At left is the conceptual design for Bikur Cholim’s Cleveland Comfort House fronting East 90th Street as viewed from Cedar Avenue. Cleveland Clinic’s Emergency Department is at right. Its expansion and need for more parking led the Clinic and Bikur Cholim to trade land. Now, the Cleveland Comfort House is planned to rise on Chester Avenue at East 93rd Street (studioTECHNE). CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE THEM.
Five structures to be razed as a result
In the next few weeks, demolition work to take down five structures could get underway to avail land for the Cleveland Clinic’s expanding Emergency Department, 9105 Cedar Ave., at its Main Campus in Cleveland’s Fairfax neighborhood.
They include structures on parcels of land bought only three months ago by Bikur Cholim, a faith-based medical support nonprofit seeking to develop its $10 million Cleveland Comfort House. Thanks to a land swap, that center now has a new location on which it will be built.
“Bikur Cholim is very grateful to the Cleveland Clinic for negotiating a land swap,” said Ari Jaffe, a board member at Bikur Cholim of Cleveland. “The swap provides each institution with developable land adjacent to existing Cleveland Clinic facilities.”
Like most Cleveland Clinic Main Campus developments these days, it first requires moving around pieces in the puzzle in order to solve it. The demolitions will create a nearly 1-acre plot on which the global health system can build a roughly 140-space parking lot for the Emergency Department, Clinic officials said.
Facing that new parking lot across East 90th Street, on the west side of the existing Emergency Department, the Clinic will spend $250,000 to provide an interim entrance for Emergency Department patients who self-present during construction, according to plans submitted to the city.
“Work is limited to interior alterations to (the) existing ED (Emergency Department) administrative office area and staff entry vestibule, as well as a new temporary exterior canopy structure,” wrote Edward Matthew Paine of Cleveland-based Hasenstab Architects Inc. in submitting the plans for the temporary entrance.
Pieces are moving on the chess board that is the Cleveland Clinic Main Campus. The two winners are the Clinic which gains space for more Emergency Department parking and Bikur Cholim which gets a new place to build its Cleveland Comfort Center. The losers are five structures that are to be demolished (Google).
Permitting work is also getting underway for the 120,000-square-foot expansion of the Clinic’s 1994-built, 228,000-square-foot Maria & Sam Miller Emergency Services Building, also called the E Building. The expansion will aid the Clinic in pursuing a Level I trauma center designation for the facility.
Expansion of the Emergency Department will be constructed on its 112-space parking lot, or at least most of it, erasing 95 parking spaces. Although 17 spaces will remain, another 13 new parking spaces will be added along a vacated East 93rd north of Cedar, plans show.
To make room for the new 140-space parking lot west of East 90th, the demolitions will remove a quintet of two-family residences — at 8921, 8927 and 8931 Cedar, the latter which included the now-closed Doc & Lennie’s restaurant. plus 2116 and 2118 E. 90th.
B&B Wrecking & Excavating of Cleveland will carry out the demolition work for $183,200, according to a permit application submitted to the city’s Building Department last week.
“All buildings to be demolished in (their) entirety including slab and footers and backfilled to positive drainage,” wrote B&B Wrecking & Excavating Project Manager Matthew Banaga in the application.
Seen from the portion of a parking lot to be eliminated for the expanding Cleveland Clinic Emergency Department are low-rise structures to the west, across East 90th Street, that are to be demolished for new Clinic parking. At right is the Carnegie Tower at Fairfax (Google).
Among the most recent acquisitions were 8931 Cedar plus the two East 90th parcels. Those deals closed July 27th, Cuyahoga County property records show. No dollar amounts were shown for those transactions because they were acquired in a trade.
The Clinic received those parcels from Bikur Cholim in exchange for giving the nonprofit a 0.82-acre parcel it owned at Chester Avenue and East 93rd Street. That property is used as a parking lot.
That’s where Bikur Cholim will now seek to build its $10 million, three-story Cleveland Comfort House. The facility is proposed to have 10 extended-stay suites, common area, kitchen facilities, meeting room, and small library.
The Cleveland Heights-based nonprofit organization, whose Hebrew name translates to “visiting the sick,” is dedicated making it easier for people needing to visit a family member in the hospital or for non-hospitalized patients to get treatments while accompanied by family or local volunteers.
Given that Bikur Cholim’s project is still in the early stages, it was fluid enough that a different site plan could still be adopted. Marco Ciccarelli, an architect and founding principal at studioTECHNE of Cleveland, will design the new project.
Three Cedar Avenue houses, including the former Doc & Lennie’s restaurant at right which fronts a boarding house, plus the associated trees, are about to be taken down for a Cleveland Clinic parking lot (Google).
If enough funding can be raised soon, construction could begin by the start of next year and take about 10-14 months, said Jaffe, who also is an attorney at Kohrman Jackson & Krantz LLP in Downtown Cleveland.
“Bikur Cholim’s new parcel is twice the size of its previous property in an excellent location along Chester Avenue,” he said. “Further details will be provided by Bikur Cholim and Cleveland Clinic on their respective plans in the coming weeks.”
In late July, in its acquisitions for the new Emergency Department parking lot, the Clinic acquired 8921 and 8927 Cedar from affiliates of Activity Capital LLC of Woodmere for $550,000, county records show.
Another building to be demolished in the near future may be a vacant, former Texaco gasoline and three-bay service station at 9300 Cedar and built in 1920 in the Spanish style that was popular a century ago.
That structure and its 0.36-acre parcel was acquired last week by the Clinic from Ninety-Third Parking LLC for $385,000, according to Cuyahoga County records. It is next to other Clinic-owned land and City Land Bank lot that will be combined to form another new surface parking lot, Clinic officials said.
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