AKRON, Ohio – As its name suggests, Spring Hill Apartments sit on a grassy elevation, just west of downtown Akron, and from any of its balconies, day or night, summer or winter, one can take in a panoramic view of the city.
The closest thing Akron has to skyscrapers eke out over the treetops, and Barberton, a neighboring city, is just visible off to the south. The hum of traffic from State Route 59 and I-76 reverberates nearby.
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When it’s warm, a gentle breeze can provide the simplest dose of relief from the heat. On the Fourth of July, fireworks paint the sky, and the explosions echo off the walls of the balconies as though the rat-a-tat-tats are crackling through a surround-sound speaker.
Looking straight down, one can see East Avenue, where an old brick building with a white dilapidated marquee reads “Orders To Go,” and a sign out front boasts “Bob’s Hamburg, since 1931.” Some of the houses are nice, with fresh paint and well-kept yards. Others have cardboard instead of windows and piles of trash on the front porch.
Sliding glass doors separate each balcony from the living room and the rest of the apartment. The floors are carpeted and the walls white. In unit 602, a TV sits in the corner, up against the back wall, and a couch and coffee table anchor the space. Down the hallway are two bedrooms, one bigger than the other, complemented by one-and-a-half bathrooms. The gas stove is next to the sink, opposite the single-door refrigerator, on tile flooring in the kitchen.
From 1996 until 2003, this is where LeBron James and his mother, Gloria, lived – No. 602, Spring Hill Apartments. After they moved out, at least 15 people, not counting children, have paid rent and called that apartment home. Just like LeBron and Gloria, they slid open those glass doors, stood on the balcony, and dreamt of moving out.
The red brick mansion was built circa 1903, by a wealthy family of water wholesalers who owned it until the 1930s. That’s when it became the Kate Waller Barrett Home – a place for “girls from unhappy homes.” It was renamed “Spring Hill” to “combat the public perception it was a place for unwed mothers.”
Some 43 years later, a wrecking ball crashed into the mansion’s side, knocking it to the ground, and the Spring Hill Apartments were built on the same site through a $7.5 million grant from the federal government.
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Karen Landis was 23 and nearly broke when she moved into apartment 602 in 1980. Allegedly, so was the elevator most of the time. The laundry room on the first floor was constantly vandalized. And one evening after work, Landis realized she’d locked her keys in her apartment. Building managers had gone home for the night, so her only way into the sixth-floor apartment was to go through a neighbor’s door, onto their balcony, straddle the railing and set foot on her own balcony.
“I probably shouldn’t have done that,” Landis said. “Those were hard times, and (Spring Hill) wasn’t a real good place. I can tell you that.”
Landis found part-time work as a health aide at a nursing home. She met Larry Stallings. They married. She gave birth to the first of their three children. And then, in 1984, the year LeBron was born to Gloria James, Spring Hill’s rent increased. The Stallings looked for and found a house on Thornton Street, not far from the apartment.
“At that time we were all struggling,” she said. “We came through the struggle and Spring Hill was one of the places where we stopped along life’s process.”
Gloria James was 16 when she became pregnant with LeBron. They moved from couch to couch for years in dwellings around Akron – a lifestyle that caused LeBron to miss staggering amounts of school as a young child. His youth football coach eventually invited LeBron to stay with his family five nights a week and attend school, while Gloria pulled her life together.
The apartment she rented at Spring Hill was the place where LeBron moved back in with her.
She gave him a simple door key to the apartment, tied to an old shoestring.
“It was like a kid getting a brand new Mongoose bike for Christmas,” LeBron said. “Just having that stability, and it just felt like home.”
Key in hand, LeBron zoomed past the kitchen, into the living room and down the hallway, toward the bigger bedroom.
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He claimed it as his, and hung posters of Michael Jordan and Deion Sanders on the wall. Posters of Allen Iverson, Tracy McGrady, and Kobe Bryant would soon follow.
LeBron’s friends came to the apartment all the time in high school, even though, as LeBron is fond of pointing out, most lived in bigger places than he did.
Having stability in No. 602 while paving the way for bigger and better things wasn’t restricted to just LeBron and Gloria.
Brittany Davis shared a homeroom in middle school with LeBron for one year. They attended different high schools, and after LeBron and Gloria moved out of Spring Hill, Davis moved into apartment 602. “I was born and raised in the neighborhood, so I already knew that he lived (at Spring Hill),” said Davis, 36, now a working mother of two, who declined to share much more of her story because she said she was late for work.
Sharness Dowdy was trying to make ends meet when she moved into apartment 602 in 2008, at age 19, with her young son. It was their second apartment in two years – they lost the first, a small, one-bedroom unit on Copley Road, in a rough neighborhood in Akron – when Sharness, then 18, lost her job.
“As a teenager I was mostly homeless, living with a couple of relatives here and there,” Dowdy said.
When she lost the apartment on Copley Road, she was sleeping on a friend’s couch until something opened up at Spring Hill. While living there she worked two jobs — one in the morning at a nursing home, and another, at night, as a home health-care aide. She saved up enough over two years to move into a house on Hardesty Blvd. From there, she was able to use apartment 602 as a springboard to a more comfortable life.
She obtained her nursing assistant’s license and became a technician on the psychiatric unit at Akron General Hospital. Today, she is the owner of a small Akron restaurant called The Nite Owl and has two children.
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“Spring Hill was definitely a stepping stone for me, and it showed me where I didn’t want to be and didn’t want to stay in life,” she said. “I wanted to give my son so much more. Look at where I was and look at me now, I’m a lot better. I have my own business.”
While Dowdy and her eldest son, Davonte, lived at Spring Hill, LeBron and his friends filmed the documentary, “More Than a Game.” Both LeBron and Gloria visited the apartment, Dowdy said, and LeBron signed a basketball jersey for Davonte, then 3.
“They were really nice,” said Dowdy, 34. “LeBron was looking all in my refrigerator, in my freezer and stuff. Next thing I know I started getting shipments of pops and some Coke – I guess he was sponsored by Coca-Cola. I ended up getting a year’s supply of pop and juices sent to my house for me and my son.”
Sierra Allen moved into No. 602 in 2015. She had been staying at her sister’s place in Akron, but when she learned she was pregnant, she and the child’s father knew they needed a place of their own. The couple had a girl, and when Allen would come home from a long day of working a drive-thru window, she would rock her to sleep and wind down the evening sitting on the balcony. Today, she lives with three children in an apartment in Barberton, the suburb one can see to the south, on sunny days, from outside 602.
“You can just stand out there, just look at everything, think about life,” said Allen, 33. “Just (think about) your dreams, like trying to make it out. I’m actually really trying to make it out, that’s one of my biggest dreams that I still have today.”
Dillon Henderson was on his way to making it out, or so he thought. An all-city basketball player at Buchtel High in 2017, he graduated and headed to North Dakota to play college ball. He hated it and moved into apartment 602 late in 2017 to work and to train with the hope of breaking back into college hoops. He lived there for a year with his best friend and eventually enrolled in a junior college in Minnesota.
“Most of the time when we were on the balcony, we just talked about how are we gonna make it to the league, or how we’re gonna do this college stuff?” Henderson said. “‘I wonder if ’Bron has sat here and dreamed about all this stuff?’ We all said that.”
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In 2018, the woman who moved into 602 after Henderson left got into a fight with a neighbor and three of the neighbor’s friends over a boyfriend, according to police reports. They pushed their way into her apartment and beat her up. She was evicted from the property in May 2019.
The woman who lives in apartment 602 now, Amaya, is 21. On an unseasonably warm day last April, in the midst of the pandemic, she opened the front door of the unit, a fan on full blast in the living room.
“I get his mail sometimes. One was an American Eagle catalog, like a coupon book and the other was in a white envelope, it looked like it was for health insurance or something. I was thinking like, my mind is playing tricks on me. American Eagle? He can afford Gucci now, Prada.”
From age 15, Amaya said, she’d been hooked on methamphetamines, smoking weed, drinking. She ran with an older crowd.
Amaya was 18 and pregnant when a social worker in Akron tried to help her regroup, and among the items on the social worker’s list was finding Amaya an apartment. Spring Hill was taking applications, and Amaya could afford it, even if she didn’t have a job. Her first month of rent plus her phone bill came out to $38.
Eight days after getting the key to apartment 602, Amaya gave birth to a baby girl. But Amaya had drugs in her system at the time of the birth, she said, and was denied custody of the child, who now lives with her paternal grandmother.
On July 4, 2019, Amaya and her boyfriend sat on their balcony. If this apartment was where LeBron and Gloria came together, again, maybe it could be so for Amaya and her daughter someday.
“Anytime during the summer, but especially at that time, on the Fourth of July, dude you can see all over Akron,” she said. “And in that moment I’m like, ‘Oh my God,’ and me and my boyfriend, in that same moment, we’re like ‘what if LeBron James did this? How many times do you think he’s done this, or how many times do you think he looked out there like this?”
Today, LeBron owns several residences, all a world away from Spring Hill.
He lives with his wife and three children in the toney Brentwood community of Los Angeles, in a home with a wine cellar, cigar lounge, sound-proof theater, indoor-outdoor gym and sauna. He bought it for $23 million in 2017, while he was still playing for the Cavs. He also has a Mediterranean-style compound in Beverly Hills, which offers a breathtaking view of downtown and Hollywood.
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Lebron still owns the suburban Ohio mansion he had built not long after turning pro out of high school, the place where he moved after leaving apartment 602. It has six bedrooms, eight bathrooms, a recording studio and a barbershop. He can drop a few bars and get a close shave when he stays there for All-Star weekend.
But he holds so dearly to the seven years he and his mother spent at their apartment in Akron that he named his production company “SpringHill.”
“Like the Jeffersons said, move on up,” LeBron said last May, after a Lakers game, as he sat in a chair, thinking back on the memory of the day he and his mother left Spring Hill.
“The bitter side (of moving out) was leaving that community, leaving next-door neighbors that I’d seen all the time walking down the stairs or riding the elevator, or being outside when I walked to my car to go to school or ride my bike or things of that nature. But the sweet part of it was I knew I was going to put my mom in a situation that I had always dreamed about, and just getting her a place of even more security.
“That place will always be with me for the rest of my life.”
(Photo illustration: Wes McCabe / The Athletic. Photos: Lucy Nicholson / AFP via Getty Images; Joe Vardon.)
