An ambitious project is coming to life in the Hingetown neighborhood of Ohio City as two female entrepreneurs, Anne Hartnett and Andria Loczi, have refurbished the historic Vitrolite building and are reopening it this summer to house new businesses, including Harness Cycle.
In 2022, the pair bought the building at 2915 Detroit Ave. for $1.68 million from the previous owner (Intermuseum Conservation Association, or ICA) under their real estate company, Harness Collective. They’ve spent the past five months completely rehabbing the 18,000-square-foot space and just celebrated their grand opening earlier this month. In addition to Harness Cycle, the Vitrolite is home to Soul Yoga as well as the new restaurant Patron Saint. The building’s owners are also launching the Event & Collaboration space, a multipurpose venue that they’re planning to use as an art gallery and workspace as well as for community programs and rentals.
In 2024, So Fun Space, a “stay and play” center that provides family-focused programming and art and activity-based learning will be opening. The operators are still finalizing their plans, which may include child care and other family wellness programs, Hartnett said in an email. Additionally, in coming years, the owners plan to fully activate the rest of the building by opening a wellness spa and digital content studio within the complex.
Hartnett and Loczi’s aspiration is for the Vitrolite to create a space for like-minded Clevelanders to practice wellness and engage socially in an inclusive, family-friendly environment. They’re also hoping to shift the paradigm in real estate development by co-locating similar businesses to stimulate their collective growth.
“We are trying to preserve the historic nature of the building and honor how it came to be, while also pushing into a bold new direction, modernizing it and helping others call it home along with us,” Loczi told The Land during a tour.
“This building is perfect for this concept,” added Hartnett, explaining that this is the first of many projects they hope to take on.
To make the project a reality, Harness Collective had to retrofit the entire building, which was occupied by ICA from 2003-2022. The Vitrolite was originally built in the early 20th century as a showroom and distribution center for the Chicago-based Vitrolite Glass Company, which produced the popular and colorful structural glass tile on the building’s facade and the facades of other Art Deco style buildings across the country.
“Structurally, the building was in impeccable shape, but it is a new use, so we really had to rebuild it from the inside out,” said Hartnett. “It was a really aggressive timeline, and it was no small feat to get this done since we started in January.”
With this audacious timeline in mind, the duo quickly went to work to secure funding and find tenants. To finance the project, Harness Collective utilized a Small Business Association 7(a) loan from Huntington Bank, public loans from the City of Cleveland and Cuyahoga County, a small amount of Opportunity Zone funding, and an angel investment from a local group of women.
They also engaged a number of local businesses to build the interior features. Moen donated bathroom fixtures, Design Surfaces donated flooring and helped source backsplash tile and countertop surfaces, Cleveland Hardwood designed the floors of the yoga studio, and Sherwin Williams provided interior paint matching the original Vitrolite tile colors at a discounted rate. (Donated and discounted materials were exchanged for agreed-upon in-kind benefits, such as access to the property for photoshoots.)
Fostering entrepreneurship
The name Harness Collective may sound familiar, because this parent company evolved from Hartnett’s longstanding fitness studio, Harness Cycle, a B Corp which started in Hingetown and has been running (or in this case, spinning) since 2013. (Harness Cycle is now one of the subsidiaries of Harness Collective.) The owners say the Vitrolite project has helped launch Harness Collective as an atypical development firm, and they hope to inspire a new type of development by similar firms.
Harness Collective’s main goal as a self-described “neighborhood-focused commercial real-estate development firm” is to build a portfolio of retail-focused properties and develop unused buildings for new or expanding businesses. They try to work with tenants on their operations and help them grow. Loczi said Harness Collective is all about activating spaces that help fellow entrepreneurs bring their dreams for owning a business to fruition. Founding tenants even received a small equity (ownership) stake in the project when they leased in the Vitrolite, according to the owners.
As female entrepreneurs, the two women also say they’re helping to dismantle gender disparities in entrepreneurship. Hartnett said these disparities became real to them when their meetings to secure funding took place predominantly among men. As women developers in a male-dominated space, they’re helping to create a new prototype.
For example, in the building’s footprint, there are no gendered bathrooms. There are just single bathrooms for Vitrolite patrons to use as they please, a feature that they say forced them to apply for a variance since the city of Cleveland’s code requires gendered bathrooms. The building also has a lactation room for parents and caregivers, giving them a separate space to care for their children, a feature that was important to the two developers as mothers who have sought to make the building family-friendly.
The idea behind giving their tenants equity in the project came from personal experience. The fitness studio rented on W. 29th St. for a decade, and throughout a time when property values in the area surged, they couldn’t reap any benefit without a stake in ownership. “Harness was part of the resurgence and the push of what happened [in Hingetown], but I was just a tenant. Because I was a tenant, I didn’t have equity in a market that we helped drive. That became important to me going forward,” said Hartnett.
For a fee, Harness Collective also offers coaching to its tenants and other clients to assist emerging entrepreneurs in navigating the challenges posed by business ownership. “Part of Harness Collective is supporting brick-and-mortar, not only with commercial real estate or just physical space but with coaching, development, and support to help [tenants] lean into becoming entrepreneurs for the first time or launching their own brick-and-mortar,” said Loczi.
By offering these services, Hartnett and Loczi hope to help businesses they work with become successful. For example, they’ve coached Ylonda Rosenthal-Greene, owner of Soul Yoga, using Harness Cycle’s “playbook” that draws from their decade of experience successfully running a wellness studio.
“I think it’s pretty unique as a developer that we have also been operators,” said Hartnett. “We want our partners to be successful, for knowledge to be shared – if they’re successful, then we’re successful. We know what it feels like to be an operator in an emerging market.”
Anchoring the community
One of the unique aspects of the Vitrolite project is that all the businesses have separate entrances, but once you’re in the building, you can access all of them. The collection of businesses hosted in the Vitrolite was also intentionally curated by Harness Collective to foster synergy among them and to retain patrons within the building.
They also tried to work with tenants, such as Rosenthal-Greene of Soul Yoga, to design spaces that would meet their needs. As Hartnett explained, “The heartbeat of Ylonda’s concept for Soul Yoga is representation, diversity of age, race, shape, and sizes.” These principles inspired the design of the flooring, a dazzling conglomerate of different colors, shapes, and sizes of hardwoods that are designed to be as diverse as Soul Yoga’s clientele.
On the ground floor of the Vitrolite is Patron Saint. Owner Marie Artale is a Cleveland native who met Hartnett and Loczi at a mutual friend’s birthday party after she relocated back to Cleveland. Artale shared with the business owners that she’d moved back to open a restaurant. “In an insane cosmic moment,” Artale said that her description of the business was a near match for the Vitrolite showroom and that her ethos matched that of Harness.
“She has a cool vision for how to treat her employees and how to cultivate their growth opportunities which felt in alignment with us,” said Hartnett.
Hartnett and Loczi said this is just the beginning – now that the building is done, patrons can expect several more spaces to open later this year or next year, including So Fun, the event/gallery space, and other new businesses.
Check out these businesses now open in the Vitrolite building at 2915 Detroit Ave.:
- Soul Yoga, an inclusivity and empowerment-driven studio that offers a variety of instructor-led classes throughout the day, seven days a week, that range in purpose (and temperature) from classic classes to intense exercise and relaxation sessions.
- Harness Cycle, a spin studio that offers instructor-led classes throughout the day, seven days a week, in which riders are able to follow along at their own pace in an intimate setting.
- Patron Saint, an Italian all-day café where diners can enjoy espressos, aperitif cocktails, and satisfying plates in a bright, airy room flanked by numerous archways and adorned with the original and colorful glass tile. Hours are 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday-Friday and Saturday 8 a.m. to 2 p.m.
Nate Flauto was a participant in The Land’s community journalism program.
We're celebrating four years of amplifying resident voices from Cleveland's neighborhoods. Will you make a donation to keep our local journalism going?
