This parking lot at the southeast corner of West 9th Street and St. Clair Avenue in Downtown Cleveland will remain a parking lot for the foreseeable future despite it gaining a new owner (NEOtrans). CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE THEM.
Future use of parking lot also ID’d
Last week, NEOtrans reported that one of the last large “parking craters” remaining in Downtown Cleveland’s central business district has a buyer. This week, we confirmed who the buyer is and what they plan to do with it.
The buyer of the West 9th Parking Lot at the southwest corner of St. Clair Avenue is the State of Ohio. The 2.3-acre lot has a street address of 1365 W. 9th St.
The State has a pending purchase agreement for the 350-space parking lot because it has long faced a parking crunch at its nearby Frank J. Lausche State Office Building, 615 W. Superior Ave., according to a state spokesman.
“Yes, the Ohio Department of Administrative Services (DAS) is assisting BWC (Bureau of Workers Compensation), which is pursuing the purchase of a parking lot for its Cleveland office located in the Frank J. Lausche State Office Building,” said J.C. Benton, public relations manager at DAS.
He said parking has been a longstanding challenge for both BWC’s staff and their customers who visit the glassy, black, 15-story state office building which has stood since 1979. The lot will also continue to be available for public use, he noted.
The property that is being bought by the state will provide parking for the black office building near the center of the image and which is partially hidden by the historic Rockefeller Building at left and the shorter Perry-Payne Building to the right of it (NEOtrans).
There are reports that a significant portion of parking for the state offices will be going away during construction over the next few years. Bedrock is redeveloping the area below Lausche for its 40-acre Cleveland Riverfront development. But Benton said the parking lot purchase is not affected by that.
“The proposed acquisition is not tied to any single development; rather, it is an effort to provide reliable, reasonably priced, and safe parking options for the Frank J. Lausche State Office Building employees and the public,” Benton said.
He also confirmed that the State does not plan to increase the number of parking spaces at the West 9th lot, such as by building a parking structure with two or more levels. It will remain a surface lot, Benton added.
After the construction of Sherwin-Williams’ nearby headquarters on a 5-acre parking lot and Stark Enterprises’ sale of its 3-acre Gateway District parking lot to Bedrock for Cosm and future mixed uses, this lot is one of the large swaths of parking left downtown.
Last week, NEOtrans photographed and briefly spoke with geotechnical crews collecting soil samples to a depth of only 20 feet from multiple locations across the West 9th parking lot. That spurred hopes that the lot would be developed by the then-mystery buyer.
Although it was marketed as offering a vertical development opportunity, the West 9th Parking Lot will remain a parking lot for the foreseeable future for the black office building partially hidden at the center of this image (NEOtrans).
Based on geotechnical work done at the Sherwin-Williams headquarters site one block east, historic brick and stone foundations from since-demolished buildings extend to a depth of only 12-15 feet in this part of downtown.
But Sherwin-Williams’ contractors drilled more than 200 feet down to bedrock to guide it in its construction of foundational caissons to support its 616-foot-tall skyscraper.
Since the crews gathering samples on the West 9th lot only went to just below the historic foundations in this two-century-old neighborhood, it appears that work was done only to confirm the stability of the site to continue parking there.
Because the State is buying the valuable land, and governments don’t pay property taxes, that action will take it off the tax rolls. The tax revenue loss would be significant.
Cuyahoga County had appraised the nine parcels that comprise the parking lot in total at $8.96 million which generated $361,111.83 last year for the county, library systems and the Cleveland Metroparks, county records show.
A dozen years ago, Stark Enterprises bought the West 9th Parking Lot, outlined in red, in the Warehouse District with the intent of developing it (Stark).
The parking lot has been owned since 2014 by an affiliate of Cleveland-based real estate firm Stark Enterprises and operated by LAZ Parking. Stark bought the land for $9.5 million. Terms of the pending deal with the state, which hasn’t yet closed, aren’t yet publicly available.
Since the completion of the Sherwin-Williams headquarters, which has only a 920-space garage for its 3,000-plus employees, demand for parking in the Warehouse District has increased. K&D Group plans to build a 500-space garage as part of its Rockefeller Building redevelopment.
The property was twice listed for sale since 2019 by Cushman & Wakefield CRESCO of Independence. Its Principal Rico Pietro as well as Stark Enterprises Vice President of Marketing and Communications Stacie Schmidt declined to comment about the pending deal.
Stark had hoped to develop the site with mixed use, like residential or offices over ground-floor retail with a possible floor of indoor parking in between, which was consistent with past masterplans by the nonprofit Historic Warehouse District Corp.
But no formal plans for developing the lot were ever revealed publicly. Downtown Cleveland Inc President & CEO Michael Deemer. and Ward 8 Councilwoman Stephanie Howse-Jones did not respond to NEOtrans’ inquiries seeking comment about the state’s pending purchase.
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