These stores along the south side of St. Clair Avenue near East 17th Street at the edge of Downtown Cleveland are to be razed to add generators behind a new screen wall for the gray data center behind (Google). CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE THEM.
Retailers to be razed for H5 expansion
Amid the growing controversies surrounding the expansion of data centers in Ohio, Downtown Cleveland’s largest data center is about to get bigger. And, as part of that expansion, it’s evicting small businesses and proposing to demolish a row of storefronts along a major downtown street.
H5 Data Centers’ Cleveland Data Center, 1625 Rockwell Ave., already owns 2.4 acres of land at the east edge of downtown for its 351,000-square-foot facility. It has been adding generators along the south side of St. Clair Avenue but utilizing existing parking lots, until now.
It seeks to demolish five more retail spaces after acquiring another 0.75-acres of land, divided among a retail property at 1536-40 St. Clair and a second, larger property at 1616-36 St. Clair, each of which house a number of active businesses that had to quickly find new accommodations.
That’s despite H5 affiliate CLE-Infrastructure LLC of Beverly Hills, CA acquiring those properties more than a year ago in January 2025 for an undisclosed sum. The prior owner, Lakewood-based Green OZ LLC, bought them a year earlier for just under $1.5 million, county property records show.
“H5 Data Center has acquired adjacent buildings along Emerald Court (an alley parallel to and south of St. Clair) and will demolish those buildings to expand their generator yard,” wrote Dale Grieder, the project’s architect at The Foundation Architecture in Valley City in Medina County, in a permit application to the city.
Properties owned before 2025 by H5 Data Centers of California are outlined in blue whereas newly acquired properties are outlined in red. The buildings on those newly acquired properties will be demolished (MyPlace.CuyahogaCounty.gov).
Cost to demolish the one-story retail buildings is estimated by the architect at $250,000. The building at 1536-40 St Clair measures 6,060 square feet and the building at 1616-36 St. Clair measures 20,280 square feet. Both buildings date to the early 1960s.
“They (H5 Data Centers) are proposing to construct a new screen wall along St. Clair Avenue that will maintain the characteristics of the storefronts of the buildings to be demolished,” Grieder continued.
H5 had planned in 2022 to expand onto its western parking lot by constructing a new 20,574-square-foot building, including for the addition of generators to provide back-up electrical power supplies. But it never constructed the building, choosing instead to add generators in smaller enclosures along St. Clair.
To make way for the expansion, it is evicting several businesses. Among those in H5’s way are or were Cleveland Safe/Cleveland Key & Security, Ambitious Ink Printing Company, Kk Lustrouz Kollection clothier, and Spaces & Co., a co-working location that apparently has or had several tenants.
Cleveland Safe plus Cleveland Key & Security are both owned by Mark Brajdich as they have been for nearly 50 years. But the business was actually founded in 1869 and has a lot of historic inventory Brajdich must dispose of in less than two weeks before his unplanned move to a new space less than half as big.
A screen wall like this one with a gate is proposed along the south side of St. Clair beyond the next building east for the Care Alliance Health Center. While the health center isn’t due to be demolished, the next building east will. It was the Spaces & Co. co-working site. The gray building directly behind them is the H5 Data Center (Google).
“After 47 years, they’re kicking us to the curb,” Brajdich told NEOtrans. “It’s become a challenge for the last month and a half trying to find office and warehouse space. And we have to since we’re the primary vendor for the City of Cleveland and Cuyahoga County. We need to stay within a certain radius of where we are now.”
He was able to find a new location at Hamilton Avenue and East 28th Street but it has only 3,100 square feet compared to the 7,000 square feet Cleveland Safe/Cleveland Key & Security had on St. Clair. Other tenants like him were in the same situation. They were told to leave with almost no notice, he said.
“They took us to housing court in February to evict us even though they owned the property for more than a year,” Brajdich said. “Guess you can’t fight city hall.”
Some of the businesses that are getting evicted are taking up H5 on its offer for temporary storage space within the data center until they can find a new home. But Brajdich said H5 wasn’t able to offer his business what it needed.
“They offered us a small amount of storage space for the time being but it wasn’t enough for us,” he said. “Our new space (on Hamilton) is going to be a tight squeeze but we’re just trying to hold on for a year or two more until I retire.”
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