Fidelity Hotel Opening Helps Bring Life and Glamour Back to Historic Short Vincent Block in Downtown Cleveland

The Club Room, the street-facing restaurant of the Fidelity, helps bring life to a street that’s struggled with on-off vacancies since the 1970s. Credit: Fidelity Hotel

The single block in front of the Fidelity Mortgage Building used to be affectionately called Short Vincent.

There, from the 1880s to the 1950s, was a den of barhopping and debauchery, a sliver of Cleveland’s purest nightlife where reporters for the Cleveland Press drank whiskey, where girls stripped at the French Quarter, where others supped at The Theatrical or Manny’s Deli, or counted horse bets at Kornman’s. “The Grand Canyon of Cleveland,” as some called it.

The era also made it a target for cops and the Ohio State Liquor Control. Short Vincent, a writer for Cleveland Historical said, offered “good food, underworld gossip and the odds on anything.”

Today, the T-section of East 6th and Vincent is nothing more than an alley in between a parking garage and a row of dumpsters. All the byproduct of decades following the failure of urban renewal.

A glimmer of change may come, however, in early 2025, when the $60-million dollar makeover of the Fidelity Mortgage Building into the Fidelity Hotel opens to the public, after nearly a decade or so of the intersection of East 6th and Vincent sitting neglected and deserted.

Which a recent tour of the Fidelity began to prove. On Tuesday, Scene was brought through the hotel’s first-floor lobby and kitchen, with its bespoke feather-y chandeliers and Jazz Era-styled Club Room restaurant, its private dining room festooned with bronzed leaf murals.

“Cleveland has not seen anything like this in years,” Cathy Ruhling, Fidelity’s director of sales, told Scene from the foyer. “Meaning a blend of historical building and what can be done with really thoughtful planning.”

With of the Hotel Cleveland on Public Square earlier this year, following a $90-million renovation, Downtown has been host to a great number of vintage-era, higher-end hotels. There was the Hilton in 2016, the facade-awakening of the Kimpton Schofield and the nearby 9 building in 2015, the reopening of the Hotel Indigo in 2021.

But, as Fidelity’s management argues, nothing deserving the stamped label of true-blue boutique.

“Short” Vincent and East 6th streets in the 1950s was a hive of festivity before becoming a back alley for a parking garage in the late 1970s. Credit: Cleveland Historical

“It’s specially tailored to the senses,” Ruhling told Scene. “It’s not”—she went to a whisper—“your vanilla Hilton or Marriot. It’s not your everyday hotel.”

With 97 rooms total, Fidelity seems to want to prove that coastal luxury can work here. At least the rooms so far show that, with their mini bar closets of snack bins (Malley’s chocolates!), sparkling waters and salmon-colored robes. There’s the chess board bathroom tile in the Fidelity Suite, the tiger ottoman in the Vincent. Even the hallway’s aged mail shoots have had all their bronze cleaned and made shiny again. These are rooms that die to convey a story.

At night, easily the best time to see what’s been done here on East 6th, the Fidelity’s facade lights up in an aura of warm gold, thanks to sheered strip lighting up and down the building. Which, despite Fidelity’s hidden at the tail end of Vincent, is a perk for those dodging the noise.

“We only see a pro to that,” general manager Eric Conrad told Scene from the 11th floor meeting room. “On Euclid, there’s game traffic. Loud motorcycles. But tucked away here, it’s an easier sleep.”

Yet, despite Fidelity’s custom evergreen housekeeping carts and its stunning pressed silver wall in the banquet room, opening its shades sort of brings the nostalgic and optimistic back to the reality of a postmodern city—namely, the fact Fidelity’s flanked by two less-than-impressive parking garages, one that blankets an other-wise distinct view of the roof of the Historical Arcade.

And boutique doesn’t come cheap.

Fidelity’s rooms range from a base $164 a night for their 210-square-foot Queen room to $579 and up for their suites. Prices roughly $20 to $30 more expensive than your average Downtown hotel on a typical weeknight.

But this is boutique, remember?

As Ruhling said: “Everything about this hotel screams unique.”

As for bringing back the energy of Short Vincent’s heyday, that’s left to consider. Currently, Fifth Third Bank’s garage shows no signs of demolition. And the first-floor of the Garfield has been dusty and vacant ever since Harness Cycle left for Ohio City before the pandemic.

Maybe it’s just best, future guests, to bathe in the warm light at the Club Room, with a highball and a tweed jacket.

The Fidelity Hotel with host a grand opening, its management said, in the spring.