On the ground floor at the northwest corner of the Northern Ohio Blanket Mills is the proposed location for a Neighborhood Family Practice community health center. It is the third and largest commercial tenant for the former textile factory which opened this year with 60 low-income apartments on the second and third floors (Iryna Tkachenko). CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE THEM.
Clinic to open at Northern Ohio Blanket Mills
Cleveland’s growing demand for affordable health care and having one of the worst infant mortality rates in the country is behind a new clinic planned for Cleveland’s Clark-Fulton neighborhood. Cleveland-based Neighborhood Family Practice (NFP) is proposing to open a community health center in the newly refurbished Northern Ohio Blanket Mills at 3466 St. Rocco Ct.., just off Fulton Road.
Although the new clinic will offer a variety of primary health care services to all, including a 1,000-square-foot pharmacy, one of its specialties will be for providing pre- and postnatal care. That is reflected in the amount of space proposed to accommodate those services, according to plans submitted to the city yesterday by design firm Dimit Architects LLC of Lakewood. It isn’t yet clear if this center will be in addition to the seven clinics NFP already has or if it will be a relocation.
“We are proud to already be serving the midwifery and primary care needs of the Clark-Fulton community at our existing sites,” said Kimberly Kowalski, marketing and public relations manager at NFP. “However, we are always exploring options to better serve our patients.”
Plans for the Northern Ohio Blanket Mills site show several public venues in the future community health center. Upon entering the center from the parking lot on the west side of the building, visitors would find a waiting room, lobby and children’s play area to the left. To the right will be a 730-square-foot centering classroom for approximately 30 people.
Centering classes are a model of prenatal care that involves groups of pregnant women meeting together for prenatal and postnatal visits. The groups are supported by a prenatal provider. At NFP, such care is offered under the auspices of the nonprofit Centering Healthcare Institute of Boston.
Four ground-floor commercial spaces at the Northern Ohio Blanket Mill are shown here, with the planned space for the Neighborhood Family Practice’s community health center shown in red and marked with a red star (Dimit).
Next to the centering classroom will be a 1,300-square-foot community center with enough room for at least 36 people to gather and sit at tables. In the midst of 20 exam rooms are planned two nurses’ stations, a midwifery team room, triage station, vaccine administration space and laboratory. Midwives provide instructions on many aspects of childbearing, including mother and infant care, nutrition, exercise and breast-feeding.
Rounding out the floor plan is a break room for about 32 people, medical team providers office, medical team support office, plus offices for the site administrator, midwife administrator, resource coordinator and other staff, Dimit’s submittal showed.
Total cost of improvements are estimated at $2.54 million to build out a 14,506-square-foot commercial space on the ground floor of the Northern Ohio Blanket Mills, according to Dimit’s building permit application submitted to Cleveland’s Building Department.
It is the largest commercial space among the four offered at the former factory built from 1889-1895 to make woolen horse blankets and carriage robes. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the 112,000-square-foot textile factory had its upper floors converted to 60 low-income apartments by Levin Group of Cleveland and the Metro West Community Development Organization for $35 million.
A clinic had been considered for the site for a long time. When the current project was getting started in 2016 and tax credits were being sought by Levin Group from the Ohio Housing Finance Agency, a spokesperson for the developer said the commercial space would be “ideal for a neighborhood health clinic.”
The seven existing community health centers operated by Neighborhood Family Practice are shown here, plus the planned Clark-Fulton location. The NFP clinic shown at West 117th Street will move west down Lorain Avenue to West 130th Street in the coming months (Google).
NFP, whose administrative offices are on Ridge Road, has been serving Lakewood and the West Side neighborhoods of Cleveland since 1980. Earlier this year, the practice, which is a Federally Qualified Health Center, announced it would move its West 117th Street community health center west down Lorain to the former CVS drugstore at West 130th. The move will expand access to primary care, dental, and pharmacy services. Construction is underway.
Last year, NFP said it would seek its first expansion east of the Cuyahoga River by locating within a medical office building next to St. Vincent Charity Community Health Center on East 22nd Street. The practice has 22,000 patients and has been growing a lot in the past decade, fueled by the Affordable Care Act and the expansion of Medicaid.
NFP opened its fourth community health center in Cleveland’s Bellaire-Puritas neighborhood in 2014 and it its fifth in 2015 at West 117th and Lorain. In 2017, NFP began offering dental services at its Ridge Community Health Center and moved to a larger location in Bellaire-Puritas. A 2019 merger with North Coast Health in Lakewood led to the establishment of NFP’s sixth location, North Coast Community Health Center at 16110 Detroit Ave.
Only one ground-floor commercial space remains available at the Northern Ohio Blanket Mills — a 7,300 square feet of loft-style, brick-and-beam, high-ceiling office or retail space. Although, based on how fast the others went, this space is likely going fast too.
While the new health clinic would be on the northwest side of the Northern Ohio Blanket Mill, this 2021 rendering shows the south side of the complex which has 60 low-income apartments (Dimit).
Metro West will also be one of the building’s ground-floor commercial tenants even though it is moving from just a few hundred feet away at its current home at the Lin Omni Square, 3167 Fulton, which was built as part of the blanket mills.
It will be leasing 3,208 square feet and investing $336,840 to build out the space for its new offices, according to plans filed in June with the city. Its offices will look out onto Paris Avenue which has 15 spaces of on-street parking. Another 12 spaces of on-street parking are on West 33rd Street. There are 104 spaces of off-street parking divided among two lots.
At roughly the same time as Metro West’s filing, another incoming tenant submitted plans to locate in the Northern Ohio Blanket Mills development. Little Steps Bilingual Enrichment Center will lease 7,950 square feet at the L-shaped building’s east end, also along Paris Avenue. It will invest about $914,250 to build out its space, according to a separate permit application filed with the city.
Little Steps is currently located at 4732 Lorain Ave. but is pulling up stakes to make way for a mixed-use redevelopment by Forest City Shuffleboard owner and developer Jim Miketo. However, Ramonita Vargas, chief executive director of the Spanish American Committee which operates Little Steps, cautioned that there is still much work to be done before a move can happen.
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