New Cleveland Foundation HQ Part of Bigger Plan to Uplift City Neighborhoods

By Steven Litt, cleveland.com

With assets of $2.6 billion and annual grants totaling more than $115 million, the Cleveland Foundation is known best as the nation’s oldest community foundation and as the city’s biggest philanthropic heavyweight.

Founded in 1914, the foundation exerts enormous influence on public policy, and urban development, and on charitable giving by other organizations.

But can it increase its impact based on where it does business in addition to the grants it makes?

The foundation, and the city, are about to find out.

Next week, the foundation will file architectural plans with the City of Cleveland to gain a building permit for a new, $22 million, 54,000-square-foot headquarters at the northeast corner of East 66th Street and Euclid Avenue, halfway between downtown and University Circle.

The foundation agreed to share the latest plans with The Plain Dealer and cleveland.com in advance of upcoming city meetings on the project.

The foundation’s move will take it from rented space in the Hanna Building in Playhouse Square, where it has spent the past four decades, to MidTown, a once-dreary stretch of vacant land and tired industrial properties where Millionaire’s Row mansions stood in the 19th-century.

Designed by the New York architecture firm of S9 Architecture, with VOCON, of Cleveland, the foundation’s new, three-story building is designed to embody transparency, open access, environmental sustainability and a host of other virtues central to the foundation’s mission.

But the project, on which the foundation hopes to break ground in December, is much more than a single building. It’s shaping up as one of the most significant urban redevelopment efforts in the city’s recent history.

The foundation sees its relocation as a way to leverage more than $400 million worth of related investments by nonprofits, businesses and academic institutions on 16 acres between Euclid and Chester avenues at the southern edge of Hough, a neighborhood still stigmatized by a 1966 uprising that left four dead and 30 injured.

Equitable rebirth

Rather than portray itself as a rescuer of Hough, however, the foundation aims to assist community-led revitalization efforts.

Working with a neighborhood advisory council, a youth council, and organizers of a new community land trust, it’s seeking ways to help build community wealth, instead of siphoning value out of the neighborhood or displacing longtime residents through higher rents and taxes in a process called gentrification.

In a neighborhood that has been suspicious of investment by outside institutions and developers in the past, the foundation’s efforts are seen as a welcome change.

"They’re being very intentional about how they engage the community,'' said Ward 7 Councilman Basheer Jones, who is thrilled by the foundation’s move.

Entrepreneur Mansfield Frazier, whose Chateau Hough Winery on East 66th Street embodies the neighborhood’s potential for creative revitalization, is equally impressed by the foundation’s project.

"It’s about getting people together and explaining what you want to do and asking for their support and input,'' he said. “This has been an inclusive process all the way down the line.”

(An upcoming story by The Plain Dealer and cleveland.com will explore community reaction to the foundation’s plans).

Sense of place

Another big goal for the foundation is to give Midtown a physical and psychological heart, emphasizing high-quality architecture, urban design and landscape architecture as accelerators of civic energy.

That’s important because after dozens of development projects worth more than $330 million over the past 15 years, Midtown still feels like a gray zone. That’s largely because the district hasn’t yet achieved critical mass, because much of the new construction has been mediocre in design quality, and because there’s relatively little street-level retail.

To make its vision a reality, the foundation and the nonprofit MidTown Cleveland Inc. quietly acquired roughly 10 acres over the past few years on two blocks west of the new headquarters site, which the two organizations hope to turn into a $400 million science and technology innovation district over the next decade.

Initial plans for the district call for 2 million square feet in seven buildings between East 66th and East 63rd streets.

The foundation, Midtown, and the nonprofit Jumpstart announced earlier this month that they had signed a memorandum of understanding this summer with Baltimore-based Wexford Science and Technology to build a mixed-use development in which scientists, academic researchers and students collaborate on ventures with established companies and startups.

By 2022, the foundation hopes to see completion of the first building in the innovation district on a site west of East 66th Street at Euclid Avenue, opposite the foundation’s headquarters, which is also scheduled for completion in 2022.

While still in the planning phase, the district has attracted a related nonprofit consulting venture, the Manufacturing Advocacy and Growth Network, aka MAGNET, to an adjacent property on the north side of Chester Avenue at East 63rd Street.

MAGNET announced earlier this month that it would move from its current home at Cleveland State University to the Cleveland Metropolitan School District’s former Margaret Ireland School, which the organization wants to turn into a high-tech manufacturing center.

Collaborative efforts

In addition to the innovation district, the foundation is supporting an extensive revamp of the 6-acre Dunham Tavern and Museum property, a once-stuffy and aloof historical site centered on a 19th-century inn just east of the foundation’s new headquarters site.

In collaboration with the foundation, the tavern’s board of directors is now reimagining the site as a vibrant neighborhood anchor fully connected to Hough, and as a regional attraction.

To aid the sense of connection between its project and Hough, the foundation supported a redesign of East 66th Street from Euclid Avenue one mile north to Superior Avenue as an ideal "complete and green street.'' The goal is to transform a crumbling corridor into a model of 21st century infrastructure that encourages further investment.

The redesign, conducted by City Architecture and Osborn Engineering under the auspices of the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency (NOACA), will link the foundation, the innovation district and Dunham Tavern to other neighborhood anchors further north.

Those anchors include Frazier’s winery, the Fatima Family Center, the upcoming new Hough Branch of the Cleveland Public Library, the reconstructed League Park baseball field, and developer Sheila Wright’s Allen Estates residential development.

​​​​​​​Wright plans to break ground today on the first six houses in a proposed project, north and west of League Park, that could include as many as 144 apartments, townhouse and detached houses on nearly 5 acres.

Focusing on neighborhoods

In many ways, the foundation’s move signals that Cleveland needs to focus on new ways to revitalize struggling city neighborhoods after decades in which downtown has been a principal focus of civic leadership.

In essence, the foundation is betting that patient, embedded, on-the-ground stewardship can reverse decades of damage caused by redlining and disinvestment in Hough and places like it across the city.

"If we’re successful this can be a model for other cities,'' said Sally Gries, chair of the foundation’s board of directors.

There’s powerful architectural symbolism in the foundation’s move as well.

In choosing S9 as the lead designer of its new headquarters, the foundation is elevating the visibility of the project’s lead architect, Pascale Sablan, the 315th Black female to achieve an architectural license in a profession notorious for its failure to advance minorities, particularly Black men and women.

Set on the southwest corner of what had been part of the Dunham property, the headquarters building will be a three-story structure framed largely with mass timber — a renewable resource that matches concrete and steel in fire resistance.

In renderings, the building’s design looks ruggedly handsome, with husky facades cladded in vertical planks of cedar that will frame deep-set, horizontal windows. The design recalls sturdy, early 20th-century factories that still dot the city’s neighborhoods.

In fact, the foundation headquarters will stand just west of the site of a former 7-story factory that Dunham Tavern acquired and demolished to expand the parklike space around its facilities.

The S9-VOCON design faintly recalls the industrial style of the old factory, but it has a sense of dynamism and movement embodied in its cantilevered second floor, which thrusts toward Euclid Avenue.

The building also defers to the nearby tavern and the open park spaces around it by stepping down to a plaza and lawn designed to act as common ground between the two facilities.

The glassy ground floor of the headquarters building will hold inviting community spaces including a lobby, café, a multi-purpose room and a conference center named for the late Steven Minter, former foundation president and CEO. It will have multiple entrances, rendering the building capable of hosting events even when the foundation’s offices on the second and third floors are closed.