Like many Cleveland millennials, Kaitie Nickel and Stephanie Hamme grew up Christmas shopping with their families downtown.
Nostalgia, as visual as it is sentimental. Of the ceiling-high evergreen in the center of the Galleria. Of the kaleidoscopic balloons and jumping fountains at Tower City Center. And, of course, the actual shopping. (Who can forget the Disney Store?)
That same childhood energy is what Nickel and Hamme, the founders of The Cleveland Market, are bringing this holiday season to nearly every first-floor space at the Galleria: a hundred vendors of all stripes, selling everything from ceramics, to jewelry, home goods and hot chocolate.
In other words, something in a just-about-desolate downtown mall.
“We’re gonna put eyeballs back on the Galleria,” Nickel said, sitting at a table outside the Browsing Room Bookstore, one of the building’s three remaining businesses.
“We’re confident that we’re actually gonna fill this space, you know, with people,” she said. “We’re actually worried about overfilling.”
For the past two years, Nickel and Hamme have been orchestrating seasonal home goods and vintage markets in a handful of underutilized city-center spaces, including the Tenk Building in the Flats; Tyler Village in Midtown; and the Flats East Bank boardwalk.
But their Galleria market, which debuts Nov. 20, is the founders’ first with the ulterior aim of revitalizing one of the city’s most barren historical buildings. A goal with overlapping ends — to try and restore 1990s-era markets while chipping away at the pervasive loneliness epidemic.
“I think people are grieving a time before phones,” Hamme said. “People are so connected, but not actually connected.”
“It’s a false sense of connection,” she said.
On Oct. 15, 1987, the Galleria opened off East 9th and St. Clair Avenue as a further-east complement to Tower City’s growing nexus as a destination for luxury goods. Name brands signified the sky-high reach of both malls. By the mid-1990s, Galleria’s storefronts included Victoria’s Secret, Eddie Bauer, Williams-Sonoma and Express.
Like Tower City, the luxury high hopes died about a decade later. By 2003, a developer named Werner Minshall believed that smaller, independent stores could keep the Galleria afloat as national brands vacated. “We want to look to [the local] community to populate this mall,” he told the Vindicator that year.
That didn’t work either. Neither did a mid-2010s plan to convert the former mall into the city’s largest hydroponic produce farm, Gardens Under Glass. Another decade later and just three tenants remain: a bookstore, a Hungarian museum and a branch of the YMCA.
While plans to remake the attached Erieview Tower into a Marriot-branded W Hotel are moving forward, the Kassoufs, the owners of both properties, have kept fixed plans for the Galleria under wraps. James Kassouf, the spokesperson for the building, did not return a request by Scene for comment.
But, it seems, Kassouf was gung ho about a Christmas market.
“What a way to activate a space that hasn’t necessarily been activated,” Austin Love, the broker that mediated the building rental, said in a phone call. “I think that if you polled Clevelanders: When’s the last time you spent time there? It’s been awhile.”
Nickel and Hamme get this. Not only have they hired a cast of holiday stars — Santa, the Grinch, Cindy Lou Who, Buddy the Elf — but will wrap the Galleria’s railings in lights and garland. A festive evergreen will rise in the center.
Vendors will fill empty storefronts on the mall’s first floor, spaces that, in some cases, still have original signage or inside paneling. The former Winking Lizard will, Hamme said, turn into a Christmas-themed bar.
Mike Hamme, Stephanie’s brother and co-founder of Cleveland Vibes with Nickel, is booking DJs and getting the word out on social media. A generation numbed by online orders, he thinks, finds its balm in the spirit of 1990s Christmas shopping.
“What is real now, right? Everything feels so fake,” Hamme said. “So, I think people are craving real things that mean something to them.”
Stephanie agreed. “It just doesn’t feel the same when it’s just all Amazon packages arriving at your door.”
The Cleveland Market will run at the Galleria, at 1301 E. Ninth St., Nov. 20-22 and Nov. 27-29. Fridays are preview nights and are ticketed.
