First Look: New Downtown Hilton Offers Stunning Views of Downtown, Lake Erie
By Steven Litt, The Plain Dealer
CLEVELAND, Ohio – Even the worst views in the rising Hilton Cleveland Downtown Hotel are pretty amazing.
From the seventh floor, which includes the lowest level of guestrooms plus a gym and a 45-foot pool, you can survey vistas of Lake Erie, the green expanse of the downtown Mall, and the modern-style office towers that march down East Ninth Street from Lakeside Avenue to the Gateway sports complex a mile to the south.
A hardhat tour on Friday of the 32-story, $276 million project, now under construction, shows that there may not be a bad vista in the house. And the higher you go, the better it gets.
Located off Lakeside Avenue at the northwest corner of the city's historic downtown Mall, the hotel, designed by the Atlanta architecture firm of Cooper Carry, is poised to capture some of the most stunning views in the city.
And because an as-yet unnamed bar near the top of the hotel will be open to the public, the highest and possibly best views will be closer to Lake Erie and more accessible than views from the private office aeries in the Key Tower, the Terminal Tower and the 200 Public Square tower, located a couple of blocks south.
"There are going to be views here that are very unique," Jeffrey Appelbaum, the Cleveland lawyer overseeing the project for the county, said during Friday's tour.
On time and budget
Appelbaum reported recently to County Council that the project is on budget and on schedule for completion in time for the Republican National Convention in 2016.
As of Friday, the hotel's service and passenger elevator towers had reached 26 stories. The floor levels of the hotel guestroom tower, which are rising up around the elevator towers, had reached 20 stories.
The reflective, blue-glass facades on the hotel's "curtain wall" facade, have reached about halfway up the 20 stories, like a shiny sleeve rising in slow motion.
And inside the five-level "podium," the blocky structure that extends west from the tower toward Ontario Street, the hotel lobby, restaurant, bar and junior and main ballrooms (15,000 and 22,000 square feet, respectively) are taking shape.
Construction machines beeped and whirred Friday across dusty, raw concrete floors amid the whine and buzz of power tools. Workers were hanging pipes and electrical conduit and framing walls with steel studs and blue-colored sheetrock panels designed to be water- and mold-resistant.
"It gives you a good sense of the scale of it, now that the walls [of the junior ballroom] are boarded," said Jason Rhodebeck, a project manager for Turner Construction Co., which is leading the hotel construction.
Financed by Cuyahoga County, the hotel grew out of a 2013 accord between Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson and then-County Executive Ed FitzGerald.
They agreed to use excess cash from the quarter-percent sales-tax increase levied by the county to pay for the new, $465 million downtown convention center and adjacent Global Center for Health Innovation to finance additional downtown projects, including the convention hotel.
Seamless connections
The hotel, convention center and global center are designed to connect to one another below grade, creating a unified complex intended to encourage convention and hotel bookings in a self-reinforcing virtuous cycle.
Whether that happens, and whether the downtown convention complex will produce the predicted economic benefits, remains to be seen.
What's clear now is that the hotel tower, which is rising on the former site of the decrepit and outmoded county administrative offices, is completing the city's historic Group Plan District, an historic cluster of early 20th-century neoclassical government and civic buildings.
It's possible from up high to look east and to admire those earlier landmarks, including the Cuyahoga County Courthouse, built in 1912; City Hall, built in 1916; Public Auditorium, finished in 1922; and the Cleveland Public Library, finished in 1925.
Appelbaum said he has heard from a number of critics that views on the west side of the hotel, which face across Ontario Street to the 26-story, Brutalist-style Justice Center Tower, finished in 1976, would be second-rate.
He disputes that.
"Even on this side, the Justice Center is not as imposing as some would have expected," Appelbaum said. "We're far back, so it's a small slice of the view plane."
Cleveland has plenty of troubles, including its declining population, persistent poverty and the legal and policy struggles over how its police use force.
But the views from the hotel present the city's flattering side, which it hopes will help attract visitors. Simply by existing, those views demonstrate an ability to move a big construction project to completion.
"There were some people who didn't believe we were going to build this thing," Appelbaum said of the hotel. "But it's here."