Walk through the doors on Superior Avenue and look up. Five stories of iron and glass rise above you, sunlight pouring through an ornate skylight, Victorian-era balconies tracing the interior like layers of a wedding cake. This is the Cleveland Arcade, opened in 1890 and still standing—one of the finest surviving examples of 19th-century European-style shopping arcade architecture in America.

The building represents Cleveland at its most confident. During the Gilded Age, when the city’s industrial prosperity seemed limitless, civic leaders built commercial spaces to rival the great arcades of Milan and Paris. The iron framework, the glass roof flooding the interior with natural light, the multilevel galleries creating spectacular vertical drama—all of it announced that Cleveland deserved architecture matching its ambitions.

By the time Masumi photographed it in 1986, the Arcade had just completed a major restoration. The building had faced uncertain years—downtown retail declining, maintenance deferred, the future of such grand spaces unclear in an era of suburban malls. But adaptive reuse saved it: hotel rooms on the upper floors, retail maintained below. The photograph captures a preservation success story, the moment when creative reuse demonstrated that historic commercial architecture could survive.

Masumi’s panorama stretches nearly six feet across, capturing both the 300-foot length of the passage connecting Superior to Euclid Avenues and the vertical drama of the atrium. Her collage technique collapses this complex three-dimensional space into a single composition—the fragmentary images suggesting how the eye actually moves through such architecture, looking up and down and across, never able to take it all in at once.