owner tapped to run Ferrante’s kitchen, told Scene. Instead, Kirchoff is throwing thoughtfully-curated, New York-style sandwiches into the mix.
“Dave’s doing what I hope to see more of in this community,” Kirchoff added. “Daring to bring a big, creative vision where it wasn’t previously.”
Ohio City’s longest corridor of shops and restaurants has inched westward in the past few years. The Judith, Cent’s Pizza + Goods, Sacred Vortex, Guitar Riot and Sartorial have replaced vacant storefronts in the past few years. With more development, and construction headaches, on the way.
Though a two-mile street repaving, with cycletrack and new sidewalks, could makeover the public side of the corridor, Lorain’s improvement is still scattered, with tire shops and closed funeral homes dotting the stretch down toward West 65th.
Ferrante himself, with his warm-lit book mecca off West 46th, hopes to be part of the change.
On Monday evening, dozens of Ferrante’s friends and family members sat eating hors d’ouevres as Ferrante professed his undying commitment to Visible’s new home of Ohio City.
“I don’t like that some sports teams are moving to Brook Park, out of the city,” Ferrante said, reading from a bundle of notes. “We need to move in the same stream. This is why I’m staying in Cleveland.”
Applause abounded. Ferrante looked around, then said, “I’m here forever. This is my retreat.”
