The Caxton Building is a historic building completed in 1903 in

Cleveland Cleveland ( ), officially the City of Cleveland, is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Cuyahoga County. Located in the northeastern part of the state, it is situated along the southern shore of Lake Erie, across the U ...

Ohio Ohio () is a U.S. state, state in the Midwestern United States, Midwestern region of the United States. Of the List of states and territories of the United States, fifty U.S. states, it is the List of U.S. states and territories by area, 34th-l ...

.Caxton Building
Emporis (includes photos) It was designed by Frank Seymour Barnum's F. S. Barnum & Co architectural firm. The 8-story steel-frame office building was constructed for the Caxton Building Company and its president Ambrose Swasey. It housed graphic arts and printing businesses, and was named after William Caxton, a British printer in the 15th century. The main entrance to the building is a

Romanesque architecture Romanesque architecture is an architectural style of medieval Europe characterized by semi-circular arches. There is no consensus for the beginning date of the Romanesque style, with proposals ranging from the 6th to the 11th century, this lat ...

style

terra cotta Terracotta, terra cotta, or terra-cotta (; ; ), in its material sense as an earthenware substrate, is a clay-based unglazed or glazed ceramic where the fired body is porous. In applied art, craft, construction, and architecture, terracot ...

archway. It includes intricate organic

cartouche In Egyptian hieroglyphs, a cartouche is an oval with a line at one end tangent to it, indicating that the text enclosed is a royal name. The first examples of the cartouche are associated with pharaohs at the end of the Third Dynasty, but the fe ...

s in the style popularized by American architect

Louis Sullivan Louis Henry Sullivan (September 3, 1856 – April 14, 1924) was an American architect, and has been called a "father of skyscrapers" and "father of modernism". He was an influential architect of the Chicago School, a mentor to Frank Lloy ...

, as well as column capitals accenting its buff-colored

masonry Masonry is the building of structures from individual units, which are often laid in and bound together by mortar; the term ''masonry'' can also refer to the units themselves. The common materials of masonry construction are bricks, building ...

. Its ground floor retail frontage has included restaurants and cafes.

History

The building was designed to accommodate heavy printing presses. In 1905 it housed Alfred Cahen's business which became the

World Publishing Company The World Publishing Company was an American publishing company. The company published genre fiction, trade paperbacks, children's literature, nonfiction books, textbooks, Bibles, and dictionaries,Ohio Erie Canal
National Park Service It was declared a Cleveland landmark in 1976. The building underwent restorations in the 1990s.Caxton Building
Encyclopedia of Cleveland History

History

See also