With a high-revenue billboard greeting people in Downtown Cleveland with “Hi”, a more appropriate sign might be one bidding “bye” as its five-story host is proposed to be demolished (Google). CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE THEM.
Building is next to Sherwin-Williams HQ
A 19th-century building that’s not been treated very well for the past six decades may soon get the roughest treatment of all — demolition. That’s according to a permit application submitted today to the city’s Building Department.
Proposed for demolition is the five-story Gilman Building, a commercial structure located at 1350 W. 3rd St. in Downtown Cleveland’s Warehouse District. Cost of demolishing the 18,290-square-foot structure is estimated at $282,000, according to the application.
It was submitted Friday morning on behalf of property owner 1350 W III LLC, an affiliate of Welty Enterprises of suburban Akron, by Randall Parsons, president of Akron-based AVID Architects Inc. The application shows Parsons paid the $150 filing fee.
But an as-yet unanswered question surrounding the proposed demolition is — why? NEOtrans reached out to Welty Development President Tom Charek and Kenneth Landenberger, general manager of commercial leasing and facilities at Welty, but without any response as yet. Parsons also didn’t reply.
To win city approval for a building demolition in Downtown Cleveland, the applicant has to provide plans for what land use would replace the demolished structure. Parking lots are allowed only as an interim use, but the city has an uneven record in enforcing that requirement.
The southwest corner of St. Clair Avenue and West 3rd Street has had the Gilman Building on for more than 140 years although the building was modernized in the late 1960s (Google).
No plans or other attachments were submitted today to the city with the demolition application, although the applicant said it would be submitting those plans electronically later.
In an historic district, which the Warehouse District is, any building demolition faces greater scrutiny and is often denied when the building is stable, considered historic, architecturally significant or contributing architecturally to the historic district.
The building is listed in good condition by city and Cuyahoga County records. It was last renovated in 2004 by Stark Enterprises for its headquarters. It has no pending building code violations.
The worst transgression associated with the building in recent years was that Welty in February didn’t register its façade with the city before a 30-day notice expired.
Landenberger paid on April 30 a $200 civil ticket levied against the property by the city, public records show. The city requires such registrations to protect against façade failures.
Coated with eight decades of soot from Cleveland’s industrial peak, the original Victorian charm of the Gilman Building stood soiled by the 1960s, at left. It compared with a modernized and, in the 2000s, newly renovated structure (contributed).
However, the Gilman’s historic façade was modernized and re-cladded in the late 1960s. Ironically, that extra protection for the public might be what dooms the 143-year-old building.
Tom Yablonsky, an advisor to the Historic Warehouse District Development Corp. and its former executive director, said the Gilman has been altered so much over the decades that it might not be eligible for historic protections.
But he also said that other historic preservation consultants in the recent past said the building’s 19th-century exterior remains underneath its 1960s and 2004 modernizations and could be restored. He said the city’s Landmarks Commission would have the final say.
“It’s worth checking,” Yablonsky said. “We need to protect the surviving building stock in the Warehouse District.”
The building was built in 1882-83 for the A.S. Gilman Printing Co. and designed in the Victorian style by John Edelmann, a mentor to famed architect Louis Sullivan, called “Father of skyscrapers.” The Gilman and New York City’s Decker Building (1893) may be the only two surviving monuments to Edelmann’s work.
This site plan for the Sherwin-Williams headquarters’ Downtown Cleveland campus shows what was built next to the Gilman Building and compares with the next image to show future phases (Sherwin-Williams Co.).
Welty acquired the property in 2021 for $3,375,000 from the Realife Real Estate Group and used it as a construction field office for the neighboring Sherwin-Williams headquarters project. Welty formed a joint venture with the Gilbane Building Co. to serve as construction manager of the 1.1-million-square-foot headquarters.
Although it no longer has an active office use, the Gilman Building has a huge billboard on its windowless west side that produces a steady and apparently large source of revenue. The building has not been marketed for new office or retail tenants in five years.
Rico Pietro, a principal at the Independence-based commercial real estate brokerage Cushman & Wakefield | CRESCO, which had last marketed the Gilman, said parking is in high demand in the Warehouse District after Sherwin-Williams’ HQ opened. Parking is in short supply.
It got even shorter when Stark Enterprises sold a 350-space parking lot farther west on St. Clair at West 9th Street. The buyer, revealed in July by NEOtrans, was the Ohio Bureau of Workers Compensation. Those parking spaces may be dedicated wholly to state use, causing a greater strain on the supply of public parking.
Future phases of development at the Sherwin-Williams headquarters shows the Gilman Building remaining next to low-level, three-story, mixed-use structures (Sherwin-Williams Co.).
But, based on the structure’s 3,658-square-foot footprint, demolishing the Gilman might yield only 10-12 parking spaces to a potential expansion of Sherwin-Williams’ surface lots west along St. Clair Avenue and south down West 6th Street.
There are no public records indicating that Sherwin-Williams is acquiring the Gilman now. But Sherwin-Williams reportedly had expressed interest in buying the Gilman Building at the same time Welty was stepping up to acquire it, NEOtrans reported in 2021.
The reasoning, according to sources who spoke to NEOtrans on the condition of anonymity, was that the global coatings giant wanted to someday develop a consistent form of mixed-use buildings along St. Clair and the Gilman did not offer a design it wanted to emulate.
Julie Young, Sherwin-Williams’ vice president of global corporate communications, did not respond to an e-mail from NEOtrans prior to publication of this article. The e-mail asked if the company was interested in acquiring 1350 W. 3rd.
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