08/24/2026
The pile of brick, timber and debris near the center of this 360 panorama is what remained of the former Friendship Baptist Church at East 55th Street and Central Avenue after a major fire early Friday morning.
Cleveland firefighters were called to the vacant church shortly before 2 a.m. on August 21. By the time crews arrived, fire had already broken through the roof. Nearly 60 firefighters from more than 14 companies responded to the two-alarm fire, and much of the roof and interior eventually collapsed. No injuries were reported. The cause was still under investigation in the immediate aftermath.
The loss is significant because the building was one of the older surviving religious structures in this part of Cleveland, but its history reaches well beyond one congregation.
The church was built in 1894 for Tifereth Israel, Cleveland's second-oldest Jewish congregation. At the time, East 55th Street was still known as Willson Avenue, and the building became known as the Willson Avenue Temple.
In the Cleveland of the 1890s. Central Avenue, originally called Garden Street, was already an important east-west route. Streetcars made the intersection accessible from other parts of the growing East Side, and the surrounding neighborhood was filling with immigrant families, shops, schools, churches and synagogues.
The temple was designed by architects Israel J. Lehman and Theodore Schmitt. It was not simply a sanctuary. The complex included classrooms, offices, a library, meeting rooms and other spaces intended to make the congregation an active part of everyday neighborhood life. That broader idea of a synagogue serving religious, educational and community purposes was an important part of Tifereth Israel's development during this period.
The congregation's move to East 55th also reflected a larger pattern in Cleveland. Jewish families who had once lived closer to downtown were gradually moving east, first through neighborhoods along Central, Woodland and Scovill, then later toward Glenville, Wade Park, Cleveland Heights and other eastern communities.
Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver became the congregation's rabbi in 1917, while Tifereth Israel was still worshiping at this corner. Silver later became one of the most prominent American Jewish leaders of the 20th century and a major advocate for Zionism. In 1947, he addressed the United Nations during the debate that preceded the creation of Israel.
By then, however, Tifereth Israel had long since left Central Avenue. The congregation moved to a new temple on Ansel Road in 1924, following many of its members farther east.
The old Willson Avenue Temple began a second life.
Mount Zion Congregational Church purchased the building in 1924 after losing its previous church to fire. Mount Zion was part of Cleveland's growing African American religious community and remained here until around 1940. Friendship Baptist Church then purchased the former temple and made it home.
That sequence tells a great deal about what was happening in the Central neighborhood during the first half of the 20th century.
Central had once been one of Cleveland's most ethnically mixed neighborhoods. Germans settled along Garden Street as early as the 1830s, and later decades brought Jewish, Hungarian, Czech, Greek, Italian and other immigrant families. Schools, businesses and religious institutions reflected that mixture.
The Great Migration changed Central dramatically. Cleveland's Black population rose from 8,448 in 1910 to more than 34,000 by 1920 as African Americans moved north in search of industrial work and opportunities that were denied to them in much of the South.
Many settled in Central, but not simply by choice. Discriminatory housing practices, restrictive real estate customs and lending barriers limited where Black Clevelanders could buy or rent. By the 1920s and 1930s, Central had become the heart of Black Cleveland.
Religious institutions followed those population shifts. Former synagogues and churches throughout the East Side were purchased by Black congregations as earlier congregations moved farther east. The transition of this building from Tifereth Israel to Mount Zion and then Friendship Baptist is a particularly clear example of that larger Cleveland story.
The panorama also looks across an intersection that once contained another major landmark.
On the northeast corner of East 55th and Central stood the Majestic.
The building opened in 1902 as the five-story Majestic Apartments and later became the Majestic Hotel. By the 1920s and 1930s, it had become one of Cleveland's most important hotels serving African American travelers.
This was at a time when Black travelers could not assume that hotels, restaurants or other businesses would serve them. The Majestic appeared in editions of the Negro Motorist Green Book, the guide used by African American motorists to locate businesses where they could safely find lodging, food, fuel and other services.
In 1944, businessmen Alonzo G. Wright, Lawrence O. Payne and William O. Walker purchased the Majestic. Under Black ownership, the hotel became an important commercial and social center in the Central neighborhood and was the largest Black-owned hotel in Ohio during its final decades.
The building contained more than hotel rooms. There were restaurants, a pharmacy, a barber shop, a beauty salon, professional offices and other businesses. Its nightclub spaces became part of Cleveland's jazz and nightlife scene under several names, including the Furnace Room, Heat Wave, Ubangi Club and Rose Room.
The Rose Room is especially remembered for its music. Pianist Duke Jenkins led the house band during the 1950s, and the club's Monday night jam sessions attracted local musicians and nationally known performers passing through Cleveland.
That history is difficult to picture when looking at the open land and scattered buildings around East 55th today. During the middle decades of the 20th century, this was a much denser urban neighborhood. Streetcars moved through the intersection, storefronts lined the streets, the church was active, the Majestic was operating across the way and music clubs were part of the nightlife along Central.
There was also a major public school nearby.
Central High School occupied a Gothic building at East 55th and Central beginning in 1878. The school was one of Cleveland's earliest public high schools and became deeply connected to the city's political, industrial and cultural history.
Langston Hughes attended Central High while living in Cleveland. His years here placed him in a school and neighborhood filled with the children of immigrant and working-class families. The school also became important in Cleveland's music history, particularly as generations of Black students entered during the early 20th century.
Jazz composer and pianist Tadd Dameron attended Central, as did musician Carman Newsome. Other people connected to the school's long history included John D. Rockefeller, Marcus Hanna, inventor Charles F. Brush, Congressman Louis Stokes and Benjamin O. Davis Jr., who later became commander of the Tuskegee Airmen.
The Central High building itself eventually disappeared as the school system changed and the neighborhood was redeveloped.
There is an even older chapter at this intersection that has nothing to do with churches, hotels or jazz.
In 1871 and 1872, professional baseball was played around Willson Avenue and Garden Street, today's East 55th and Central. The Cleveland Forest Citys played home games here as members of the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players, an organization generally recognized as the first professional baseball league.
This intersection has carried a remarkable number of different identities in roughly a century and a half. It has been associated with early professional baseball, public education, Jewish Cleveland, Black Cleveland, churches, hotels, jazz clubs, immigrant neighborhoods and the Great Migration.
Much of that landscape disappeared through a combination of population loss, demolition, urban renewal, highway-era redevelopment and changes in housing and industry.
The Majestic closed in 1967 and was later demolished. Goodwill Industries opened a rehabilitation center on the former hotel site in 1972. More recently, that property has entered another period of redevelopment, with plans that have included recognition of the Majestic's history.
Friendship Baptist lasted much longer.
The congregation continued using the former temple for decades, and the building remained one of the few physical reminders of the older East 55th and Central streetscape after so much around it had vanished. In recent years the church had been vacant, but the 1894 structure was still there, carrying visible evidence of several very different chapters in Cleveland history.
That ended with Friday morning's fire.
The former church site represents more than 130 years of religious and neighborhood history. Across the intersection stood a Green Book hotel and one of the centers of Cleveland's Black nightlife. Nearby was Central High School. Before either of those existed, professional baseball was played in the same area.
East 55th and Central looks very different now, but it has been one of those Cleveland intersections where several major parts of the city's history overlapped.
The fire removed one of the last buildings that still made that older landscape visible.
