They remember the Holiday Tree Festival and its spectacular displays. They remember The Depot Restaurant and its Choo Choo Wheels Pasta dish. They remember New Year’s Eve and wedding nights spent at the hotel with the round rooms.
And of course, they remember the warm oatmeal cookies (with one raisin in the center).
The news that local partners plan to buy Quaker Square, the former oats mill-turned-hotel and shopping center, triggered a wave of memories from locals. Built in the late 1800s after the original plant burned down in 1886, the facility served as the Quaker Oats factory for decades. On April 1, 1975, it reopened as a hotel and a retail and dining space. The University of Akron purchased the downtown complex in 2007. It was most recently used as student housing during the pandemic.
Kyle Craven, Joe Scaccio and Steve Dimengo, the local business partners under contract to purchase Quaker Square, have big plans for the six buildings, including reopening the hotel. The sale is expected to close this month.
When Signal Akron asked readers to share their Quaker Square memories, we received more than 120 submissions.
“I purchased an aquarium at a shop there, and spent literally hours eating cookies, wandering around, and marveling at the old factory remnants on display,” wrote Charles Welsh.
“I was one of the people who helped clean out the basement to make the [Tavern in the Square Restaurant] that I then worked at when it was completed,” wrote Cathy Kotouc. “The best thing was watching the stained glass pieces being put in place.”
Signal Akron reached out to several people who shared memories about Quaker Square. Here are some of their stories.
Friday nights at Santa Fe Station
For more than four decades, Linda Sepesy considered herself a “closet dancer.” She loved to dance and took ballet lessons as a kid. But dancing in public? Never.
That changed in January 1993 when she was 45 and recently divorced. Some friends invited her to go dancing at Santa Fe Station, a new country western place at Quaker Square. Sepesy said yes.
“I think I realized at that point in my life that if I was ever going to do anything like that, the time was now,” she said. “We had so much fun there that all of those fears and feelings of not being good enough to get out there were just out the window. Put your feet on the floor, listen to the music, and start dancing and smile and have a good time. And that’s what we did.”
Sepesy visited Quaker Square numerous times for shopping and “the great oatmeal cookies.” But her memories of Santa Fe Station are what stick with her. Like the time she won a dance competition with her future husband, Harvey Rios.
“We didn’t know what we were doing, but we had a great time,” Sepesy said. “They gave us points for enthusiasm, and we won. Couple number 13 on Friday the 13th.”
At 77, Sepesy is still dancing, but these days she prefers the ballroom variety. After Rios died in 2002, she married Joe Sepesy, another avid dancer.
Many of the friends she made at Santa Fe Station are still in her life. She’s excited that Quaker Square could once again become a place where people gather.
“It will come back, but it won’t be exactly as it was. It shouldn’t be exactly as it was,” she said. “It needs a new life, a new vibe, a new generation to go there and appreciate it.”
‘Akron needed something that was really different’
Debbie Lucas still thinks about the peach cobbler at Schumacher’s Restaurant.
For her, the best part of the cobbler was the middle. Between the sweet, crunchy top and the juicy peach filling was a layer she describes as similar to bread pudding. It took Lucas a while, but she was eventually able to duplicate the recipe.
“Even now when I make it at home, it just takes me and my husband back to think of those times,” she said.
Her husband, Jim Lucas, agreed, with a caveat.
“The peach cobbler was fantastic. Wasn’t as good as the eggs Benedict, but the peach cobbler was great,” he said.
Debbie and Jim spent their wedding night at the hotel at Quaker Square in one of its famous round rooms. After they married, the couple often visited Schumacher’s after church for its Sunday brunch. Back in those days, Debbie said, brunch was a new and exciting concept.
Debbie and Jim visited Quaker Square often throughout the years, from lunch dates when they both worked downtown, to trips to see the Christmas trees with her son when he was young. But as businesses at Quaker Square closed and the Holiday Tree Festival moved to the John S. Knight Center, Debbie said she and her family eventually stopped visiting the once-popular downtown destination.
“It was a shame that it went away,” she said. “It was just different. And Akron needed something that was really different. … It was a big deal for us, because there wasn’t hardly anything around that [was] like that at the time.”
Debbie and Jim don’t visit downtown Akron as often as they used to, but if Quaker Square reopens, that could change, she said.
“Since we’ve retired, we hunt for things to do,” she said. “Why should we go elsewhere if we could have something like that here?”
Celebrity sightings at the Hilton
Donna Joseph could probably write a book about her time waitressing at Schumacher’s in the mid-1980s. At the time, she was 26, and the Hilton Hotel at Quaker Square was a celebrity hotspot.
Joseph had waitressed before, but working at the hotel restaurant was a new experience.
“It was a whole different world, because you have people from all over the world coming in there, people that I would never have met had I not worked there,” she said.
She recounts some of the famous people she met while working at the restaurant: members of the Kenley Players theater troupe, singer Debby Boone, the cast of “WKRP in Cincinnati,” actors Robert Urich and Dick Gautier, comedian Rip Taylor, game show host Bert Convy and the country group Alabama.
She even went out with a few of them, including a lunch and sailing date with game show host Michael Young. Off the clock, of course.
“I got invited to parties with them. I mean, unofficially, we weren’t supposed to go, but I was on my own time. They’d say, ‘Hey, after you get off work, if you’d like to we’re having a party here. Feel free to crash it,’” Joseph recalled.
It wasn’t all fun, though. She recalled one hotel guest, a wealthy businessman from California (who shall remain unnamed, she said) who told her he was looking for a date and asked if she was free.
“I said, ‘Sir, I work here. I work at the hotel,’” she recalled. “And he proceeded to unleash one of the most foul questions I’ve ever been asked.”
Like others, Joseph is nostalgic for the old Quaker Square. She hopes the new owners will restore it to at least some of its former glory. When asked if she would visit a new Quaker Square, she didn’t hesitate.
“Oh absolutely!” she said. “Hey, I know all the nooks and crannies down the back!”
‘I remember everything’
The last time Tony Falcone visited Quaker Square was in 2022.
He was in town from Savannah, Georgia, and staying at the BLU-Tique Hotel downtown. When he stopped by the complex, a group was packing up the space. For several months, Curated Storefront converted a floor in the massive complex into three art galleries.
The group offered to let him walk through the area, where Falcone worked in the mid-’80s while attending the University of Akron.
“I remembered everything,” said Falcone, who now lives in Medina. “There were banquet tables set up in there with skirting on them and stuff like they had an event recently. It was just wild, all the old furniture. It was very fun walking through there.”
Falcone started working at Quaker Square when he was 22. He worked at several restaurants there, including Schumacher’s and The Depot. He recalled the many celebrities who stayed at the hotel including Madonna, John Cougar Mellencamp and The Moody Blues.
When the opera singer Luciano Pavarotti was in town for a concert at the Richfield Coliseum, he stayed at the hotel.
“They sent me to a mall to buy a bathing suit for one of the people in Pavarotti’s band that wanted to go swimming in the pool, and he didn’t have a bathing suit,” Falcone said. “Evian water had just come out, if you can believe that. That was the first wave of bottled water. I had to go find Evian water. They had to bring a piano in and take it up the elevator, put it in his room.”
Falcone still keeps in touch with many of the people he met working at Quaker Square. All of them are talking about the recent developments around the complex.
“It was a great job,” he said of his time there. “I was young, and that was pretty much my first career, so it was a big deal to me.”
‘It was a great run’
Cathy and Gary Sherwood opened their first store at Quaker Square in 1975.
They would stay for more than 20 years years.
Cathy and Gary owned three businesses throughout their run at Quaker Square: Candles and Collectibles, Sherwood Florist and the Christmas Shop.
In the early years, business boomed at Quaker Square. On the weekends, it was tough to find a parking spot, Cathy said. The holiday season brought large crowds to the shops, especially at the couple’s Christmas store.
“You couldn’t bag [merchandise] fast enough,” Gary said.
In the ’90s, foot traffic began to drop off. By that time, they had opened an ice cream store in Hartville and Gary was working at Goodyear. He attributes part of the decline in visitors to the Holiday Tree Festival moving to the John S. Knight Center. As more restaurants and bars moved in, retail businesses moved out, he said.
In 1995, Cathy and Gary followed suit.
“So we finally said, ‘Well, that’s enough. We’re not making a profit now. Time to get out,” Gary said. “But other than that, it was a great run.”
The couple made many memories while working together at Quaker Square. In the early days, Gary did his candlemaking at home and then brought them into the store. At that point, he’d take over so Cathy could go home. But one day, he was particularly late getting to the store, and Cathy was not happy about it.
“I just kept putting her off and putting her off, and she wanted to know what the hell I was doing,” he said.
The task that held him up?
“I had gone and gotten her engagement ring,” he said. “So I just tossed it on the counter then and said, ‘Well? You spoiled my surprise.’”
The couple both laughed as they recounted the story. They’ll celebrate 49 years of marriage in October.