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CLEVELAND, Ohio — If blackboards could talk at the century-old Longfellow Elementary School in Cleveland’s Collinwood neighborhood, they’d speak of second chances and second lives.
That’s the story of a Cleveland landmark repurposed as affordable housing for seniors in a venerable blue-collar community tucked into the city’s northeast corner a block south of Interstate 90 and less than a half-mile south of Lake Erie.
The tale may not be as rousing as “Listen my children, and you shall hear…” the opening of “Paul Revere’s Ride,’’ written by the school’s namesake, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882). But it’s stirring in its way.
The renovated and expanded school, where a ribbon-cutting was held in October, was 100% leased as of Dec. 21. The original building, at 650 E. 140th St., has 30 affordable independent-living apartments inserted into one-time classrooms. Another 50 units fill a three-story addition behind the school, with a seamless, one-story lobby connection joining the new and old structures.
“It was a long time coming,’’ Aaron Greenblatt, executive vice president and in-house counsel for Connecticut-based Vesta Corp., the project’s owner, said in an interview with cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer. “It took a long time to get the financing in place; it’s great to get to this point.”
Apartments in the original building range from 608 to 820 square feet, with bedrooms, kitchens and living areas inserted into onetime classrooms. They were listed for $795 a month for single occupants earning up to $37,980 according to Apartments.com. The one- and two-bedroom units in the new building range from 797 to 821 square feet, with rents from $914 to $1,088 according to the property’s main office.
Beautiful bones
The school looked vastly different in 2016 when it was close to being demolished by the Cleveland Metropolitan School District. That’s when the nonprofit Cleveland Restoration Society staged a last-minute effort to see if the building could be saved and reused.
“At our initial meeting, the school board was set on demo-ing the building,’’ Cleveland architect Arne Goldman said in an interview earlier this year. “They said it was too late. We said it wasn’t too late.’’
Goldman, a board member at the restoration society, was part of a pro bono task force assembled to explore the possibilities of adaptively reusing the school, which had been vacant for a decade.

Preservation activists praise the conversion of Cleveland’s vacant Longfellow Elementary School to affordable senior housing as a model for re-using unneeded school buildings across the city.Steven Litt, cleveland.com
He toured the leaking, water-damaged structure with task force members including Cleveland architect Anthony Hiti and restoration society Executive Director and President Kathleen Crowther. They signed waivers and donned hazmat suits for protection from mold and asbestos, he said.
“We were seeing these beautiful bones, this beautiful structure with plaster all over the ground and asbestos everywhere,’’ he said.
In 2018, with the school district’s agreement, the restoration society issued a request for qualifications to redevelop the building, followed by a request for proposals for companies interested in repurposing the building. Vesta submitted the winning concept.
Goldman recused himself from restoration society votes on the project when Willoughby-based Marous Bros. Construction, where he works as a director of business development, decided to bid on the project as its design-build contractor. Cleveland-based LDA Architects, Inc. served as a preservation consultant.
A notable success
Today, Longfellow is one of the city’s most notable recent historic preservation success stories.
Goldman said the $23 million project penciled well, financially speaking, because it occupies a 5-acre parcel big enough for the 50-unit expansion. It also helped that the project qualified for more than $12 million in low income housing tax credits and federal and state historic preservation tax credits.
To keep the preservation tax credits, Vesta and Marous had to meet stringent federal standards administered by Ohio’s State Historic Preservation Office. Those requirements included saving original materials such as blackboards and cloakroom cubbyholes in the old classrooms. Those details give the building’s one-bedroom suites a true “old school” feel.
Goldman and architect Mark Green, who was director of design at Marous earlier this year, said state officials were “not shy’’ about saying what was and wasn’t permissible in the renovation.
“As long you have a collaborative attitude, the process goes well,’’ Green said. “They knew what we were trying to do,’’ Goldman said. “They were happy this building wasn’t demolished.”
Giving thanks
At the ribbon-cutting, more than 100 attendees filled Longfellow’s 3,200-square-foot auditorium, repurposed as a community gathering space with accessible bathrooms, storage closets for seats and tables, and an elevator to an upstairs gym filled with exercise machines.
The event was stirring, but also chronologically jarring. It occurred in 2023, but was cradled within brickwork and sash windows dating back to the year in which Calvin Coolidge was elected president.

Preservation activists praise the conversion of Cleveland’s vacant Longfellow Elementary School to affordable senior housing as a model for re-using unneeded school buildings across the city.Steven Litt, cleveland.com
The building’s facades feature whimsical stone carvings of owls, an example of ornamentation considered anathema in modern architectural styles that swept the U.S. after World War II. The fanciful birds once served as the school’s emblem, and now symbolize a community of residents aged 62 and up.
Crowther said at the event the school renovation could serve as a citywide model of how the solid, well-constructed buildings of an earlier era, once given up as worthless, could be saved and repurposed. The one-time “palace of learning,’’ as she put it, had become “a palace of senior living.”
She described the original school building as an exemplary fireproof structure designed for the district by Cleveland architect Walter McCornack. It was built after the Collinwood school fire of 1908, which claimed the lives of 172 children and two teachers.

Preservation activists praise the conversion of Cleveland’s vacant Longfellow Elementary School to affordable senior housing as a model for re-using unneeded school buildings across the city.Steven Litt, cleveland.com
The state’s deputy fire marshal determined that an overheated furnace ignited exposed dry wood in the school’s boiler room, quickly turning the wooden structure into an inferno, according to the Cleveland Historical website.
The fire “changed building standards for schools on a national level, and Cleveland led that charge,’’ Crowther said. Longfellow became one of a number of buildings McCornack designed for the district. The restoration society defined Longfellow’s style as Dutch baroque, signaled by elements including curlicue profiles on its cornices.
Despite the building’s distinguished history, Cleveland’s loss of more than 60% of its population since 1950 rendered Longfellow and numerous other schools and churches across the city unneeded for their original purposes and vulnerable to neglect, decay and demolition.
Crowther credited elected officials including Ward 8 Councilman Mike Polensek and former councilman Jeff Johnson, now a Cleveland Municipal court judge-elect, for helping to find a new use for the old school.

Preservation activists praise the conversion of Cleveland’s vacant Longfellow Elementary School to affordable senior housing as a model for re-using unneeded school buildings across the city.Steven Litt, cleveland.com
The councilmen led the charge to have the building listed as a Cleveland Landmark, which empowered the city’s Landmarks Commission to deny a demolition permit, a vital step that provided time to seek a new owner.
“This could not have happened without the political power of those guys,’’ Crowther said in a recent interview, looking back on the fight to save the school.
“We are weak without the political power,’’ she said. “All sorts of logic can be applied to these situations, but if you don’t have the political power, you’re dead in the water. Polensek stood up to the school district. We make nice about it now, but there were some tense moments.’’
Cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer reached out to the school district for comment.
At the ribbon-cutting in October, Polensek recalled that he paid a visit to Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine at the governor’s mansion to seek his support for the all-important state historic tax credits.
First Lady Fran DeWine baked cookies in the kitchen for a granddaughter’s birthday while the two officials chatted in the adjacent dining room. Polensek said he enjoyed the delicious aroma, but wasn’t sure he was making headway with DeWine until he mentioned that the late George Voinovich, the former Cleveland mayor and Ohio governor and senator, had grown up in Collinwood.
DeWine, who had served as lieutenant governor under Voinovich in the early 90s, perked up when he heard about the neighborhood connection.
” ‘That’s all I need to hear; I’ll support the project,’ ‘’ Polensek said DeWine told him.
Cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer reached out to the governor’s office for confirmation.
The project didn’t go without a hitch. Goldman said that after the construction team finished restoring the chimney at the rear of the original school, vandals stole the lightning protection system from the structure. The chimney then got hit by lightning, and the work had to be redone.
Today, however, the restored chimney towers as the centerpiece of the school’s rear façade, which has a roofline distinguished by its sinuous baroque curves.

Sandra Williams, a new resident at the Longfellow Elementary School, praised the conversion of the building to affordable senior housing during a ribbon cutting on Oct. 26, 2023.Steven Litt, cleveland.com
After watching the ribbon-cutting, resident Sandra Williams, the associate minister of Everlasting Baptist Church at Eddy Road in Cleveland, said she was thrilled to move from an apartment in Willoughby to the Longfellow building in August, when units in the new part of the structure became available.
“I love it,’’ she said. “It’s peaceful. I love my place. The bathrooms and bedrooms are large. We have walk-in closets. It’s very nice.”
She expressed gratitude for Councilman Polensek’s intervention. But she also felt spiritually moved by the project, and the celebration she had just witnessed.
“I thank God for this move,’’ she said. “I’ve been praying about the seniors. We need the attention. And this seems to be divinely done by God.”
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