Gwendolyn Garth remembers the music that used to float out of the Majestic Hotel on East 55th Street when she was a child living nearby. She also remembers the food.
“The rolls. They had the best rolls,” Garth recalled when showing off the Ohio Historical Marker erected in August on the site of the hotel, at East 55th Street and Central Avenue. “I also remember the ladies – and the men – dressed to the nines.
“And how quiet it was on Sunday mornings,” she added.
Garth led the push to get the new marker. It honors the history of the 250-room hotel, built in 1902 and demolished in 1967.
The Majestic was the largest hotel in Cleveland dedicated to Black visitors, according to the “Encyclopedia of Cleveland History.” It became the “city’s premier hostelry for black visitors to Cleveland in the 1920s,” lasting until the mid-1960s.
According to Cleveland Historical, “it was the largest Cleveland hostelry listed perennially in the Negro Motorist Green Book, a guide for Black motorists during the Jim Crow era. Not only did the Majestic provide a place for Blacks to stay, it gave them a place to eat, relax, and enjoy musical entertainment free from discrimination. “
Hotel sat at center of bustling neighborhood
In 1944, three Black business leaders – Alonzo G. Wright, Lawrence O. Payne and William O. Walker – purchased the hotel.
The Majestic housed a pharmacy, a barbershop, a restaurant and the Rose Room jazz club. The club famously hosted “Blue Monday” parties. The hotel closed and was demolished in 1967, according to the marker, “as civil rights advances opened more public accommodations to African Americans.”
A young Garth walked by the Majestic on her way to George Washington Carver Elementary School. She believes preserving its memory is important. Referring to the Cleveland Metropolitan School District students who walk by the new marker today, she said: “These kids know nothing about nothing. Let’s give them the history.”
She then pointed to empty lots and vacant buildings nearby. In her childhood, they housed restaurants, bars and stores that thrummed with neighborhood activity.
In 1972, after the hotel was demolished, Goodwill Industries of Greater Cleveland moved its operations into a building it constructed at 2295 E. 55th Street. In 2023, Goodwill moved. International Food Solutions won a $10 million federal grant to build a food-processing facility on the site.
Garth said she has long “had a vision” to turn the former Goodwill Building into the Majestic-Central Cultural Arts Center. The center would host events, offer classes and give young people a place to gather. She used her computer to create renderings of such a space. With her eyes still set on that vision, she decided the first order of business would be getting the historical marker.
Securing a marker takes planning
Since the 1950s, the Ohio Historical Markers program has sponsored 1,750 markers. Those markers “tell the state’s history as written by its communities.”
Garth worked with the city and International Food Solutions to get the marker placed on that property.
It was dedicated on Saturday, Aug. 22, as the ruins of the nearby Friendship Baptist Church were still smoldering from a fire that completely destroyed it the day before. Garth knows the rubble from the church fire is hard to miss, but she hopes people also notice the marker.
“I believe I’m on a spiritual mission,” said the artist and community activist. “This is important. We have to preserve Cleveland’s history.”
