ART & ART DECO CLEVELAND 2006
September 13-17, 2006

English Oak Room (1930)

Small & Rowley, Architects.

The premier dining room in the Cleveland Union Terminal, this was among the fanciest restaurants in town for many years. The walls and columns are of English Oak--from the Sherwood Forest--with hand carved ornament and inlays of ebony, white maple, and rosewood. The polychrome, Art Deco ceiling is especially extravagant. We imagined how the room looked in its heyday: with high-backed leather chairs, Sheffield silver, and service carts rolling upon the black and white marble floor.

The English Oak Room closed in 1975, due in large part to the dramatic decline in passenger train traffic. The room was restored in the late 1980s and today is rented for weddings and other special occasions.

The Cleveland Union Terminal was part of the Terminal Tower Complex, an enormous mixed use complex built between 1923-1934. At 6.5 million square feet, this"city within a city" remains among the largest in the country. Rockefeller Center usually is thought of as the original urban mixed use complex, but planning for the "Terminal Group" predates Rockefeller Center by nearly 20 years. It included Cleveland's main train terminal, a hotel, department store, main post office, and several office buildings. At the center is the 708 foot Terminal Tower, the second tallest building in the world when it was completed in 1927. The Terminal Tower has been the symbol of Cleveland ever since. It remained the tallest building in the world outside of Manhattan until 1964.

The Cleveland Union Terminal had more square feet than Grand Central Terminal, and incorporated more facilities. A distinctive feature was the vast amount of commercial space on the concourse level: 39 shops and restaurants forming the "world's largest unified merchandising service" in connection with a train station. The food facilities accommodated 10,000 people at lunch.

In the late 1980s the Cleveland Union Terminal was remodeled into a shopping mall and renamed Tower City Center. The remodeling was very sensitive to the elegance of the original facility, and much of the character and decorative features were maintained.

Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland