Looking north along West 65th Street in Cleveland’s Stockyards neighborhood, Tortilleria La Bamba y mercado is proposed to built if a permit situation can be resolved. Across the street to the left, another retail development is planned that would add an Ollie’s Bargain Outlet store (Onyx Creative). CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE THEM.
Ollie’s Outlet, Tortilleria La Bamba due
Along the southern portion of West 65th Street in Cleveland’s Stockyards neighborhood, a new round of private investment is set to reactivate the area with jobs and shopping activity — just as city officials had hoped years ago.
Ever since the old Cleveland Union Stockyards was shut down in the late 1960s, the neighborhood has struggled to reinvent itself while abandoned meatpacking plants and other decaying buildings dotted the landscape.
But that began to change when a former Swift & Co. meatpacking plant started to be demolished by the city in 2018. Unfortunately, the $3.6 million job wasn’t fully funded by Mayor Frank Jackson’s administration. So the massive, partially demolished factory sat for another six years until the rest of it was taken down.
By early 2025, the lot at 3241 W. 65th was cleared, seeded with grass, and marketed by the city’s industrial-commercial land bank. It didn’t take long for the 2.5-acre site to find a new suitor.
In February of last year, City Planning Commission approved plans for La Bamba Group to build a new tortilleria food manufacturing facility and retail mercado. The company has outgrown the current space it rents, just off Bennington Avenue near West 130th Street.
The site of the new Tortilleria La Bamba is where the former Swift meatpacking plant stood until early 2025. It was partially demolished in 2018. This is what it looked like after its partial demolition (LoopNet).
So its affiliate, West 65th Business Partners LLC, in June 2025 acquired the land on which the old Swift meatpacking plant stood. The acquisition was via a zero-dollar quit-claim deed transfer. The city had acquired the land for $105,000 in 2018, county records show.
According to city Building Department records, issuance of construction permits has been pending since last year for the new 35,184-square-foot, $7.1 million Tortilleria La Bamba. But no permit fee invoice was apparently sent to the project’s general contractor, Fortney & Weigandt Inc. of North Olmsted.
Paul Lewis, project manager for Fortney & Weigandt sent a letter to the Building Department on Aug. 8, 2025 asking “please provide a statement with the permit cost, we will process immediately.” Once construction starts, it could take about 10 months to complete, according to its permit application.
La Bamba Group was founded by Leticia Ortiz and her sister Enedina Ortiz in 2009, starting out in a 4,000-square-foot space in the Culinary Market Building behind the West Side Market in Cleveland’s Ohio City neighborhood. The company produces tortillas for Ohio restaurants.
An Ollie’s Bargain Outlet store like this on Broadview Road in Parma is planned on West 65th Street in the former Kmart plaza (Google).
The new facility will fill out the lot between West 63rd and 65th streets, with driveway access to both. The building will face south toward its parking lot with its mercado next to the parking lot and its bakery behind. A drive-through lane is also envisioned on the West 63rd side of the building, site plans show.
That pending redevelopment project now has a companion — right across the street at the former Kmart plaza. The shopping plaza was built in 1977 to replace the cattle pens of the old stockyards — once the nation’s seventh-largest stockyard. Swaths of automobile junkyards fill out the remainder of the site.
The Kmart store, 3250 W. 65th, closed in 2010 and was replaced by a Roses Discount Store, a retail chain for clothing, health & beauty products & housewares, plus toys, snacks & more. It has a companion store at that site — Roses Flooring and Furniture.
Next to it, at 3230 W. 65th, a Big Lots store gave way to Dollar Paradise Number Four. That store closed and now the 31,556-square-foot space is going to be renovated for $325,000 for an Ollie’s Bargain Outlet store, a growing retail chain, according to a permit application submitted yesterday.
The former Big Lots that became a Dollar Paradise store on West 65th Street will now become an Ollie’s Bargain Outlet after proposed renovations are made (Google).
“I have been in the neighborhood long enough to remember when this space was a Big Lots and Rose’s was a Kmart,” said Ward 11 Councilwoman Nikki Hudson told NEOtrans. “I am thrilled about Ollie’s Bargain Outlet moving in, and especially the jobs this means for the neighborhood as well as its economic impact.”
Several dozen new jobs are likely to be created based on its square footage but an official number is not yet available. The owner of the retail plaza is Fields Investments of Agoura Hills, CA which manages 25 commercial properties totaling more than 1.2 million square feet nationwide, according to its Web site.
In addition to the West 65th plaza, Fields owns Euclid Beach Plaza, 16122 Lake Shore Blvd., in Collinwood plus Glenville Plaza, 10310-10430 St. Clair Ave., in Glenville. In the suburbs, it has Sprague Square Center, 7768-7800 W. 130th St., in Middleburg Hts. The nearest Ollie’s stores are in North Olmsted and Parma.
“My hope is that this will continue to spur more business development in this plaza and the rest of the Stockyards neighborhood,” Hudson added.
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