An SMN feature based on Rhonda Crowder's November 2024 reporting for Cleveland Magazine.
East Cleveland was once a magnet for upwardly mobile families, Black and white alike, in an era when business magnate John D. Rockefeller called the suburb home. Decades of white flight, disinvestment and a population loss of more than half have since hollowed the city out. A small core of committed residents has been working to reverse that slide, and the newest bet on the city's comeback is a coffee shop.
Siblings Ismail and Alima Samad founded the nonprofit behind Loiter Cafe & Marketplace, planted at Euclid Avenue and Woodlawn — literally the gateway into East Cleveland. The building carries its own history: it's the long-vacant former Mickey's Rustproofing shop, empty for two decades before the Cuyahoga Land Bank stepped in to redevelop it.
Land Bank staff say the strategy behind picking this block was deliberate. Planning studies pointed toward starting redevelopment near University Circle — home to more than 30 arts, culture, education and medical institutions — and working outward from there. Kamla Lewis, the Land Bank's senior housing development and project manager, calls the building a genuine find. The renovation ran roughly $3.5 million, and about 200 surrounding residential lots are now queued up for market-rate development by the Land Bank and private developers.
Julie Criscione, a 25-year East Cleveland resident working as the Land Bank's project consultant on the renovation, sees the cafe as more than a place to grab coffee — in her view, it's the cornerstone the neighborhood has been missing, and a potential spark for broader economic development in East Cleveland.
Ismail Samad's road here wasn't a straight line. He caught the food bug early, working a catering job at 14, later leaving culinary school unfinished and college unfinished too. He opened his first restaurant, Crust and Crumbs, on Lakeside Avenue more than two decades ago. When the 2008 recession hit, he left Cleveland to work as an executive chef on the East Coast, where he got pulled into the farm-to-table movement and food-systems work that reshaped how he thought about the industry. He moved back home when COVID hit, settling next door to his parents; the family now farms mint tea leaves across six parcels on their street.
That same hyper-local sourcing shows up on Loiter's shelves. The cafe makes its own hot sauce, pickles and kimchi in-house, and stocks coffee, orange grits, donuts and other goods from fellow East Cleveland producers and small businesses.
For Samad, the goal isn't just selling coffee. It's giving people room, cup by cup, to imagine what's possible for their own neighborhood again.
— Adapted from Rhonda Crowder's article, “A Peek Into East Cleveland's Loiter Cafe & Marketplace,” originally published by Cleveland Magazine, Nov. 3, 2024.
