Demolition of the vacated Martin Luther King Jr. Branch Library is due to yield a podium of ground-floor retail and structured parking topped by a multi-story hotel, seen in the city-approved masterplan behind Fenway Manor and the new MLK Library. The new library is on the first two floors of Library Lofts (City Architecture). CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE THEM.
Demolition up for city reviews on Friday
If the City Planning Commission’s Design Review Committee gives its blessing on Friday, the vacated, former Martin Luther King Jr. Branch of the Cleveland Public Library at 1962 Stokes Blvd. will be coming down. It appears to be a sign of the times in a rapidly growing University Circle.
Replacing it, according to a Circle Square district development master plan approved by the same Design Review Committee in 2020, is a wider Reserve Court plus a proposed podium of first-floor retail and several levels of structured parking, topped by a multi-story hotel.
Circle Square’s developers, organized as UC City Center LLC, said they are holding to that plan. They and library officials are asking the City Planning Commission to hold to it as well.
“The old library has no historic significance and is not, to our knowledge, recognized on any cultural or historic register,” noted the developers’ demolition presentation. “The city and library solicited the developer to consider an agreement to build a new branch that would include the demolition of the outdated existing library.”
UC City Center was created by Cleveland-based Midwest Development Partners (MDP) to help plan for and deliver the 4.5-acre, 1-million-square-foot-plus Circle Square district bounded by Euclid Avenue, Stokes Boulevard, Chester Avenue and East 105th Street.
The Stokes Boulevard frontage of the old MLK Branch Library that is proposed to be replaced with a wider Reserve Court at left flanked by a podium of retail and parking topped by a new hotel tower (MDP).
In December, UC City Center’s engineering consultant Susan Frankel & Associates, Inc. of Beachwood submitted a demolition permit application to the city’s Building Department for the old MLK library.
Cost of demolition is estimated at $150,000. The permit application notes that, once the building is removed, the site will be backfilled, graded and seeded. But that and a lack of construction permit applications suggest that construction of the retail-parking-hotel phase is not imminent.
On the other hand, infrastructure improvements such as the development of the Reserve Court alley into a wider throughway to East 105th offering sidewalks and other public spaces along it are in the near term. The old library is in the way of that public infrastructure.
“We are working to finish our previously shared master plan,” said Steve Rubin, vice president of UC City Center, of its Circle Square construction efforts. “At this time we have nothing further to report.”
In January, Cuyahoga County records show UC City Center acquired the half-acre MLK Branch Library property and the two-story, 22,632-square-foot library for $5.2 million. Those proceeds were used by the Cleveland Public Library board to help finance construction of its $21.9 million replacement library.
This view shows what is proposed to replace the old MLK Branch Library — a new, wider and longer Reserve Court with sidewalks, landscaping and public spaces, at left, and a ground-floor retail spaces with layers of structured parking and a hotel tower above (City Architecture).
Five days after MLK Day in January 2025, the new MLK Branch Library opened on the first two floors of the 11-story-tall luxury Library Lofts, 10555 Euclid Ave. in Cleveland’s University Circle.
Even though the retail-parking-hotel phase of Circle Square does not appear imminent, space may soon reaching a premium in the Circle Square district. UC City Center is pursuing its next building — the 24-story East Stokes apartment tower, also dubbed the Chester Tower in some planning documents.
Power Construction of Chicago, its general contractor for that tower as well as for The Artisan in Circle Square, will need construction staging and parking areas for the next phase.
The old library was built in 1970, two years after the civil rights leader Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. It was designed by Ward and Schneider, a Cleveland-based firm known more so for modern church designs.
In 2019, before development of Circle Square began, skinny Reserve Court was not a place where anyone would want to linger. The MLK Branch Library at right and Fenway Manor at left ignored it with their blank walls (Google).
In the spirit of MLK, the new library is open to anyone. But to some it is an anachronism. MLK advocated for places and programs that could help lift poor African-Americans out of poverty.
A library was seen as being aligned with that goal. But now being in the same building as luxury apartments, not affordable to many African-Americans living in surrounding neighborhoods, is concerning to some who posted recently in a discussion thread on Reddit.
Cleveland is a very different city today than it was when the first MLK Branch Library was built. It opened in the waning years of manufacturing’s dominance in Greater Cleveland’s employment scene.
It was Cleveland’s prowess in manufacturing over the prior century and its promise of jobs that attracted the Great Migration of African-Americans from the agricultural South, where mechanization was eliminating their farming jobs.
Interior of the old MLK Branch Library on Stokes Boulevard after it was vacated for the new facility on Euclid Avenue (MDP).
In 1970, Greater Cleveland’s three largest private employers were General Motors, Ford Motor Co. and Republic Steel Corp., totaling 40,000 jobs just among those three.
The predominant loss of industrial jobs to automation and the relocation of other jobs to countries with cheap labor left many Clevelanders, especially African-Americans, with difficult choices.
Today, the new MLK Branch Library is located in Cleveland’s hub of eds-and-meds jobs, the region’s largest employment sector. Rapidly expanding Cleveland Clinic alone has more than 50,000 employees in Northeast Ohio. University Hospitals is the second largest with more than 27,000 local employees.
University Circle is also the region’s fastest growing employment hub which demands new housing, hotels and retail. And where there’s strong demand, prices go up. But it also attracts more development to satisfy that demand. Circle Square is one of Greater Cleveland’s largest development districts in terms of square feet.
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