Owners of Cleveland's Historic Downtown May Building propose gutting it for Casino Parking

Image from the Wikipedia (public domain)

More about this building

OK, they were turned down by the city planning commission.

The building's owners, a Florida-based investor group, had hoped to create 734 parking spaces on four floors and remove the windows for ventilation.

An architect working on the project said that that building's ground floor would be maintained for retail, and that housing and offices were possible on the upper floors. But plans submitted to the city focused on the parking proposal, which was limited to the second through fifth floors.

The commission seemed shocked that with all the "investment", in the area, like the nearby, football, baseball and basketball arenas, the soon to be constructed massive convention center and casino, that the owners didn't see more value in renovating the building for any higher use.

Of course- creating massive single use facilities, specifically aimed at bringing in huge crowds to such a small area was almost certain to inspire just this kind of development. Already several other historic buildings had been torn down for casino parking.

My sad guess is that these neighboring developments, taken as a whole subtract, rather than add to the building's potential value for offices, or residential. How many people say, gee I want to have an office right by a casino (a small casino might be different) or a huge stadium? Fewer are likely to want to live there.

Even so, Cleveland, still has the bones of a great downtown-and this building is a very big part of that. There is also a tight and growing demand for residential space downtown. One can only hope this building can make it.

Cleveland's Playhouse Square: A Model for Economic Vitality--In The Wall Street Journal

In a time when arts organizations all over and Cleveland itself is hurting badly, Cleveland's main theater district thrives as an integrated real estate developer- extracting the value it's own theaters bring and building on it through property development.

"What makes PlayhouseSquare unique is that it not only renovated and manages the performance spaces—including the five historic theaters (the Ohio, the Palace, the State, the Allen and the Hanna) that otherwise would have been bulldozed for parking lots—but it also created a local development corporation that owns more than 1.6 million square feet of office and retail space inhabited by more than 3,000 workers in five buildings; developed the 205-room Wyndham Cleveland Hotel; and manages an additional million square feet of real estate throughout the Cleveland metropolitan area.

Its budget of more than $60 million puts it ahead of the better-endowed Cleveland Orchestra and Cleveland Museum of Art. Two-thirds of PlayhouseSquare's annual budget supports the performing arts. One-third is reinvested in its real-estate ventures.

"The real-estate business is a working endowment for the theaters," said Gina Vernaci, vice president of theatricals for PlayhouseSquare. "The stages feed the neighborhood's excitement and vice-versa," she added. "People who work down here now think about PlayhouseSquare as a campus."

Playhouse Square on Wikipedia

More Cleveland Public Art: Claes Oldenburg, Free Stamp

I really loved a lot of Cleveland's downtown architecture which tends towards, Classical, High Modernism, WPA era and grand Victorian (with a good dose of Brutalism) Still, there is something bit overwhelming about the scale-perhaps a dose of humor would work well?

Claes Oldenburg's Huge Free Rubber Stamp makes a perfect connection between the formal downtown and the Rock Hall.

From the Artist's website.

Apparently, this little shot of freedom wasn't an easy addition to make.IMHO, the final result is beyond fabulous.

"Our design made it necessary for us to select a short word to be "reproduced" by our stamp -- four letters at most. Coosje chose "free," a word with multiple implications, comparable to "liberty," the word held aloft by the female figure atop the monument across the street. The word was related paradoxically to its compressed position, and could not be read, only imagined by studying the edges of the letters.

The Free Stamp was proposed and approved, and work began on its fabrication. Halfway through, however, the company changed ownership, becoming British Petroleum; as a result the sculpture was abruptly canceled. There were protests in the city and eventually we were offered alternative sites by a committee to preserve the sculpture. At first, the Free Stamp's close connection to its original site seemed too strong, but we then realized that a stamp has no fixed position and is just as often seen lying down as it is standing up. One could imagine that the Free Stamp had been picked up and thrown, landing on its side in Willard Park, one of the sites offered by the city, in view of the British Petroleum skyscraper. The new position also had the important advantage of fully revealing the word "free," radiant in its pink hue, though in reverse."

Read more about the artist couple, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen.