An earthmover works atop a pile of debris that used to be a roughly 135-year-old building on Detroit Avenue in Cleveland’s Ohio City neighborhood. The house behind it is due to be razed next. The billboard is part of the same property which could become a multi-family development site (KJP). CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE THEM.
Owner says she doesn’t have plans for site
An historic building on Detroit Avenue in Cleveland’s Ohio City neighborhood was there when commuters on the adjacent West Shoreway went home on Friday evening for the weekend. When they went past the site this morning during their return to work, the building was gone.
The highly visible 4,000-square-foot building, a two-story brick structure at 4104 Detroit Ave., was demolished by Greenland Demolition LLC of Seven Hills, according to a permit issued by the city Dec. 26. A tiny, 500-square-foot house behind the building and located next to the eastbound lanes of the Shoreway is also going to be coming down, a second permit shows,
What’s going to replace it, if anything? The owner, Angela Mastros of Wintersville, OH, near Steubenville, told NEOtrans during a brief phone interview that she has no plans for the site. So why spend $59,000 to take down the two structures? She’s not saying.
“Call me back when we have plans for the site,” Mastros said.
A neighbor living near the site posted on the discussion forum UrbanOhio that there was a cardboard sign on the front door for a couple of months. The sign noted that “luxury apartments” were coming to the site that’s located just east of The Harp restaurant and across Detroit from the The Cleveland Bagel Company.
Although faded, the former mixed-use building on Detroit Avenue was in fair condition, according to appraisers from the Cuyahoga County Fiscal Officer, the structure was razed. The building’s owner also recently took title to the billboard property at right. The parking lot at left is for sale (Google).
“I don’t know what that sign was about,” she added.
A source familiar with the site and who spoke with NEOtrans on the condition of anonymity said Angela Mastros and her husband Nicholas Mastros, an ear-nose-throat doctor with the Trinity Health System in Steubenville, are planning a multi-family development on the site.
ArcGIS Online maps show that both the building and the house had stood since about 1890. The site is in Ohio City, most of which is an historic landmark district that normally requires Cleveland Landmarks Commission approval and a post-demolition site plan for demolition applications.
But the landmark district doesn’t exist here along either side of Detroit Avenue, between West 32nd and 45th streets, city maps show. So the demolition request was approved relatively quickly with a simple building department permit review.
Mastros, doing business as OPA Enterprises LLC, said she acquired the building parcel and a billboard parcel next door in October 2024 as a gift from her father, Paul Papas. He directly owned the billboard parcel since 1999; his company Apostolos Inc. owned the building parcel since 1994, county records show.
On a September 2023 day, the newly opened Opa Gr Cle carry-out ice cream parlor was advertising it was “Now Open” next to the tiny, for-rent house along the West Shoreway. The parlor also advertised its Greek dough balls covered in honey, called Loukoumades. The tiny house is also to be demolished (Google).
Papas of Highland Heights has run several Greek restaurants in Greater Cleveland. He most recently ran a takeout restaurant called Opa Gr Cle from the now-demolished building. The restaurant was well-regarded based on Google reviews and had few blemishes on public records. The Cleveland Health Department in April 2024 found two “critical” training-related violations of the restaurant. Neither was serious enough to penalize the business.
The last building department complaint against the property was in September 2022 in which an exterior gas meter was found to be sticking out on to the sidewalk, with other, undefined exterior building violations. That didn’t result in any follow-up actions either, certainly not enough to force a change in ownership or demolition.
The restaurant got an occupancy permit from the city in March 2023, but as an ice cream parlor occupying 784 square feet of the ground floor. Two apartments were on the second floor with a third in the house out back. The parlor’s occupancy permit said Papas planned to invest $4,000 in the ice cream parlor.
Cleveland Planning Commission’s GIS map shows the two-parcel, 0.204-acre property is zoned as local retail with a pedestrian-retail overlay which allows a residential building with a ground-floor commercial use to be located on the site with no setbacks. It has a height limit of 60 feet, permitting a building of about five stories tall.
Based on the size and zoning of the site, a building offering at least several dozen apartments over a ground-floor retail space could be constructed here. That doesn’t include a neighboring 0.11-acre parking lot which has been listed for sale since November.
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