Shaker Square, a Great Place to Spend the Day

By Cool Cleveland Correspondent Carol Drummond

Here’s a plan for a perfect Saturday in Northeast Ohio. First, starting downtown, take a rapid transit East and get off at Shaker Square. This way you’ll have no parking worries.

Your nose will tell you where the coffee shop is and you can take your specially roasted cup a’ jo and breakfast pastry outside to lovely café table on the sidewalk. Now that the caffeine has kicked in it’s time to shop.

Head to the center of the square, where Shaker Boulevard has been closed for the weekly farmers market, and you can browse up one lane and down the other gathering the region’s best and freshest seasonal product and more.

When you are done with the market, take a cruise around the square. You’ll find stores that run the gamut from fashion to toys and even the arts.

By now you might need some additional refreshment, so grab an ice cream cone or bag of kettle corn and head one block North of the Square to Larchmere Boulevard. This is where you can slow you pace way down and take your time combing through the antiques shops, book stores and art galleries. After an afternoon on your feet you need to settle in for a great meal, and you can find that either at one of the restaurants on Larchmere Boulevard or head back a block South to Shaker Square where there is a range of restaurants, from diner, to ethnic, to upscale, depending on your mood and budget. Finally, end your day with a movie in the restored vintage theatre right on the square, and a few steps away is the rapid transit to take you back home.

Shaker Square is one of the area’s oldest and longest running shopping centers and the it is still just as charming and relevant as at its beginning. It was designed and developed to work with the transit system whose hub is in the Terminal Tower downtown, by the same family company that designed and built the original Tower City complex in the early part of the twentieth century, the Van Sweringen brothers. The attention to detail while also creating spaces that facilitate easy passage of people as well as spaces in which to spend some time, is a hallmark of that period of time, and still appreciated today by those who enjoy historic Shaker Square.

There is so much to do in Shaker Square and the surrounding neighborhood, here a few of the highlights: