Cleveland Development Thread

[Soda]

Old, old Columbus bridge being taken out to make way for a new bridge.

Update: Second pic is the old bridge sitting on a barge getting towed away.

 

[MoFlo]

Nothing too groundbreaking, but more info on Phase II of the casino.

The last couple of lines are interesting.

CLEVELAND - Let there be no doubt Cleveland will be getting a second casino, said owner Dan Gilbert.

“Phase II is absolutely going to happen and we're more excited about that than Phase I,” Gilbert said. He emphasized the opening of the Phase I Horseshoe in the Higbee Building enabled them time to study the market, and learn what customers want and don’t want.

“It was very important for us to learn what happened in Phase I,” he said.

“If you look at Caesars Total Reward database, those are the amount of people who have signed up throughout Caesars system who are in Ohio and surrounding areas, there's a percentage of them who have come to Horseshoe and there's a larger percentage that still would come more often if a casino had different kinds of things.

“You know Phase I doesn't have the kinds of amenities that a full-blown, from-the-ground-up casino would have, so there's a big part of that marketplace,” said Gilbert.

That’s why the Phase II casino will have a different feel than Phase I.

“We want to make it the best it possibly can be,” he said. “That area along the river there, the entertainment center, Gateway, I mean it really gives an opportunity for you to do something much, much better than just putting a casino with four walls in there.”

Gilbert said they are in engineering and design talks now.

Looking back on the Horseshoe Cleveland’s first year Gilbert labeled it a success even though numbers were lower than what state analysts initially projected.

“It’s definitely a profitable casino and we're happy with it for sure, but more important is what we're learning. We're learning a lot,” he said. “For me, it was more important to understand, the learning of what this market's all about and what long term is going to work.”

Those numbers were impacted as well by the roughly 800 Internet cafes that popped up in recent years across the state. The Ohio attorney general said those sites had more slot machines than the state’s four casinos and two racinos combined.

Those gambling operations received a boost Wednesday when the Ohio State Senate passed legislation that will essentially eliminate the Internet cafe industry in the state.

Gilbert also said a skywalk connecting the parking garage to the Horseshoe will be coming.

“That is something that was absolutely needed and wanted by our customers,” he said.

When asked about Forest City’s reported plans to sell off some of their assets surrounding the casino Gilbert said there would be interest on his part.

“We're always looking for properties and always open to look at properties that are around any of our assets to see if it makes sense if it fits in,” he said. “I don't have any detail on exactly what pieces at this point."

http://www.newsnet5.com/dpp/news/local_news/cleveland_metro/Cavs-owner-Dan-Gilbert-says-design-work-continues-on-Clevelands-second-casino

And on a related subject. This isn't development per se, but something that development obviously had a hand in bringing in:

CLEVELAND - The popular World Series of Poker tour is making stops at the new casinos in Cincinnati and Cleveland.

The franchise's newly announced tour includes a Sept. 19-30 stop at the Horseshoe Casino Cincinnati, and then March 20-31, 2014, at the Horseshoe Casino Cleveland.

Now the casinos will have to figure out how to accommodate the players and the crowd.

The year-old Cleveland casino was bumped from the World Series of Poker tour this year after the Ohio Casino Control Commission rejected plans to play in the ballroom at the adjacent Renaissance Cleveland Hotel.

The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer reports that Caesars Entertainment, which manages and holds a stake in the two casinos, also owns the World Series of Poker.

http://www.newsnet5.com/dpp/news/local_news/cleveland_metro/world-series-of-poker-tour-coming-to-horseshoe-casino-cleveland

 

[Soda]

29 million bucks was given to the "Opportunity Corridor" project from the State. This money is for planning an extension of I-490 that ends in the University Circle area... Not right in there, but near it..

Opportunity Corridor project in Cleveland gets $29 million for planning

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The Opportunity Corridor project has received $29 million from the state for full-bore planning.

The $324 million project would link Interstate 490 with University Circle by way of a 3 1/2-mile boulevard through Cleveland's East side neighborhoods.

Money for the long-sought project is starting to fall into place. Community leaders back the plan as a way to move traffic more quickly to the Cleveland Clinic, University Hospitals and other large employers in University Circle.

They also believe the four- to six-lane boulevard, featuring multiple intersections, will draw development to some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods.

The $29 million isn’t new. The Ohio Department of Transportation, working with an advisory committee on big-budget projects, targeted the money a while ago for Opportunity Corridor, said ODOT spokeswoman Amanda Lee.

The state Controlling Board voted Monday to give ODOT the authority to send the money along.

“This money will keep the project moving,’’ Lee said in an email.

The money will be added to an existing, $5.3 million contract with HNTB Ohio, Inc., which has done preliminary engineering and an environmental-impact study.

The new funds will pay HNTB to finish the environmental documents and craft detailed plans for the road’s layout and construction.

Among long-time supporters of the project is State Rep. Armond Budish, whose office announced the release of state money.

Opportunity Corridor “will better integrate the local streets with the larger roadways, making the area a catalyst for property development, neighborhood investment and jobs,” Budish, a Beachwood Democrat, said in a news release.

The project has a long way to go. Federal transportation officials still must approve the plan. And multiple sources must deliver large chunks of funding.

Cuyahoga County Council is considering an $11 million investment, which would help leverage $44 million for the project’s first stage, widening and rebuilding East 105th Street from Chester to Quincy avenues.

Cleveland plans to invest $12 million. The city and the Ohio Department of Transportation’s Cleveland-area district are applying for $215 million from the Ohio Turnpike and Infrastructure Commission.

Opportunity Corridor is among multiple, competing requests across northern Ohio for turnpike money. The turnpike will soon issue $1 billion in bonds to finance big road projects in northern Ohio, backed by toll increases.

Opportunity Corridor could be done by 2019 if funds fall into place. The plan has broad support but some opposition too.

Some rancor is expected because the state would buy and demolish 90 homes, businesses and other structures in the project’s path.

Critics believe the $324 million is better spent repairing roads that serve University Circle and bolstering options like transit and cycling.

http://www.cleveland.com/metro/inde...roject_in_cle.html#incart_2box#incart_m-rpt-2

 

[TheNewEra]

CLEVELAND - The Ameritrust Tower and the Cleveland Trust Rotunda is in the process of getting a major facelift and renovation.
Located at the corner of East 9th Street and Euclid Avenue, the buildings are being transformed into a modern-meets-historical luxury hotel called The Metropolitan Hotel at The 9, a high-end urban residence. It will open in the fall of 2014.

Also slated to be housed in the complex is the Adega restaurant, featuring modern Mediterranean cuisine with downtown's largest outdoor dining area, a theater called The Alex, a banquet room near the vault, 12,000 feet of meeting and event space, an art gallery and a Heinen's grocery store.
The complex will be setting a few records once it is complete. For instance, the Alex theater will use cutting-edge technology in the form of 3D image projection, the first in Cleveland. It will alos house the tallest residential building in Cleveland and the outdoor patio will be the city's largest.

The men in charge are the Geis brothers, Greg and Fred, co-owners of Geis Companies. They are very proud and thrilled that their prized dream for Cleveland is coming to fruition.
"Having the ability to participate and make it happen is something that our organization embraced,” Greg Geis said. “And we're doing it because we want it to be an iconic property for 100 years from today. So we've taken a long-term approach to the vision and have invested and we put our money where our mouth is."

http://www.newsnet5.com/dpp/news/lo...st-Rotunda-gives-tour-of-renovations-progress

 

[MoGottiFor3]

[video=youtube;Ii0pP0tuP0g]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ii0pP0tuP0g&sns=tw[/video]

 

[davedugan43]

Phase II of the Flats East Bank renovations break ground in Spring 2014.

If it gets even close to resembling these pictures, it's gonna be an awesome step in the right direction.

 

[The Oi]

Looks like Navy Pier.

 

[Mac]

Looks pretty damn good

 

[davedugan43]

I mean, obviously Lake Erie is not going to resemble the Atlantic around Jamaica, but the rest is definitely attainable.

 

[TheNewEra]

Thoughts?

San Francisco is a great American city. And Google is a great American company. But the two are having some trouble getting along. Last week, anti-eviction protestors surrounded one of Google’s private shuttle buses, which transport employees from their urban homes to the company’s suburban campus, and staged a phony incident in which an alleged Googler unleashed his contempt for the city’s lower orders. Then, just in time for the backlash to the anti-Google backlash, prominent local startup CEO Greg Gopman delivered the real deal in the form of a Facebook rant decrying the San Francisco poor as, in essence, uppity. In other cities, Gopman wrote, “the lower part of society keep to themselves” and “realize it’s a privilege to be in the civilized part of town and view themselves as guests.”

With tensions running high, perhaps a breakup is in order.

The Bay Area is sick and tired of the antics of entitled techies, and the nouveaux riches want a place where they’ll be appreciated. It’s time for federal authorities to step in and move the show someplace else. Cleveland, say.

After all, every big city has its share of obnoxious protesters and obnoxious overclassers. What makes the tensions in the Bay Area especially extreme is the fearsome competition over scarce resources—specifically housing and office space.

The influx of money, young people, and business investment into Silicon Valley hasn’t led to a construction boom and the urbanization of the area. Instead, the local towns continue to insist on strict, suburban-style zoning that essentially rules out new housing supply. Nor are city officials in San Francisco interested in rezoning to allow for more population in a city that’s currently only about half as dense as Brooklyn. The mass transit system, likewise, strains to cope with current demands (a situation not helped by the cultural gaps between the tech set and other transit stakeholders). Local officials are unable or unwilling to reform Caltrain in a way that would make it useful regional transit, and again, Valley officials won’t zone for the creation of giant office towers in downtown Mountain View and Palo Alto that would make more transit-oriented development workable.

So instead of the tech boom leading to broadly based prosperity, it leads to private buses and skyrocketing house prices. If I called the shots, I would change these policies. But if that’s not going to happen, a divorce is the second-best solution.

The problem is that it’s not going to happen on its own. Large tech companies like to be where the highest concentration of skilled tech workers is. Entrepreneurs want to be where the venture capitalists are. Venture capitalists want to be near both the skilled workers who can staff new firms and the established firms who may buy the companies. People with skills want to go where the venture capital and the employers are. Individual people or small firms can and do leave, in search of cheaper houses or other amenities, but in doing so they give up substantial benefits of agglomeration. And when they do leave, they tend to scatter—some to Austin, some to New York, a few to the Boston area, Zappos is even in Las Vegas—rather than building a new hub.

What’s needed is for a critical mass—say Google and Apple and Facebook and Twitter—to move all at once, to the same place, thus immediately creating a new tech hub. With the startups and VC firms left behind, Silicon Valley and San Francisco will still be a vibrant industry hub. But the departure of thousands of highly compensated employees of four tech giants will provide a great deal of relief to the local real estate market.

Meanwhile, our New Tech Metropolis will have enough local engineering talent and acquisition money that it will inevitably develop a startup scene of its own.

The only question is where? All you need is a city that has bigger problems than douche-y Facebook posts, creating plenty of room for local housing investment to become a win-win rather than an engine of displacement. Cities such as Buffalo, N.Y., or Pittsburgh come to mind, although unlike Detroit and Cleveland, they lack a major airport. Plans to save Detroit, however, are a bit cliché at this point, and I worry that any tech hub you tried to build there would naturally drift over to Ann Arbor, Mich., anyway. But Cleveland’s got plenty of affordable housing, plenty of available office space, flights to every important North American city, and even its own Federal Reserve bank.

The relocation of big tech companies to the North Coast would immediately create new business and employment opportunities in terms of high-end dining, fancy coffee, and other Bay Area amenities but without crowding out existing local businesses. Cleveland’s local tech companies would stand a better chance of getting investment, and over time, some employees of the big four relocators would leave and launch their own startups or VC firms. The Bay Area economy, meanwhile, will cool down considerably without negatively impacting real living standards for most people, since much of the lost activity will simply translate into cheaper real estate prices. Firms left behind will even find it easier to expand.

Obviously, this would be much more laborious than simply building more Silicon Valley where it already exists. But if the politics of increased density are too difficult, relocation really is the next best thing. The Greenhouse Tavern is delicious, LeBron might be coming back to the Cavaliers, and there’s even a casino conveniently located right downtown. Throw in a few technology giants, and it could be the next great American city. Get excited, Googlers—you’re gonna love it.

http://www.slate.com/articles/techn...a_tech_hub_in_a_place_where_it_s_welcome.html

 

[Soda]

Update on the East Bank project....

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The developers behind the Flats East Bank project expect to break ground within weeks on their first residential building, the centerpiece of the waterfront neighborhood's second phase.

The Cleveland City Planning Commission and a downtown-focused design review committee gave the thumbs-up this week to the footprint for an eight-story, 243-unit apartment building facing the Cuyahoga River. The Wolstein Group and Fairmount Properties have applied for a building permit for the foundation and needed the commission's approval before the city would sign off.

Adam Fishman of Fairmount, which is developing the project with Scott and Iris Wolstein, said the team is on the verge of closing on financing for phase two. Fishman wouldn't discuss the details, but the final package is sure to include a blend of public and private money.

The $275 million first phase of the Flats project sits east of West 10th Street and comprises the Ernst & Young Tower, an Aloft hotel, a fitness center, restaurants and a parking garage. The second phase will be anchored by the large, curving apartment building, where six residential floors will perch atop 10 to 15 ground-floor restaurants and businesses and largely concealed second-story parking.

Flats East apartment elevation Jan 2014
View full size
An elevation plan shows the riverfront face of the planned apartment building at the Flats East Bank project in downtown Cleveland.
Dimit Architects

Phase two plans also show a handful of freestanding restaurants and entertainment venues, including Panini's and Toby Keith's I Love This Bar & Grill. Those buildings, and a long-discussed riverfront boardwalk, would open by June 2015.

A second, lower-rise office building north of Front Street would lag the apartments, with financing that hinges on pre-leasing. Fishman would not identify potential office tenants, but he said the building might range from 130,000 to 175,000 square feet.

"We've just finished leasing 425,000 square feet in a location where many said we couldn't lease a single square foot," Fishman said of the swift movement of office tenants to the E&Y Tower. "We're extraordinarily bullish on our prospects."

Don Frantz, a consultant working with the developers, said the apartment floor plans call for 175 one-bedroom units, 61 two-bedroom units and seven three-bedroom units. Fishman would not provide specific rent figures but said the building will charge rates "near the high end" of the market.

A small portion of the building -- less than 20 percent -- could be corporate suites, which companies rent to house traveling executives or short-term hires.

The building would hold 246 parking spaces, all reserved for residents. The project already includes several public-parking areas, in the phase one garage or on surface lots, and sits next to the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority's waterfront rail line.

Frantz and representatives from Dimit Architects showed a few renderings at public meetings this week, but they cautioned that elements of the design still might change. One high-profile feature stood out: Large "Flats East Bank" lettering, on top of the apartment building, modeled on iconic displays like the Domino Sugars sign in Baltimore.

"This is a high-quality project," said Jack Bialosky, Jr., an architect and member of the downtown design review committee. "It's everything that we want to come here. That it has a sandwich of retail, then parking, then residential makes it extraordinarily difficult to accomplish. And it looks great to me."

 

[Pick6]

^ do you have a link for this article?

 

[Huber.]

Cleveland's failed bicentennial bridge lighting project doesn't bode well for PlayhouseSquare's giant chandelier:

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Cleveland's bright ideas always seem to dim.

PlayhouseSquare's plan to hang a giant crystal chandelier above Euclid Avenue in the theater district got me thinking about a couple other projects that were supposed to be something iconic and withstand the test of time.

It's too early to predict the chandelier's future. The 20-foot-tall, 8,000-pound lighting fixture is the centerpiece of a larger $16 million public-private project to improve PlayhouseSquare's streetscape and create a signature display in the district.

The chandelier is being rolled out with the same long-term vision as other bright ideas of the past. The first to come to mind is the Flats bridge lighting display -- a project intended to forever commemorate the city's bicentennial in 1996.

There's never been anything permanent about it. Little of the original lighting plan exists today.

This $3.9 million project – paid for with public and private funds – lighted eight bridges in Flats, turning the spans red, blue, purple, orange and green. And each bridge had a different lighting scheme.

At the time, the bridge lights were billed as lasting images representing our rich past and future. The bridges would be captured on posters and post cards for years to come, leaders thought. After throwing the switch on July 4 weekend of that year, they vowed to keep the bridges lighted for the next century.

But the lights didn't stay shining for even a decade, failing due to unforeseen developments and multiple glitches -- vibrations, water and poor set-up.

Today, the Flats bridges are either lighted by a mix of white lights, or they sit dark. I tried to find out what remains of the original installations.

The City of Cleveland is responsible for the lights on seven of the eight bridges. Officials acknowledged in 2000 that they lacked the equipment to reach high places and replace bulbs and perform maintenance. In 2012, the city, through the public utilities department, was preparing to hire contractor to repair and maintain the lights. (The city says a contractor was hired and work has been underway since May of 2013 to restore flood lights on some of the bridges.)

Cuyahoga County manages the Detroit-Superior Bridge, the eighth bridge in the project. With its large arches, the bridge was supposed to be the centerpiece of the lighting scheme. But bridge renovations and nearby development confounded efforts to keep the lights aglow. A county spokesman was still looking into the issue on Friday. I'll update the column when the county's response is available. (County spokesman Richard Luchette says a 2007 state law shifted responsibility for maintenance of the bridge from the county to the city/state.)

Other examples of forgotten and forlorn projects are all over town. The Detroit-Superior Bridge actually has the dubious distinction of having two ideas fade. In 2004, the bridge was narrowed to make way for a raised sidewalk for bikers, joggers and walkers. Federal grant money paid for most of the $2.8 million cost. Art displays that included devices to measure traffic vibrations, wind, sun and water temperature in the river below – were added to the sidewalk.

Do you know of a public art display or outdoor project that has been neglected after lots of fanfare? Share your observation below.
Cleveland Public Art, now Land Studio, directed the project with the hope of making the bridge a safe and unique promenade. The Cleveland Foundation paid for railings and 33 lampposts that stand along the sidewalk.

Today, the art installations and lampposts are a mess. (The sidewalk itself is largely fine but some metal grates will need attention soon or bike tires will be blowing in the spring.)

Most of the art displays have been neglected and/or vandalized. Their structures need caulking and repair as well. Pieces of the stone benches are gone and decorative elements on the sidewalk are missing or have been destroyed. A dozen lampposts need attention, including one held together by electrical tape. A representative from Land Studio is looking into the issues I raised.(Update:Land Studio's Greg Peckham says the organization had already set aside money to repair the art installations this year.)

PlayhouseSquare officials said this week that General Electric Co's lighting division is sponsoring the chandelier and promises the fixture will be able to withstand years of bad weather.

Let's hope someone can see beyond its initial glow.

http://www.cleveland.com/naymik/index.ssf/2014/01/clevelands_failed_bicentennial.html

 

[ajz20]

anything new? What will be done by this summer if anything?

 

[-Akronite-]

http://www.cleveland.com/business/i...bank_developers_wra.html#incart_river_default

GRAAAAAVE DIGGGER!

Looks like Flats East Bank is for realsies, though I doubt it ever looks quite like those concept photos.