December 19, 2024
For my wife…
I just sold 15 Broad Street in Akron after owning it for 14 years. While it started as the home for my marketing company SageRock, its most meaningful chapter was hosting The Homeless Charity and Second Chance Village – a homeless-run day center and tent city that the city eventually shut down. Though I’m feeling the loss of selling, I’m more determined than ever to fight for homeless rights. I’m studying for the LSAT to become a civil rights attorney. The building’s new owner is Robert Keith, who runs a music studio there, and I’m excited to see what he does with the place.
I’ve come late to life in being aware of my feelings.
As a man born in 1971, I wasn’t ever really encouraged to think about my feelings. And, as I’ve been learning, feelings are complicated, hard to pin down, and ever-changing. When you think you may have caught a feeling in your hands, it morphs into some other creature and slips away as quickly as it came. It’s exhausting looking for feelings. Why bother? Just feel them and move on, has been my theory most of my life. I also don’t like how it is never just one feeling. It’s usually a whole stew of emotions that spin you around. I’m learning that naming your feelings gives you some control over them and makes them less wild and consuming. I’m trying to work on understanding my feelings. It’s hard.
I guess right this moment my biggest feeling about this sale is Loss.
I was in a store last night when I said to my wife, “We should get that for the building.”
Then I said, “Wait, I no longer have a building. Robert has a building.”
That shook me. 15 Broad Street has been a major part of my identity for 14 years. I bought the place in late February 2010. I remember walking into it the day I bought it. The heat was off. It was freezing. I never actually thought about the furnace and whether or not it worked. I found out that it actually has five furnaces. And yes, they all worked. I learned a lot about that building over the next decade and a half.
I bought it for SageRock, our marketing company. We had been renting space from Mike Owen in the Ice and Coal Warehouse at 129 N. Summit Street in Akron.
We bought 15 Broad Street from Wendi Ghardenhire for $225,000. She remodeled the front three-quarters of the top floor into a beauty salon, which is how I was introduced to the building. My wife got her hair done there.
Over the next week, I met a local police officer. He was kind and knowledgeable about the community. He let me know that there are a lot of “transients” in the area. I didn’t really know what that meant. But I did learn to remove the ladder from the side of the building because someone stood it up and tried to get into the building not long after that discussion.
There was also a creepy old mattress in the back of the lower level of the building that had been closed off and had not been used in many years. The entire scene looked like something out of a horror movie. Clearly, someone had been living there. The idea that a person would break into someone’s property and have the audacity to sleep in it was appalling. It made me feel violated and angry that someone would do such a thing.
I came to deeply love that building. I also came to develop relationships with the “transients” in the area. It turned out they weren’t so transient at all. Middlebury was their home, and they had been there for years.
Here’s a cool, old picture of 15 Broad Street when it was Green Cross General Hospital:
The vines on the front of the building had been removed. But I pulled a lot of the vines off the sides of the building myself. They eat into your mortar. I also had a lot of the building tuck-pointed to repair that damage.
People would regularly come in and tell us they had been born there. One elderly lady walked her adult child around the building, explaining what each room was used for and where she stayed.
Here’s what it looks like today:
When I bought 15 Broad Street, we had nearly 25 employees working for SageRock. The 2008 Great Recession gutted our business. By the time we moved into 15 Broad Street, there were about 4 of us. I decided I preferred a much smaller company. I have never tried to grow it to that larger size again. I preferred doing the work more than I enjoyed managing the people.
I just started renting it out to other businesses. I always rented it month to month; all the utilities were included, and there was no deposit. Much to my accountant’s and lawyer’s dismay, I rarely had them fill out a lease.
That setup enabled a lot of startups and Black-owned businesses to rent there. Some businesses included:
- A tea shop
- A real estate company
- A lawyer
- A marketing agency
- A photographer
- A screen printer
- A commercial interior construction company (Owned by Mark Mickey, who you might remember, burned down his pizza shop in West Akron. Somehow, Mark never ends up in jail, which is the most remarkable thing of all about him, given his “creative” business behaviors. I like Mark. He just lives his life fast and loose.)
- A variety of different consultants
- An art studio
- An antique store
I’m quite sure there were others that I don’t recall off the top of my head.
But what I think history will show is that 15 Broad Street will be most remembered for this:
This was the home of The Homeless Charity and Second Chance Village.
We ran a homeless day center out of the lower level of 15 Broad Street and then also had our tent city that reached upwards of 70 tents at times in the backyard.
Everything was homeless run. And I mean everything.
They elected a tri-council. They ran the food pantry and the massive clothes distribution center. They fixed the computers in the computer lab. They did all the repairs on the building. They ran their own security. They created their own intake process for new residents. They started their own businesses.
It is the most beautiful organization I’ve ever had the honor of being part of. It was beautiful and magical, and it gave them purpose and meaning.
We could take a person who was freezing off the streets one day and put them on sweeping duty (everyone had to contribute one hour a day to live in Second Chance Village) the next day, and then they would be instantly part of the community. They would greet the next freezing person off the street like they had been there for years.
GOD! It was good.
Of course, the only thing the city learned from that experiment was to shut it down. After two years, the tents were removed, and the fire department shut down the day center soon after.
Such love, hope, and beauty. Such loss, destruction, and hate.
It pulls my heart in all directions, even to this day.
What happened at 15 Broad Street—the construction and destruction of a community—will forever be imprinted on me and the history of Akron. I don’t believe the outcome will age well, but we’ll see.
Loss. So much loss. But it’s important to remember that you can only have loss when you have something to lose. There was undeniable beauty as well.
There is a sentimentality to this building for me. I am sad to see it leave my grasp. But for very egocentric and vain reasons. I worry about my legacy and the legacy of this creation. That kind of thinking needs to stop. I don’t have time for sentimentality. Sitting in remembrance means you are not living in the present.
We have made no progress in helping our homeless brothers and sisters find a place to live. The city of Akron will not give them so much as a toxic waste dump to put up a shelter. They have no foundation. They have no place to rest and regroup. They are always being run this way and that. And then they are blamed for their addiction and the fact that they aren’t holding down a 40-hour-a-week 9-to-5 job.
I cannot stop. I cannot spend any time looking backward. I can only look forward.
Loss is not my only emotion. I am also filled with hope, excitement, liberation, and determination—always determination. I think they are waiting for me to one day just give up. That is not how I am built. I will never give up. The harder it gets, the more determined I become. I’ve made a life of pounding my head against the wall. This is a wall that must be broken down.
I’m studying like hell for the January LSAT. I’m going to law school to become a civil rights attorney and fight this fight more extensively in the court system.
There is some speculation that the city of Akron helped the new owner, Robert Keith, acquire a really sweet loan to buy the building so that I won’t own it anymore.
I don’t know if that is true or not. But I know one thing that IS true: Letting 15 Broad Street go has only made me stronger and more determined to solve this heinous problem of watching American citizens freeze to death unsheltered in the richest country in the world.
If they think getting 15 Broad Street out of my hands has made me less powerful and less resolved, they are sadly mistaken. I am now freer and more energized than I have been any time ever in this fight.
We WILL have a place for everyone to live in America. It WILL happen, regardless of how insane, addicted, poor, and stubborn the person may be. If they aren’t dead or in jail, they deserve some place to live. I will fight for that reality until the day I die.
On Robert Keith, the new proud owner of 15 Broad Street.
Robert has been more intensely involved in this process than anyone else. He ran his music studio out of an area where homeless people were illegally living in the building.
I think his up close and personal involvement has caused a certain amount of long-term trauma in him. But he has never quit.
Robert graduated from Firestone. Our mayor, Shammas Malik, mentioned during my recent meeting with him that he and Robert were in the same AP Euro class at Firestone.
Robert went on to study education at NYU. He now runs the coolest music studio out of 15 Broad Street. He is going to now have the ability to keep pushing his vision even further.
Robert is thoughtful, creative, and so so cool. I couldn’t be happier that Robert is now the next owner of 15 Broad Street. I’m really excited to see what he makes of the place.
Here’s a picture I took of Robert in 2021:
Good luck, man! I think you are going to have a wonderful time being the new owner of 15 Broad Street.
Rocky has done a lot of research about the history of 15 Broad Street. You can check that out here if you are interested.