Walk Kenmore Boulevard on a weekday afternoon and you will hear it before you see it. Drums thump through an exposed brick wall on the corner where Cook's Hardware used to sit. A guitar gets tuned somewhere behind the counter at Lay's Guitar Shop. The Rialto Theatre marquee, rebuilt to look the way it did a century ago, hangs over the sidewalk like a promise the block intends to keep.
Everyone who has lived near Kenmore for more than a few years already knows the boulevard's nickname. It has been called Akron's Music Row since at least 2017, when a cluster of recording studios, two guitar shops, and a live venue gave a struggling commercial strip its first real identity in decades. What almost nobody notices, because it happens slowly and one storefront at a time, is that the businesses actually opening on the boulevard right now have nothing to do with music at all. And the person who built the anchor venue said, on the record, that this was exactly what needed to happen.
The Cluster That Earned the Name
The music identity is not marketing spin. Lay's Guitar Shop has operated on Kenmore Boulevard since Virgil Lay opened it in 1962, repairing and building instruments for players who went on to work with Joe Walsh, Jimmy Page, and The Black Keys. Lay also founded SIT Strings, still headquartered a couple miles off the boulevard. The city later renamed the alley behind the shop Virgil Lay Way in his honor.
A few doors down, brothers Seth and Nate Vaill spent four years renovating the long-shuttered Rialto movie theater, reopening it in 2015 as a live venue with two recording studios attached. By the time Kenmore Neighborhood Alliance director Tina Boyes was giving interviews about the district a few years later, she was counting six recording studios and two guitar shops within a few blocks of each other, all feeding musicians and gear back and forth across the same stretch of sidewalk.
That density is real and it is unusual. Most Akron commercial corridors have one or two music-adjacent businesses scattered among everything else. Kenmore Boulevard has a working ecosystem: shops that repair the instruments, studios that record the songs, and a theater that puts the finished product on a stage.
What the Man Who Built the Anchor Venue Actually Asked For
Here is the detail that gets lost in every retelling of the Music Row story. Seth Vaill, the person most responsible for turning the Rialto into the district's centerpiece, was blunt about what the boulevard still needed, and it was not more music infrastructure.
"I want to walk along this boulevard and see people on Kenmore Boulevard at 10:30 at night. I don't want people to leave our place and then just leave the boulevard."
He said this while talking about wanting more bars and restaurants nearby, not more studios or stages. A concentration of recording equipment does not keep a sidewalk occupied after a show lets out. Somewhere for people to sit down and stay does.
Three New Storefronts, Zero Songs
Look at what has actually filled Kenmore Boulevard's empty storefronts since then and Vaill's wish list starts checking itself off.
- Whiskers & Wine Cat Lounge, opened in July 2023 at 932 Kenmore Blvd by Akron native Nicole Farrell, became Ohio's first cat café and wine bar. Visitors pay a small cover to spend time with adoptable rescue cats through Farrell's nonprofit, Just Cats Rescue, while sipping coffee, tea, or a mocktail in the café area up front.
- Old 97, a speakeasy-style bar built inside a former trolley depot, has been owned since 2021 by a couple who took on the building after it passed between owners for decades. It is the kind of low-key, easy-to-miss spot that Vaill's after-show crowd would actually walk to.
- Rita's Italian Ice, the seasonal dessert franchise, announced this spring that its fifth Northeast Ohio location is coming to 1060 Kenmore Blvd, citing the neighborhood's momentum as the reason for choosing the site.
None of these businesses record an album, sell a guitar string, or book a band. All three are exactly the category Vaill said the boulevard was missing: places to land after the music stops.
Where the Two Halves of the Boulevard Actually Meet
The music side and the non-music side are not operating on separate tracks. The Kenmore Neighborhood Alliance built its event calendar specifically to push foot traffic between both.
Kenmore First Fridays, the alliance's summer series, turns the boulevard into a closed-off strip of live music, food vendors, and family activities, drawing crowds that spill past the Rialto's doors and into whatever else happens to be open that night. In December, the Rialto hosts its own Winter Break Music Festival, a two-day mini-fest built around the venue's newer Living Room stage, timed specifically because organizers noticed people missing outdoor summer festivals once the weather turned. And the annual BLVD Block Party, anchored by the Kenmore Cowbell 7K road race and a parade, has drawn crowds the alliance has put at close to 2,000 people in a single day.
Those events are the proof of concept for Vaill's original complaint. A festival weekend already pulls people onto the boulevard for the music. What determines whether they stay past 9 p.m. is whether there is a cat lounge, a speakeasy, or an ice counter open when the show ends.
Why This Matters If You Already Live Here
None of this changes what Kenmore Boulevard sounds like on a Tuesday afternoon. The studios are still there. Lay's is still repairing instruments. The Rialto still books touring acts most weeks. What has changed is what happens on either side of a show, and that shift has been underway for about three years now, since Whiskers & Wine opened its doors in 2023.
It is also happening alongside a larger wave of investment in the neighborhood that has nothing to do with the boulevard's storefronts. A few blocks away, Akron Public Schools broke ground in May 2026 on a new $76 million K-8 campus that will replace both Pfeiffer Elementary and the Miller South School for the Performing Arts, built on the site of the old Kenmore High School after the district tore the original building down in 2025. It is expected to open in August 2028. Combined with the boulevard's own slow diversification, it is a neighborhood that is filling in from more than one direction at once, not just adding another band to the bill.
If you already live within walking distance of Kenmore Boulevard, the practical takeaway is simple. The reason to walk down there on a random weeknight used to be checking a show schedule. Now it might just be the cat lounge, or Old 97, or, soon, a line for Italian ice. That is a small thing. It is also exactly the thing the man who built the district's anchor venue said the street was missing.
If you are watching what is happening in neighborhoods like Kenmore because you are thinking about where you might live next, that is a conversation worth having directly. Nancy Bartlebaugh and the Bartlebaugh Team know these blocks the way only people who work here every day can. Let's Connect.
