East Stokes, a massive, 24-story apartment tower over ground-floor retail and several levels of parking, is planned for the next phase of the Circle Square development in Cleveland’s University Circle (SCB). CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE THEM.
East Stokes latest addition to Circle Square
ARTICLE UPDATED SEPT. 18, 2024
The development team for Circle Square, a district bringing more than one million square feet of mixed-use development to market in Cleveland’s booming University Circle, is about to introduce its latest addition to this booming district. And that addition, at the southeast corner of Chester Avenue and Stokes Boulevard, will challenge Circle Square’s The Artisan for the tallest building in Cleveland’s “second downtown.”
Proposed to be about 263 feet tall, the 24-story East Stokes tower will be unveiled by its developers and design team at Cleveland City Planning Commission’s regularly scheduled Design Review Committee meeting on Friday. In the Circle Square master plan approved by the city in 2020, this second tall apartment building was envisioned to be of comparable height to the 24-story Artisan across Stokes on Chester. The Artisan, 10600 Chester, stands 267 feet tall.
East Stokes won’t be far behind. In Circle Square’s master plan, East Stokes was planned to have approximately 300 apartments, 10,000 square feet of retail and a parking deck for about 200 cars. It remains to be seen what the details will be in the conceptual plan to be unveiled. And it should be noted that a conceptual plan will evolve as it goes through the city’s design-review process.
A big reason why East Stokes is being pursued is because of the success of The Artisan and the continued growth of employment in and near University Circle. That includes the rapid growth of new jobs at nearby Cleveland Clinic as well as the increased enrollment and housing shortages at Case Western Reserve University. University Circle is one of Ohio’s four largest employment hubs along with the downtowns in Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati.
Looking southeast at the corner of Chester Avenue and Stokes Boulevard, the West Stokes tower would have an active street presence at the sidewalk level. Two stories of commercial use would be topped by 22 stories of residential and be separated by a six-story garage from a future phase of Circle Square fronting Euclid Avenue, shown as a white box to the right. A current view of this location is below (SCB).
Opened in 2023, The Artisan saw its 298-unit apartment building reach 90 percent occupancy in less than a year at rents commanding about $3 per square feet — that’s top of the market rents for Cleveland. A new building is considered fully leased when it reaches 90 percent occupancy.
Lead developer for East Stokes is Cleveland-based PCP Voyager led by co-Chief Executive Officers Zac Ponsky and Christopher Lynch and backed by the likes of Elie, Jeff and Morry Weiss, members of one of Greater Cleveland’s wealthiest families. Other heavy hitters on the PCP team include Lee Ponsky, Bobby Goldberg and James Ratner. Many were part of Midwest Development Partners which initiated the Circle Square vision but has since yielded to PCP.
Chicago-based developer White Oak Realty Partners was the lead developer on The Artisan. That building’s general contractor, Power Construction of Chicago, was hired to build East Stokes. Another Chicago firm, SR+A, is the project’s structural engineer. Designing the skyscraper is Solomon Cordwell Buenz (SCB) of Seattle.
SCB has many high-rise credits on its resume. They include local examples like the 2020-built Lumen in Downtown Cleveland’s Playhouse Square — Cleveland’s tallest residential building. It also designed the Raye Apartments — a two-tower apartment complex at the Van Aken District at the end of the light-rail Blue Line in Shaker Heights.
The Circle Square master plan, approved by the city in 2020, shows the East Stokes building at the upper-right. The Artisan was originally called the Main Block-North. It is probable that the East Stokes designation will be changed to a more marketable name if the project advances into construction (Bialosky).
Construction is underway now to create the full development site for East Stokes. About $8 million worth of traffic-calming work is happening to relocate sewers, streets and sidewalks at the intersection of Chester, Stokes and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. That includes squaring off what were gentle turning lanes that encouraged motorists to drive at high speeds through this area.
Other construction is occurring at Circle Square, but only because it is behind schedule. That work is for the completion of the Library Lofts, 10555 Euclid Ave., a 207-unit, market-rate apartment building atop the new, 27,000-square-foot MLK Branch of the Cleveland Public Library.
The 11-story Library Lofts started its vertical construction in the winter of 2022, at roughly the same time as the 36-story, 616-foot-tall Sherwin-Williams headquarters skyscraper started to rise in Downtown Cleveland. Both buildings appear to be at nearly the same stages of completion.
The full site of where East Stokes is proposed to rise, just beyond the construction vehicles, is being created by squaring off high-speed turning lanes for vehicular traffic at the Chester-Stokes-MLK intersection. In the background is the 20-story One University Circle apartments. After it opened in 2018, it was the tallest building in the district for three years until The Artisan topped out (KJP).
Library Lofts, built by Panzica Construction and complicated by coordinating with the library and its many change orders and cost overruns, was to be completed this past spring. While there is now electricity on site and the exterior facing of the building is being installed, the project is not yet done.
Progress west of Stokes cannot advance until the new library is opened and the old MLK Branch, 1962 Stokes is closed and demolished — sometime in 2025. Then, a new retail podium is to be constructed in its place, and topped with a 10- to 15-story, 125-room hotel with an as-yet unnamed flag.
Circle Square in December 2022 won an $8 million Transformational Mixed Use Development (TMUD) tax credit from the Ohio Department of Development for the retail podium. Next door is the 13-story, 1923-built Fenway Manor senior apartments, 1986 Stokes. It was renovated in 2019 by Orleans Co. for $25 million.
The site for the East Stokes high-rise is being created in part from reclaimed streets — namely by the city’s traffic-calming efforts to remove high-speed turning lanes from Chester Avenue onto Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and other lanes (MBI).
With a construction cost estimated at nearly $500 million and more than 1 million square feet of new buildings on 4.5 acres, Circle Square is intended to restore a walkable, urban center in the heart of this historic neighborhood. It is one of the largest multi-phase developments in Cleveland history.
At full buildout, the project will include more than 800 apartments, 36,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space, a 125-room hotel, parking, and the new 27,000-square-foot MLK public library. The project is expected to create more than 200 construction jobs and 500 permanent jobs.
NEOtrans has reached out to members of the development team for comment and more information but none have responded prior to publication of this article. We will continue to follow this late-breaking news story to share more details as they come in.
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