With Opening of Agora Lofts, Midtown Adds to Its Residential Neighborhood Credentials

Forty-eight new apartments opened up next door to the Agora last week. It’s a good sign Midtown is a step closer to resurrecting its long-since-gone town square. Credit: Mark Oprea

When Emma Croft learned she scored a nursing job at the Cleveland Clinic, she decided two things about what that meant for her living situation: She would live without a car, and she would pick an apartment both close to work and the rest of what the city offered.

Last week, Croft didn’t move into a luxury mid-rise in Ohio City or Tremont. She didn’t pick the pool-topped Skyline 776 or Waterford Bluffs. Croft chose a brick-walled loft apartment a stone’s throw from the Salvation Army and the East 55th rail bridge.

Or to use the oh-so-fitting title those 48 apartments are now called: Life At Agora.

What used to be an industrial ghost town isn’t so much anymore, with more promise of residential and neighborhood life in the shade of Cleveland’s historic concert venue.

“I think that’s kind of what drew me in,” Croft, 22, told Scene near a fire escape staircase in the shadowed courtyard outside her apartment.

“There were videos on TikTok and I was like, just looking at places in Cleveland,” she said. “I was like, Oh, that’s cute. And then there was the theater. I love music, so I was like, Okay, this could definitely work.”

Life At Agora, the latest complex to open up on Euclid Avenue, is another notch in MidTown Cleveland’s argument that it too has neighborhood credentials like its neighbors to the east and west in downtown and University Circle.

And that argument is gradually getting more sound.

Earlier this year, Black Frog, Ohio’s second Black-owned brewery, opened up alongside a jazz club, Sixty6 Lounge, in the MidTown Collaboration Center two blocks east of the Agora. Also, the Warner Swasey Building, a block south off Carnegie, received the city’s go-ahead to begin demolition.

Many who believe that Midtown is no longer that drive-through-and-miss-it spot on the map point to the Foundry Lofts, a black-and-grey complex of some 300 apartment units, off Carnegie as reason to think Life At Agora was a reasonable investment decision. (Alike to the makeover of the Agora itself in 2017.)

Ashley Shaw is probably its main cheerleader. Since before the pandemic, Shaw and her team at MidTown Cleveland, the area’s community development corporation, have been funding designs and rallying support for a renovation of Penn Square, the historical name for the southwestern block off East 55th and Euclid Ave.

For the past decade or so, Ashley Shaw, the director of MidTown Cleveland, has been spearheading a potentially multi-million-dollar investment in making the neighborhood epicenter into, once again, a place people want to be. Credit: Mark Oprea

Before it was demolished in 1976, the square was home to the Euclid Avenue stop of the Pennsylvania Railroad, a once massive building abutted by restaurants, cabarets and music halls, like Babe’s Baby and Leo’s Casino. And the Metropolitan Theater, where the Agora is housed today.

“And then, like we do in cities, we demolish all of that and just erase history,” Shaw said. “And you know, Penn was one.”

Shaw and her team have calculated that a true revival of Penn Square will take millions. About $700,000 alone will be needed to restore the railroad bridge, which today is peeling and neglected since it was repainted in 2017.

Life At Agora, and about a hundred new residents, will help Shaw and her team write grants, and convince donors, that Penn Square can once again become Midtown’s epicenter.

“It’s art, it’s gathering spaces, it’s small businesses, it’s dense activity, it’s transit,” Shaw said, leaning against a standing table outside the Agora’s lobby.

“And so we basically took all these ingredients of what these other historic squares have done to become now one the most vibrant places in our city again,” she added. “And that’s what we’re proposing for Penn Square.”

But will money, specifically about $1 million for the park alone, bring the same vibrancy you can find elsewhere?

Maybe that spark rests in the Agora itself, where Shaw and others hope to attract a pizza parlor on par with Edison’s and Il Rione. (A “Cleveland mainstay,” Shaw said.)

As she speculated on Penn Square’s future, Shaw repeatedly recalled her teenage years, when she would spend hours after concerts congregating with friends on the sidewalk outside.

An image best used to highlight Shaw’s goal—and major lift: to make Midtown that place to be once again.

“I keep telling people,” Shaw said. “If I was in my twenties again, I would totally live here. How exciting would that be?”