Cedar Avenue, looking west from near East 105th Street, will have even more large buildings along it in the coming years. This artist’s rendering will soon be the view from the top floors of The Medley apartments, now under construction with a ground-floor Meijer Fairfax Market grocery store (HOK). CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE THEM
Six-story buildings to rise on Cedar Avenue
Two years ago, Gov. Mike DeWine announced hundreds of millions of dollars in state money to launch the Cleveland Innovation District — a program to advance health care, research and related activities in the Greater Cleveland area. This week, one of the largest and most visible outcomes of that initiative will be unveiled in the form of plans for the Cleveland Clinic Foundation’s next phase of its Global Center for Pathogen and Human Health Research at its Main Campus in Cleveland’s Fairfax neighborhood.
Those plans will be presented to the city of Cleveland by the Clinic and its design team on Thursday and Friday. First will be a meeting of the City Planning Commission’s neighborhood-level Euclid Corridor Design Review Committee. The following day, the full Design-Review Committee will a look at the plans and learn of any suggestions or recommendations by the lower committee.
What they will see are two significant buildings on Cedar Avenue, on both the northwest and northeast corners of East 100th Street, comprising phase two of the Global Center for Pathogen and Human Health Research. The new buildings represent a $420 million chunk of the $565 million Cleveland Innovation District budget, with $300 million from the Clinic and $265 million in public funds. Of the public dollars, the Ohio Development Services Agency is providing $155 million and JobsOhio $110 million.
The locations of the two new Global Center for Pathogen and Human Health Research buildings are shown here as “CBA” and “CBB” on Cedar Avenue, on either side of East 100th Street (HOK).
The new center is the largest real estate outcome resulting from the governor’s announcement two years ago. According to the Clinic, the project will create an estimated 1,000 new jobs locally by the global health care system by 2029 and an additional 7,500 jobs in Ohio by 2034. Providence, RI-based Gilbane Building Co. is the Pathogen Center’s general contractor and St. Louis-based HOK Group Inc. is the project’s architect.
“Cleveland Clinic is significantly expanding its research space by building a new Global Center for Pathogen and Human Health Research,” said Alicia Reale Cooney, senior manager corporate communications at the Cleveland Clinic in an e-mail to NEOtrans. “As a cornerstone of the Cleveland Innovation District, the new center brings together a research team spanning Cleveland Clinic’s global footprint that will be focused on broadening understanding of emerging pathogens and virus-related diseases.”
The proposed pair of six-story, glassy buildings will continue the recent development activity along the Cedar corridor. Construction is far along on the 196-unit Medley apartments atop the new Meijer Fairfax Market grocery store — together it’s a six-story building at the southeast corner of Cedar and East 105th Street. In the same area, Geis Companies built the Brooks Automation/Azenta Life Sciences biorepository, 9908 Cedar, in 2021, and the now-vacant IBM-Explorys building, 10500 Cedar, in 2018 that may have a new suitor. But Cedar’s revival all started in 2009 with the Clinic’s bio-tech incubator, the Global Cardiovascular Innovations Center. 10000 Cedar.
Looking north on East 100th Street at the intersection of Cedar Avenue will have a totally different vista in 2025 when work on the next phase of the Global Center for Pathogen and Human Health Research is due to be completed (HOK).
Each new building in the Cedar corridor seems to be getting bigger. But so far none will be bigger than the pair of buildings in this phase of the Global Center for Pathogen and Human Health Research.
“Plans for construction include building two new research towers on Cedar Avenue and East 100th Street,” Cooney said. “The buildings will total 358,100 square feet — 129,900 square feet for building on northwest corner of intersection and 228,200 for building on northeast corner — and house state-of-the-art research laboratories, classroom space, offices and a café. This is in addition to current renovations already in progress of 43,500 square feet in the NA building for research facilities.”
The NA Building is the A-wing of the Lerner Research Institute, 9620 Carnegie Ave., also called the N Building in the Clinic’s letter-designation system for major buildings. On two floors inside the Lerner Research Institute is a dry lab for the first phase of the Pathogens Center which the Clinic intends to open by April. There will also be additional wet/dry labs, bio-safety labs and more, including research programs funded through partnerships instigated by the Cleveland Innovation District.
Ground-floor uses for the two new buildings in phase two of the Global Center for Pathogen and Human Health Research are shown in this site plan (HOK).
“The work around the Pathogens Center is tied to money from the state and collaboration with other partners,” said the Clinic’s Chief of Operations William M. Peacock III in a NEOtrans interview published in December. “There will be up to 1,000 new jobs just from the research component.”
The two new buildings will be connected to each other via an enclosed walkway above East 100th and be connected to two parking garages — designated BBS (south) and BBN (north) — that contain about 3,100 parking spaces. No additional parking will be included with this development but Clinic officials said in the NEOtrans article in December that they anticipate constructing two additional large parking garages in the coming years.
The locations of those garages isn’t yet known but sources said one will likely be near East 105th and the other somewhere near the west end of the campus. Those are the epicenters of the Clinic’s current construction program — it’s largest boom in more than a decade. To the west, the Clinic is building its largest-ever building — the new 1-million-square-foot Neurological Institute on Carnegie between East 89th and East 90th streets. To the east, work has started on the 150,000-square-foot expansion of the Cole Eye Institute at East 105th and Euclid Avenue.
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