Ann Little

Ann Halle Little, who piloted a Stearman bi-plane when she was 16, photographed architecture in fifty countries and published a popular history of her family's department store, The Halle Bros. Co. died January 17, 2012 at age 97. Ann Murphy Halle was born on the longest day of 1914, June 21, at her parents' summer home, Hallefarm, near Kirtland in Lake County, Ohio. She was the fifth child born to Samuel Horatio Halle, co-founder of The Halle Bros. Co., and his wife, Blanche Murphy Halle. Ann spent what she would later call an "idyllic childhood" at Hallefarm and the family's winter residence on Harcourt Drive in Cleveland Heights. During the 1930s, when department stores were closed on Saturdays and Sundays, Ann Halle accompanied her father on trips downtown when he worked on weekends in the ten-story, white terra cotta building on the triangle formed by Euclid Avenue and Huron Road in Playhouse Square. While her father worked in his office on the seventh floor, Ann busied herself operating an elevator in the dark, empty store - the beginning of what would be a lifetime love affair with her extended family of store employees. During the 1920s at Hallefarm, Ann's constant companion was Miss Maude Doolittle, who tutored the Halle children on a vast array of natural sciences including the names and personal habits of hundreds of migratory bird who summered with the Halle family in Penitentiary Glen on Hallefarm. During the winter, Miss Doolittle tutored Rose and Joseph P. Kennedy's children. Ann attended Laurel School, where she developed an interest in drawing, music, history and athletics. Upon graduation in 1931, Ann entered Smith College. By the time she was 16, she had followed her father's example and earned a pilot's license. During summer vacations from Smith, Ann explored the United States from the cockpit of a Stearman biplane, using as a map the thin ribbons of asphalt that criss-crossed the earth far below the plane. Following graduation from Smith in 1935, Ann and two girl friends sailed to Europe. During four months, she sketched, painted and photographed the great buildings of western Europe with pencil, pen and watercolors. The ways light illuminated the details of buildings -- from cathedrals to chalets -- provoked Ann's interest in architecture. On her return to the United States, she enrolled at the Cambridge School of Architecture in Massachusetts. Following her graduation in 1940, Ann went to work in the Boston studio of one of her professors, Holmes Perkins. There she met another young architectural graduate, Robert A. Little. In September, 1940, Miss Halle was designing a house in Cleveland and asked Little if he would help her survey the site. Three months later they were married in Cleveland. In June, 1941, Little enlisted in the armed services and served in various positions at Washington, D. C. Until 1945, the couple lived in Chevy Chase, Md., where their two sons, Sam and Revere Little, were born. The Littles returned to Cleveland in October, 1945. For a period of time they lived in a house on Nutwood Farm, the estate of Mrs. Lawrence Lanier Winslow, before Little designed their home in Pepper Pike, Ohio. Ann assisted her husband in his architectural practice, building and photographing models, designing interiors and furniture and photographing completed projects. For the next fifty years, the couple traveled the world on about twenty trips to more than fifty countries, travels which Ann recorded with more than 40, 000 photographs of architectural subjects. At the same time, Mrs. Little was one of three founders of the Ten-Thirty Gallery, Cleveland's first non-profit gallery devoted to exhibiting the work of contemporary Cleveland artists. She was also a trustee of Karamu House, Cleveland's nationally recognized African-American cultural center; the Cleveland Hearing and Speech Center; Laurel School; the Cleveland International Program; and the Jackson Laboratory, a biological research center, founded by her father-in-law, Clarence Little. In 1982, when Marshall Field's, who had acquired the Halle Bros. department stores in 1970, sold the stores to a liquidator, Ann Little revived a family tradition. Literally following in the footsteps of her mother and father, she returned to the store in Playhouse Square on the last day it was open and took the elevator to the tenth floor. Then circling each floor until she reached the "downstairs store" and the building engineers' cage in the basement, she personally thanked every employee in the building for their years of dedicated service to her family's enterprise and the City of Cleveland. Recognizing that the end of an historic Cleveland institution was at hand, employees began removing store records, employee diaries, newsletters, newspaper advertisements, memorabilia and thousands of photographs from the stores. Searching for a place to save the archive, they turned to Ann and her sister, the late Margaret Halle Sherwin who accepted cartons of material. Ann subsequently convinced her sister to form the Geranium Press and to commission and publish a history of her family' department store. In 1987, at a reception that filled the lobby of the State Theater in Playhouse Square, she autographed copies of Halle's, Memoirs of a Family Department Store for more than two thousand former employees and customers who had gathered to remember Cleveland's most popular department store. In the 1970s, Ann's family donated Hallefarm to Lake County which has preserved Penitentiary Glen as a public park and interpretive nature center. During the holiday season, former employees of the Halle Bros. Co. exhibit store memorabilia in the interpretive center, an annual event that draws thousands of people every year. Mrs. Little is predeceased by her husband, Cleveland architect Robert A. Little and survived by a son Sam R. Little and four grand-children, Christian, Andrews, John, and Robert. Her son Revere Little died in 1994. Those who wish may make a contribution in her name to The Jackson Laboratory, 600 Main St., Bar Harbor, ME 04609. A Memorial Service will be held at a date and time to be determined.


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