CASCADE HISTORY
■ The Cascade Plaza complex was once downtown Akron’s urban renewal centerpiece.
■ One Cascade Plaza was built in the late 1960s, the first building in a project that eventually included a second office building, the Cascade III, and a hotel.
■ FirstMerit bought the Cascade III building in the early 1990s.
■ South Howard Street, once the soul of the city’s business district, was dismantled to make way for the Cascade Plaza project and the city lost its Flatiron Building to the development.
■ Some historians have lamented the loss of those pieces of downtown’s past, while acknowledging that the plaza gave a needed boost to the city in the 1960s and 1970s.
Source: Beacon Journal archives
