When Candy Mashmoor bought the building at 1030 E. 62nd St. in the St. Clair Superior neighborhood, at first she wondered if she’d made a huge mistake.
“The day I signed, I got the keys and I was like, ‘What have I done?’” said the Brazilian-born entrepreneur and founder of YaYa & Co., a textiles company that sells handmade, sustainably-sourced pillows, bedding, rugs and other items. “I couldn’t go in. It was moldy, wet and full of junk. It was horrible. I thought, ‘I didn’t buy a building, I bought a dump.’”
Yet now, with the help of loans and grants from the city of Cleveland, Mashmoor is renovating the historic, long-vacant building into a new home base for YaYa & Co., a coworking space, and office space for Humongous Fan, an HVAC company that makes large industrial fans. The project is expected to create 50 new jobs.
“It is exciting – and expensive,” the entrepreneur said in an interview. Mashmoor expects to spend about $1.8 million on the project. City council agreed to provide a loan of $600,000, $360,000 of which is forgivable if the project creates 50 jobs. Additionally, council approved a 30-year non-school tax increment financing agreement (TIF), which is a way of funneling the increased property tax collections created from the project back into renovation costs.
Mashmoor plans to move her business, which currently occupies an 8,000-square-foot warehouse and a 6,000-square-foot showroom at 3635 Perkins Ave., into the 68,000-square-foot structure. The historic, landmark building once housed the American Gas Association Appliance Testing Laboratory. Mashmoor removed 50 dumpsters of trash and over 3,000 mattresses from the building since acquiring it for $60,000 from the Cuyahoga Land Bank in 2022.
“When I first came here, I cleaned houses,” she said. “This is my way to pay back everything this country gave to my family.”
YaYa & Co. was born four years ago, when Mashmoor decided to close her seasonable products business in China and move back to Cleveland during the pandemic. She thought she might retire, but then she started YaYa & Co. out of her basement.
“I saw there was a need,” she said of the colorful, internationally-made goods that YaYa & Co. has become known for. “I love colors and textures. I saw everything being gray and plain. I felt like the things my grandparents brought home, the things I grew up with, I wanted to bring them back. I wanted to bring back the old art forms China destroyed with mass production.”
YaYa & Co., which Mashmoore co-founded with Jordan Bigelow and Julian Ayzman, was named in honor of her daughter who died. Her daughter’s nickname was YaYa. “I wanted to do something that would make people happy, as a way of remembering her,” Mashmoor said.
Mashmoor began looking around for a larger space when YaYa & Co. outgrew their current location. “We grew so much we basically sit on boxes,” she said of the current location, where seven employees ship orders all over the world. “We have boxes everywhere. We’re out of space.”
The entrepreneur’s vision is to renovate the stout, brick building, which is broken up into three different sections, into a “Center for Design.” The south building will become the owner’s showroom and the warehouse for YaYa & Co. The north building will provide space for a local manufacturer, Humongous Fan, which will lease 20,000 square feet of space. And finally, the main building, which is about 21,000 square feet, will be made into a coworking space with an onsite daycare focused on helping women entrepreneurs like Mashmoor to become successful.
Mashmoor plans to complete a historic renovation of the building that will leave its original features intact. Picture exposed brick, concrete floors, and big warehouse-style windows and you’ve got the basic idea.
It’s in a good location, too. The St. Clair Superior area, which runs from E. 30th St. to MLK Jr. Blvd. and from the lake to Superior Ave., was once home to the city’s Slovenian community, but it’s now a melting pot of Asian, white, Latin, and African-American residents. Although it was battered by the foreclosure crisis of 2008-2009, it’s mounting a comeback and is home to the thriving Asiatown district and a cluster of businesses at E. 55th and St. Clair.
In exchange for the funds from the city, Mashmoor has agreed to not only renovate the building but also to hire minority and female contractors, provide jobs to Cleveland residents and low-income individuals, and offer paid internships for Cleveland Metropolitan School District students, among other benefits.
“She’s going to turn a very, very old abandoned property into something magnificent for the community to enjoy,” Ward 10 councilman Anthony Hairston told city council. “I’ve been searching for someone to take on this building for quite some time, and she made it work.”
The building sits adjacent to the site of the largest explosion in Cleveland history. On October 20, 1944, liquefied natural gas from the East Ohio Gas Company’s tank farm on nearby E. 61st St. began to leak into the street. It ignited and the ensuing explosion destroyed one square mile of homes, sent manhole covers rocketing skyward, and killed 131 people. Somehow, the building at 1030 E. 62nd Street survived, a testament to how solidly it was built.
During a recent tour, Mashmoor and her coworkers showed off the inside and outside of the historic building as snow fell through a hole in the roof. The entrepreneur said she is recycling all the materials left in the building, and even plans to preserve the original conveyer belt that was left there, which she’ll use to move products from the first to the second floor.
“I want the building to be as close to the original as it can be,” she said.
Subscribe to Cleveland Scene newsletters.
Follow us: Apple News | Google News | NewsBreak | Reddit | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | Or sign up for our RSS Feed
This article appears in Nov 20 – Dec 3, 2024.