On the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving, a small corner bar on the west side of Cleveland was filled with the sounds of rock, blues and jam band music. It was jam night at Spotlight Cleveland, and the tiny, wood-paneled bar – what the owner calls a “micro venue” – was full of people. As the night went on and the cozy space filled up, people spilled out onto the patio, where they huddled together in the cold, drizzling rain and carried on talking and laughing. 

In the past year, two music lovers on Cleveland’s west side, Corrine Henahan and John Dewey, have transformed what used to be a smoke-filled, run-down corner bar at Madison Ave. and W. 87th St. into a loving tribute to the local music scene. The project is a direct result of their own grit and determination. After falling in love with the building and buying it at the height of the pandemic, they put in two years of sweat equity before reopening it as Spotlight Cleveland. 
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Shaker Square is an iconic Cleveland property – it first opened in 1929 as the nation’s second planned shopping center. Yet in recent years, it’s been a bit down-at-the-heels, having gone through a foreclosure sale, fleeing merchants and, more recently, a rash of business break-ins.

That story is beginning to change thanks to an infusion of more than $5 million in property repairs by the new owners, Burten Bell Carr Inc. and Cleveland Neighborhood Progress, in the past two years. Now, thanks to an $800,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, more improvements are slated to come. According to Joy Johnson, director of BBC, the funds will go to renovating Dave’s Market, adding an elevator to the CVS building, and assorted other repairs. She said the project will create 29 new jobs, at least 75 percent of which will be for low-income individuals.

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