Construction could start as soon as March 2025 on the Women Religious Archives Collaborative Heritage Center, to be located on East 22nd Street in Downtown Cleveland’s Campus District. This will be the first of only four such heritage centers nationwide (Bostwick). CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE THEM.
Archives, research center may start in Spring
ARTICLE UPDATED NOV. 5, 2024
As fundraising continues, the nation’s first independent repository for Catholic Sisters’ archival collections could see construction start in March 2025 on the southeast side of Downtown Cleveland. The planned Women Religious Archives Collaborative (WRAC) Heritage Center at 2490 E. 22nd St. will offer public programming, exhibitions, meeting space, and be an important place for research and remembrance due to open in 2026.
Cleveland Planning Commission Design Review Committee gave final design approval last week to the facility for which $13 million has been raised. The project has a $22 million budget which includes operating costs.
WRAC on Oct. 21 purchased a rectangular, 1.6-acre parcel with an abandoned parking lot on it for $1.2 million from the St. Vincent Medical Center and the Sisters of Charity of St. Augustine, Cuyahoga County property records show.
On that land, a 31,167-square-foot, two-story structure is planned with a construction price tag estimated at $13 million, according to a permit application submitted to the city today. Half of the building will be used for storage areas of archives with the rest containing support areas, offices, research rooms, meeting and conference spaces.
Site plan for the proposed Women Religious Archives Collaborative Heritage Center, with north at the top of the image (Bostwick).
About 10 workers will be hired permanently to be on-site to maintain, digitize, store and retrieve records. And there will be a daily average of about three visitors excluding conferences, exhibits and other special events, planning documents show.
The glass-fronted new building will be adjacent to the west-side the sidewalk on East 22nd. Between the building and a new 30-space parking lot will be a garden with as many of the existing trees on the site preserved and new trees added. There will be permeable pavers and a retention pond to the west, or rear of the site, said the project’s planners led by WRAC Executive Director Sr. Susan Durkin.
“Storytelling, we know, is a powerful vehicle and it’s how we learn,” Durkin told the commission members on Nov. 1. “And it’s how future generations will learn.”
So, the new WRAC Heritage Center will tell those stories, said Durkin, who is also a co-founder of WRAC. She noted that one cannot tell the history of Cleveland without including the story of the Catholic Sisters.
Floor plan for the first level of the Women Religious Archives Collaborative Heritage Center on the southeast side of Downtown Cleveland includes more public areas including exhibit and event spaces (Bostwick).
“Ursuline Sisters were the first group of Catholic Sisters here in the city of Cleveland in 1850,” Durkin added. “The amount of impact we’ve had, beginning with things like starting the education system, Catholic health care, being involved in the flu epidemic, Sister Henrietta during the Hough Riots, creating job opportunity (and addressing) literacy, human trafficking, gun violence, you name it. The Catholic Sisters have been involved in it.”
“The Catholic Sisters are diminishing in number and these stories are at risk of being lost,” she said. “Their ability to inspire future generations for how to make their communities a better space is in danger of being lost with that. So we are creating a space for those stories to be told.”
Durkin, a past president of the Ursuline Sisters of Cleveland, oversaw the capital campaign for and construction of Merici Crossings. That 68,000-square-foot, $22 million residence for the Ursuline Sisters of Cleveland and community chapel in suburban Pepper Pike opened in early 2019. Now she’s turning that expertise to where Cleveland’s Central neighborhood meets downtown.
“Thank you for investing in this area and this neighborhood for over 100 years,” City Planning Director Joyce Pan Huang. “I really believe this design will set the expectation and the tone for the neighborhood.”
Second floor plan for the Women Religious Archives Collaborative Heritage Center shows that archives and material storage areas will be on both floors of the building. Offices for employees will be on the second floor (Bostwick).
“We are working from the planning side of things on larger planning coordination in this area because there’s so many institutional partners,” Huang noted. “(There’s) so much potential here to reconnect Central to Downtown and Downtown to Central and this is a project that will help with that because of its proximity to the East 22nd Street bridge deck.”
She and the project’s consultant, Tom Chema, noted there’s more opportunities for continued development in this area. The WRAC will also set the tone for additional potential development that could include what appears to be a stalled masterplan for the St. Vincent Medical Center. But other developments may be coming in the coming years.
The WRAC project will plan for a future expansion of the Archive Center, which is anticipated but not currently included in the $24 million budget that accounts for operating expenses. But it will accommodate public exhibits and events plus interactive digital programs that honor the unique contributions of women religious to their communities and the country.
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