Big highway-, rail-accessible site opening
A potentially large industrial redevelopment site is about to open up in Cleveland’s Cudell neighborhood, in a historic industrial district where there’s been a decent amount of commercial investment and expansion planning lately.
Weston Group, a Warrensville Heights-based commercial real estate company, is requesting city approvals to demolish two 121-year-old industrial structures at 10600 Berea Rd. The two brick structures total just over 183,000 square feet of space.
Jason Stump, Weston’s project development manager, wrote this week in a permit application that the work will “Demolish existing buildings to (their) sub-grade and make (the) site ready for future development.”
NEOtrans sent an e-mail to Stump seeking more information about the site and if Weston has an end-user identified for it. He did not respond prior to publication of this article.
Weston’s Berea Road properties are highlighted in red on this satellite map of Cleveland’s Cudell neighborhood. Interstate 90 is across the bottom of the image and the property is next to the Norfolk Southern railroad mainline between Chicago and the East Coast (Google).
Weston’s for-lease listing for the property, which was posted on LoopNet in June 2022, is no longer active. There is no for-sale listing available. Weston still has a lease brochure hosted on its brokerage Web site but there is no date on it.
It remains to be seen how big the redevelopment site might end up being. The subject property, a 4.11-acre parcel at 10600 Berea, is only one of four contiguous parcels along the north side of Berea Road Weston owns through an affiliate named Legacy Property Investments.
In total, all four parcels measure 7.3 acres — a sizable plot of land in the densely developed Cudell neighborhood. Not only is the site just 1 mile from the West 117th Street-Interstate 90 interchange, it’s located along a busy Norfolk Southern railroad mainline with freight service available from an industrial side track.
Aside from 10600 Berea, two other Weston-owned parcels also have structures on them but there are no pending demolition applications for them. One is to the east and was a former Cleveland Railway Co. garage measuring 35,360 square feet and built in 1920. East of that is a 0.66-acre Weston-owned parking-lot parcel.
This 1927-era plat and land use map shows the historical users of the Weston-owned buildings to be demolished were owned and operated by the Gair Cleveland Cartons Company. It was a Cleveland division of an East Coast manufacturer of pre-cut folding cartons for the packaging industry (CPL).
A 1.56-acre parcel to the west of the buildings to be demolished is more well known, especially to nightclubbers from decades past. At 10630 Berea is a 57,702-square-foot warehouse built in 1905.
While it currently hosts car parts retailer Roman Chariot, it was the site of the U4IA dance/rave club going back 20 to 30 years. Before that, it was briefly Gabriel’s Night Life gay bar and, before that, the Cleveland Connection rock and roll bar.
A message was left on Roman Chariot’s voicemail to learn their future plans at this site but no one has returned the call yet.
Historically, the primary user of the site was the Gair Cleveland Cartons Co., a Cleveland division of the Robert Gair Company. Gair founded the company in the 1880s in Brooklyn/Manhattan. He invented the mass-produced, pre-cut folding carton in 1879, revolutionizing the packaging industry.
Looking west on Berea Road, the Weston Group-owned property includes a large building, formerly owned by the Cleveland Railway Co., not identified in its demolition request. However, the application is somewhat vague on what is included (NEOtrans).
To the west is the Meriam Process Controls Co., formerly a Scott Fetzer company. At the end of last year, this property, at the intersection of Berea and Madison Avenue, was paper-transferred to Western Enterprises Inc.
The year before, in 2024, Scott Fetzer, Meriam and Western Enterprises were rolled into Marmon Holdings, Inc., a Berkshire Hathaway company. That is only one of many commercial changes that have come to this neighborhood.
Several weeks ago, National Foods Packaging Inc. filed plans and paperwork for a proposed major expansion of its plant at 8200 Madison Ave. Last month, Michigan-based National Storage Management Co. bought a self-storage facility at Berea and West 117th Street where it will invest capital dollars to improve the site.
Even closer to the Weston site, dessert-maker Camelot Bakery is expanding at 10401 Madison. The 17-year-old company won city approvals late last year for a 10,000-square-foot, two-phase expansion.
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