Parking lots between Huron Road and Prospect Avenue, east of East 4th Street in Downtown Cleveland’s Gateway District were closed off starting this week. If any parking reopens here, it will likely be in new parking garages to support the development of Bedrock Real Estate’s so-called Rock Block site. This view looks north from the front steps of Rocket Arena (NEOtrans). CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE THEM.
Downtown Rock Block site work starts
Another parking crater in Downtown Cleveland has succumbed to a new development that promises to attract hundreds of thousands of visitors per year. The latest to disappear is a windswept, 3-acre parking lot in the Gateway District, across Huron Road from Rocket Arena, home to Cleveland Cavaliers basketball and Cleveland Monster hockey games.
Ironically, the parking crater will be partially replaced by an actual crater, at least for about six months and hopefully not longer. At the south end of the parking lots, closest to Rocket Arena, will be a 29,000-square-foot construction pad set below street level.
The pad will be for a new Cosm immersive sports-entertainment venue. Renderings for the Cleveland Cosm were publicly released this week. NEOtrans broke the story in June about the construction pad work.
“Through Shared Reality, Cosm brings people together by merging a stadium-like atmosphere with the energy of the crowd and state-of-the-art visuals,” according to a press release regarding the renderings, shared by Cosm, developer Bedrock Real Estate Group, and Rock Entertainment Group.
“Spanning approximately 64,000 square feet and three stories, Cosm Cleveland will feature two primary programmatic elements: The Dome and The Hall, with elevated food and beverage service, outdoor seating and premium club space,” the release continued. “Additional details regarding Cosm Cleveland, including opening and programming, will be available at a later date.”
Cosm recently saw a $250 million investment from two billionaires, Cleveland Guardians minority owner David Blitzer and Cleveland Cavaliers/Monsters majority owner Dan Gilbert. Gilbert owns Rock Ventures which has under its Detroit-based umbrella Bedrock, Rock Entertainment and many other firms.
While construction of Cosm isn’t due to start until sometime in early 2026, work on the pad is getting underway now in order to test and stabilize the site which has unrecorded sewers and structural foundations, some of which date back more than 200 years ago.
The site will be excavated to a depth of 15 feet and then filled with 7 feet of stone gravel to create the pad. The pad will then will be tested from multiple locations to gather samples of soil and pre-existing structures if left in place.
The pad site will also be checked for concrete compression, slump, air content and temperatures, according to plans submitted to the city’s Building Department by Cleveland-based Osborn Engineering.
At the same location as this article’s lead photo, with Huron Road in the foreground and East 4th Street at left, the new Cosm immersive entertainment venue is shown in this schematic rendering (Rossetti).
General contractor Whiting-Turner of Baltimore is overseeing construction of the pad. Cost of the work is estimated in the work permit at $300,000 but may be a low figure. The address on the permit is 522 Prospect Ave.
Most of the parking lots bound by Huron, Prospect, East 4th Street and a walkway on the right of way of a former alley, East 6th Street, may be gone forever, but some parking could make a return to the site in one of two ways.
The construction pad permit shows that the north end of the parking lots, next to Prospect, will be used for construction staging. After work is done on the pad and the Cosm venue to be built atop it, the staging area may revert to a surface lot as is shown in a rendering published in this article.
But Bedrock has identified that spot next to Prospect for a later phase of vertical development of its Rock Block, as it has with another parking lot at 611 Huron, east of the East 6th walkway. Vertical developments on either site will likely include multi-level public parking structures as part of their programming.
Three basic structures are proposed in Bedrock Real Estate’s Rock Block. First is the Cosm entertainment venue. Two later phases are north and east of Cosm and at least one may be a high rise, according to real estate sources (Rossetti).
Parking will become even more crucial if the Cleveland Guardians follow through on rumored plans to at least partially demolish the Gateway East Garage, 650 Huron. The Guardians bought the garage two years ago for $25 million.
The Gateway East Garage is reportedly being considered for redevelopment as a ballpark village offering shops, restaurants, offices, residences and a hotel. But a new parking garage on the Rock Block would likely need to be built first.
This may not happen unless and until Blitzer exercises a pending option to acquire a majority stake in the baseball team in 2028. But Gilbert and Blitzer have already shown an interest in working together to deliver Cosm to Cleveland before New York City, Chicago, Toronto and other larger cities get one.
When Planning Commission approved a conceptual plan for Cosm in August, it also approved using a newly built parking lot at 611 Huron for construction worker parking and storage. That public parking lot, which has also been closed, is where a condemned parking garage was demolished in late-2023.
On the north side of the new Cosm, looking east, is a proposed public space. These are renderings developed as part of more detailed, schematic plans that will be submitted to the Cleveland Planning Commission for approval (Rossetti).
The site preparation for Cosm represents a big step forward for the Gateway District parking crater which was previously owned by Stark Enterprises. It planned a lofty development called nuCLEus for the site but was unable to realize it. Stark sold the property to Bedrock in 2023 for $26.5 million.
Stark is offering for sale another downtown parking crater, this being part of a 4.2-acre, multi-parcel site in the Warehouse District. It is next to downtown’s largest-ever parking crater to succumb to development so far — a 7-acre spread that now hosts the 1.1-million-square-foot Sherwin-Williams headquarters.
But the Rock Block may not be the first piece of land on which Bedrock builds its first high-rises in Downtown Cleveland.
When asked by NEOtrans about recent tower massings in the background of its Riverfront Cleveland development, Bedrock’s Vice President of Communications Lora Brand said that none are associated with the Rock Block.
Massing of a new tower, possibly for offices, proposed by Bedrock for the northeast corner of Huron Road and Ontario Street, would address a shortage of trophy-class office space in Downtown Cleveland (MKSK).
Those massings suggest Bedrock’s next steps for downtown development. Instead, the tallest tower being considered is proposed for a 0.8-acre site between the Rock Block and Bedrock’s Riverfront. It is a grassy, city-owned piece of land in front of the JACK Casino South Garage.
That garage, located at 2151 Ontario St., has 1,650 parking spaces. Since it isn’t very busy during the day, the garage could double as parking for a new office building and save tens of millions of dollars in construction costs.
The reason why a new office building is reportedly being considered here is because leases for a number of large downtown tenants at older office buildings are due to run out in the next few years, according to real estate sources who spoke to NEOtrans off the record.
If Downtown Cleveland doesn’t have enough Trophy Class or even nationally competitive Class A inventory available to satisfy it, those office tenants may find it instead in the suburbs where many modern office properties are partially or entirely vacant.
Looking west across the north side of Cosm Cleveland, a parking lot is seen at right where Bedrock envisions future development on the Prospect Avenue side of its Rock Block site. During the construction of Cosm, the area at right is proposed to be used for construction staging (Rossetti).
An anchor tenant for the new tower may be Rocket Mortgage, one of Gilbert’s Rock Ventures family of companies, which has 200,000 square feet of office space in the upper floors of the Higbee Building.
Detroit-based Bedrock and property owner VICI Properties of New York City are reportedly proposing to repurpose the upper floors of Higbees as a data center, the real estate sources said.
Gilbert likes to partner with others on major projects. While Blitzer is one such partner, another may be the Ricketts family, owners of the Chicago Cubs. The same sources said Gilbert and the Ricketts are apparently working on development opportunities, including at the Rock Block site in Cleveland.
Bedrock has so far acknowledged having only one other Cleveland high-rise in the works — Rock-and-Roll Land. This is a $488 million planned theater and 17-story hotel atop structured parking at the southwest corner of Huron and Ontario. Bedock is accumulating financing for this next phase in its Riverfront Cleveland development.
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