This single-level building at the corner of Abbey and Gehring avenues in Ohio City’s Market District will be home to a new Starbucks coffee shop at the near corner. To the right will be four retail spaces for small businesses. Renovations are underway (LDA). CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE THEM.
Large Starbucks will have drive-through, too
A shift to more chain businesses is under way in Cleveland’s Ohio City neighborhood. In February, NEOtrans was first to report that Chipotle is opening a store on West 25th Street in the neighborhood’s Market District. Now, we’ve confirmed that Starbucks has leased a spot near the West Side Market and across Abbey Avenue from the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority’s (GCRTA) Red Line rail station.
And based on the community reaction that the Chipotle news got, especially from those who love their mom-n-pop shops and cafes, the Starbucks “siren” logo won’t be loudest thing to hit the Market District. And we haven’t even gotten to the part yet about the coffee shop having a drive-through behind the building exiting onto Abbey.
The specific address for the new Starbucks is 2061 Gehring Ave., a single-level brick building that dates to 1946, county records show. Starbucks will occupy about 2,388 square feet of the building, according to a lease memorandum recorded in January with the Cuyahoga County Fiscal Officer.
Per the memorandum, Starbucks is leasing the space for 10 years with options to extend it for four consecutive five-year periods. A dollar amount was included in the confidential lease but not in the memorandum filed with the county.
This store is larger than most Starbucks locations which tend to fall in the 1,500- to 2,000-square-foot range. Urban stores are usually even smaller. And, according to the lease made with the Starbucks Corporation in Seattle, the store will have an outdoor patio on the north side.
Site plan for the Starbucks store in Ohio City with north at the right side of the image. The window for the drive-through is at the lower-right corner. These plans were approved by the city in January 2024 before Starbucks signed a lease in December 2024 to locate here (LDA).
Building renovation plans approved by the city’s Building Department on Jan. 2, 2024 don’t identify a drive-through by label. The memorandum for the lease does specify a drive through but it was signed almost a year later on Dec. 24, 2024. The proposed drive-through was confirmed by the property’s owner and developer Tom Gillespie in a phone interview with NEOtrans.
The building plans show an 11-foot-wide window Gillespie said would be used for the drive-through. It will be located at the north end of the building’s east side, which is behind the building. But the city-approved plans also show an unlabeled dashed line, apparently for a proposed curb or lane-striping, that veers away from the rear of the building near that window.
No significant physical changes to the site apparently need to be made to accommodate a drive-through, however. There is a paved area behind the building that is wide enough for two lanes of vehicular traffic and has an existing driveway apron onto Abbey. The entrance to that driveway is off Gehring, south of the one-story retail building.
“Yes, there will be a drive-through,” Gillespie said. “The larger store was one of our issues. Their (Starbucks’) new model is to have a very small space with fewer interior customers. I wasn’t going to have that for this neighborhood. That was important for me. And we’re going have four other storefronts going down Gehring, each with small spaces of about 700 square feet for small businesses like the Quonset huts in Hingetown.”
Called the Brennan-Hogan Co. Building, it was built 79 years ago as a De Soto-Plymouth car dealership. Gillespie received $410,000 in state historic tax credits in June 2024 for the $4.3 million renovation and redevelopment. He said he doesn’t yet have tenants for the four small spaces, but he anticipated that landing Starbucks as an anchor will help generate tenant interest.
The northeast side of the building where Starbucks will open is seen here from Abbey Avenue. It shows the existing driveway behind the building where Starbucks’ drive-through will be located. The large building beyond is the mixed-use Intro apartment building over retail spaces (Google).
Gillespie, who has developed properties along West 25th, acquired this site through his company Gehring Property Company LLC. His general contracting company, Gillespie Environmental Technologies Inc., or GETCO Inc., is overseeing the most of the renovations. Exterior work is due to be completed in June. Starbucks will probably open by the end of the year, Gillespie said.
A decade ago, city officials and Ohio City residents fought a proposal to build a McDonald’s at Lorain Avenue and Fulton Road in part because it would have a drive-through and 87 feet of retail frontage. It was in a pedestrian-retail overlay zoning district where such frontage is limited to 40 feet. While McDonald’s prevailed in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court, the fast-food restaurant was never built.
Several zoning classifications converge at the site of planned Starbucks, including the base zoning for semi-Industry, according to the city’s GIS mapping site. The property also has urban form overlay, pedestrian-retail overlay, a pedestrian-retail street frontage overlay, and even a riparian setback overlay. The Brennan-Hogan Building predates the overlays.
“That building has been largely vacant for the last 20 years or more, so while I don’t love national chains kicking out locally operated businesses as Chipotle did with Molly and Nolan’s Soho Chicken and Whiskey, at least Starbucks is going into an vacant eyesore property,” said Sam McNulty, who regularly strolls past the site on his three-minute walking commute to his office at Market Garden Brewpub & Restaurant, which he owns.
But he noted the site is a high traffic area for cars, buses, bikes and pedestrians with trains below. In addition to the West Side Market and GCRTA station, the $150 million, 512,000-square-foot Intro development is to the west. To the east, GCRTA and MRN Ltd. are planning a significant transit-oriented development with a plaza over the Red Line tracks and Greenway trail.
Renovations are underway inside and out at 2061 Gehring Ave. where Starbucks will be the anchor tenant with four smaller retail spaces available for lease (Sam McNulty).
McNulty expressed concern about the traffic and pedestrian safety here. And that’s not even because of freak accidents like the one that occurred on Halloween 2024 when an Audi crashed into Intro at a high rate of speed, injuring the driver and closing two restaurants for repairs for about 10 months.
“I’ve no doubt the neighborhood and traffic safety planners will oppose having a drive-through on this busy and curved intersection,” he said. “The safety hazards this would create will no doubt result in a huge spike in traffic accidents at this already dangerous intersection of Lorain, Gehring and Abbey.”
Ward 3 Councilman Kerry McCormack told NEOtrans he was unaware of the plans to locate a Starbucks here. He announced last month that he is not seeking re-election this fall. Since 2016 he has served Ward 3 which includes downtown, Ohio City, and other near-west side neighborhoods. Ohio City Inc. Executive Director Jane Platten also hadn’t heard about the Starbucks plans.
“The more I travel, the more I appreciate how unique Ohio City is with nearly all locally owned and operated businesses that you can’t find anywhere else,” added McNulty, dubbed the unofficial mayor of Ohio City. “Places like Solon, Avon Lake or Mayfield Road out east have no character with the plethora of enervating national chains that are always smeared across much of the retail landscape of the United States.”
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