‘A lot of space to grow’: How a global pandemic has changed life in downtown Akron

After graduating from Kent State University, Bronlynn Thurman bounced around Akron’s various neighborhoods and Cuyahoga Falls before finally settling in downtown Akron in November 2019.

Living downtown gave the Akron native the “big-city feel” she was seeking, as well as the opportunity to reduce her carbon footprint by riding her bike to work at the GAR Foundation.

“I just wanted a chance to live in the heart of it all,” said Thurman, 33. “I love that it’s walkable and I love that it has all of my favorite small businesses. There’s also an energy and vibrancy and grittiness to the downtown community that I wanted to be a part of and I’m glad I get to experience.”

But a few months after she moved into Canal Square, a global pandemic erupted, effectively shuttering downtown with the rest of the world.

“It was just a ghost town,” she said. “I remember when the shutdown happened in March 2020 just thinking this would all blow over within a few weeks, but I could have never imagined this.”

As the world emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic, companies are saving money by keeping their employees at home — creating a surplus of empty office space.

“The pandemic has absolutely advanced a more work-from-home culture which has decimated the office market in not only our downtown but other downtown areas in cities across the country,” said Sean Vollman, Akron deputy mayor for integrated development. “Now more and more employers find that the remote work model makes them more competitive and helps with employee retention and recruiting.”

The future of downtown remains unclear as Akron leaders rethink the best ways to revive the downtown district in a post-pandemic world.

Amid this uncertainty, here are the experiences, concerns and hopes of a few of the people who live, work and invest in the heart of the city of Akron.

Downtown is ‘a place where people can thrive’

For downtown residents like Thurman, what was once a lively downtown neighborhood became a shell of its former self during the pandemic shutdown of March 2020.

“I remember wandering around in the days and weeks after the shutdown happened and taking photos of what it felt like to be in a space that was empty and it ended up staying that way for a while,” Thurman said. “I think that we all tried to figure out ways of connection amidst all that; I think we were all scared we didn’t know what was happening but we knew that we needed others.”

She recalled the hours spent biking on the Towpath Trail or reading books at Lock 3 and was happy for the “robust and accessible green space” that downtown Akron was able to offer to escape the monotony that came with remote work.

“Nature felt safe, being outdoors felt safe, and when we realized we could finally be outdoors safely with others, that became our central space of connection,” Thurman said. “Nature was not only a lifeline for our downtown community but other communities as well.”

Post-pandemic, that downtown community is growing.

Although the office market has struggled, downtown Akron’s residential market is strong, Deputy Mayor Vollman said.

“Most of the development that you’ve seen downtown in the past few years has been residential,” Vollman said. “I know we are in the early stages of making the CitiCenter building residential. We’ve done a lot to create more opportunities for people to live downtown through the residential tax abatement program and we want to keep that going.

“The best remedy for downtown is people,” he said. “We are always thinking about how do we get as many people downtown as we can and how we can create more residential spaces to entice people to live here.”

Thurman is excited to see how far downtown has grown from her adolescent years and, in particular, how the arts scene in her neighborhood has expanded.

“I look at how what the Civic Theatre has been doing has been incredible,” she said. “They’ve been able to pull in major acts. They’ve been driving things forward as a creative center for downtown.

“I don’t want to forget about Musica and BLU Jazz and all these other arts and cultural spaces, and, yes, we are a Rust Belt city where things are always going to be a bit slower; we’re not as sexy as the Bay Area, but we have a lot of charm and we have a lot of space to grow.”

Thurman is hopeful for downtown Akron’s future and praises the resiliency of a community that she acknowledges has had its fair share of challenges in the past few years.

“I think that there are a lot of players around the table that are doing a lot of good work downtown and I think a lot of residents are beginning to see that we can change and we can move in a positive direction and we can make this neighborhood a place where people can thrive,” Thurman said.

Restaurant owner loves love being downtown

Ed Sutter, owner of Eddies Famous Cheesesteaks and Grille, began working downtown in 2011, when he opened his original cheesesteak shop at Main and Exchange streets adjacent to the since-closed Zar Nightclub.

He also worked as a vendor for four seasons in Canal Park, where he said he enjoyed a successful run working in the RubberDucks ballpark.

“Around that time when I first started working downtown, it was a really happening place and the RubberDucks were doing well and I wanted to leave the Falls and attract a new market and I thought downtown was the best way to go,” Sutter said. “This was before the Main Street construction or the pandemic or social unrest or anything like that; it was really great to work down here.”

Multiple shootings and other safety issues at Zar Nightclub forced the nightspot’s eventual closure in late 2017, leading to the demise of Sutter’s shop. Sutter, who also led a successful food truck operation, decided to focus on that endeavor following the closure of his spot.

“I had an opportunity to purchase our current space in 2018, but the price at that time didn’t make sense to me,” Sutter said. “I also knew the Main Street construction was coming up and I didn’t want the feeling of my business hanging on for dear life, so we just went mobile for two years and that helped to build the customer base.”

As the downtown construction started to wrap up and his social media presence sparked interest in his business, Sutter decided the time was right to finally find a permanent location.

“My vision of what this location could be sort of came back to my mind at this time, and it involved all these office workers who work across the street by Cascade Plaza stopping by for lunch and just what a great opportunity it would be to get all that foot traffic during the day,” he said.

Within a few weeks of Sutter finalizing the deal to purchase the space at 147 S. Main St., COVID-19 arrived in March 2020.

He opened his doors in November 2020, and business was good at first.

“Little would I know how disastrous COVID-19 would be,” Sutter said. “I had no idea it would be like this. When I opened the store, I had no idea just how much it would change the city and just the world. We thought we could just forge our way through this thing.”

By 2021, he said, “things began getting really difficult” as remote work persisted.

“It seemed like 50 or 60% of the potential business that was here was now gone,” he said.

The Landmark (a former bank) and 159 Main (the old Law Building) opened and filled with tenants now living beside Sutter’s new location. But gone was the lunchtime bustle of white-collar workers who are still largely absent today from the officer towers across the street at Cascade Plaza. Sutter said he could open the front door of his store and look up and down the street and see not a single soul for hours, aside from the occasional dog walker.

“In 2021, I had a lot of days where I didn’t know if Eddies on Main Street was going to make it. We were paying the bills just about, we just could not bear the impact of not having workers downtown right across the street. They’re a big chunk of the reason I decided to purchase this space in the first place,” he said.

Vollman said more employers have returned to the office recently, which has made downtown Akron seem more lively now than a year ago. He noted the city wants to find and incentivize more developers to purchase and develop downtown office space and promote working in office. But the city only has so much control in what happens once the developers purchase these buildings.

“We can’t dictate to companies that their workers are going to be in the office or not,” Vollman said. “I would love to be able to influence that a bit more but private companies are making their own decisions in their best interests.”

Despite the challenges, Sutter said he is still glad he chose to be downtown.

“There’s a perception that I’ve heard a lot about downtown how ‘Oh, I would never go downtown, it’s crime-ridden’ and how there are safety issues, but that couldn’t be further from the truth,” Sutter said. “I love being downtown and even though it just seemed like we went through one thing after another with the construction and then COVID to get this place up and running, we’ve only gotten stronger as a store and as a community.”

Business owner finds ‘perfect fit’ in new office

Jessie Robinson recently stood in the doorway of her roughly 10-square-foot office on the fourth floor of the AES Building on the southern end of downtown.

Robinson, a Realtor, broker and insurance agent who owns Goodman Services and Goodman Financial Services, considered renting commercial space in the AES Building. But “the cost was too great for me as a small business owner,” she said.

And she couldn’t imagine running her growing businesses from home.

“I don’t want to bring people to my house with my noisy kids and barking dog and ferocious husband,” joked Robinson, an Akron resident. “That’s why this is a perfect fit. It’s really cost-effective as a small business owner, and you have room to grow.”

So, she and 27 other individuals and businesses looking for the right fit are now leasing just as much office as they need at HQ. The new addition at AES is owned by the Schipper Group and managed by IWG, a workplace solutions company with nearly 4,000 office-share locations around the world.

Around the corner, Mark Carson of Stow popped out of the remote-work office he shares with a colleague in IT at a company not headquartered locally.

Carson doesn’t have kids, a dog or a spouse at home. But there are chores. And they compete for attention with his day job.

“A lot of people say working from home is kind of amazing,” Carson said. “And that’s kind of true. But there’s also a lot of distraction.”

Developer considers Akron a ‘progressive community’

Tony Troppe is an Akron developer whose downtown work includes the BLU-Tique Hotel, BLU Jazz+ and other residential holdings within downtown’s arts and entertainment district.

He believes the empty buildings that litter downtown Akron that were once completely filled with office workers buzzing about should now be turned into mixed-use developments that drive more interest in the community.

“There’s been an urban exodus across the country where people are moving away from downtowns to the suburbs and that has been true here as well, but as more and more of these shuttered office spaces due to COVID move to residential developments, I believe residents are going to want to come live down here and experience the arts and the community that downtown is fostering,” Troppe said.

“From my understanding, the residential marketplace for downtown has continued to increase,” he said. “The pandemic is happening but that is not stopping people from wanting to live down here.”

According to Troppe, the relatively low cost of living and the arts scene has raised the quality of life for workers who want to live downtown,

“I’d consider Akron to be a progressive community in the sense that it is making progress and I’d consider downtown to be a community where it is easy to make your mark and put ideas into action and while the pandemic may have slowed things down in downtown for a while, the spirit has always been there to make downtown a community where people want to live and grow,” Troppe said.

Canalway president sees more to come

Daniel Rice, president of the Ohio & Erie Canalway, oversees the Lock 3 Park project, a resident-driven Akron Civic Commons project that he hopes will be a major part of transforming Akron’s downtown in a post-pandemic world.

“The residents really identified the need to upgrade the space,” Rice said. “They didn‘t want to lose the concert space and all the events that go on there; they just wanted to add more.

“Residents shared with us that they would like to have a 365-day park. If there isn’t a concert or an event happening at Lock 3 there really wasn’t much of a reason to go.”

“We had a whole series of community engagement meetings and everything that you see being built there right now came from the residents‘ vision,” Rice said. “They wanted to see a world-class pavilion, more seating, better accessibility; residents wanted to make everyone feel welcome, whether you worked or lived downtown, were just visiting the area or even a University of Akron student.”

Rice, who has worked downtown for more than 20 years, acknowledges how downtown is the “heartbeat of our city,” and he believes investments into Lock 3 Park and other spaces downtown will pay off by bringing in further investments and residents.

“With all these public space investments and improvements, we are on the cusp of even greater investment in our downtown,” Rice said. “We know young people are looking for great public space where they can be outside, where they can network. I think younger people who are seeking a destination where they should live and work will seek out Akron’s downtown community, it will become that destination.”

Rice also noted how the upcoming Sojourner Truth Plaza will be “another amazing public space” that will turn into a destination that attracts people to downtown Akron.

“Downtown is already the center of our government, the center of our entertainment between the Akron Civic Theatre, the Art Museum and Lock 3 Park,” Rice said. “You‘ve got world-class health care and a world-class university and now the Sojourner Truth Plaza will join all these wonderful resources and continue to make downtown a place to live, work and play.”

Reporter Doug Livingston contributed to this report. Reporter Anthony Thompson can be found at ajthompson@gannett.com or on X at @athompsonABJ.

This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: Downtown Akron residents, investors share post-pandemic hopes