CLEVELAND — Tracy Taylor remembers when the Galleria on East Ninth Street was a destination.
Now the greenhouse-like shopping mall is almost empty. The Parker Hannifin Downtown YMCA, where Taylor works out, is a rare bright spot at the southeastern corner of the building.
But the energy on that block, in the heart of Downtown Cleveland’s Erieview district, is about to change. In late December, a local development group closed on financing to fill much of the Tower at Erieview, the heavily vacant skyscraper next door, with new uses.
It will become Ohio’s first W hotel, part of the Marriott International family of brands, with 227 luxury apartments upstairs. The office footprint in the building will shrink by about 60%. The plans also call for a spa, a rooftop deck and a restaurant on one of the upper floors.
“We’ve been waiting – anxiously – for this,” said Taylor, who works at an investment advisory firm on the tower’s 29th floor.
“I’m one of the people rooting for this place to really liven back up,” she added.
The project has been on the drawing board since 2018, when an investor group led by the Kassouf family bought the struggling tower, Galleria and attached garage. It took years to pull together the money, public and private, to make the math work.
“We believe in Cleveland. I think Cleveland, just every city, needs a place like this,” said Elias Kassouf, whose great-grandfather ran a news and fruit stand on the block at East Ninth and St. Clair Avenue more than 100 years ago.
The 210-room hotel is set to fill the tower’s lower floors. Upstairs, workers are already gutting vacant office space to make way for the apartments, which will also carry the W brand. Renters will have access to hotel services, including housekeeping and a concierge.
That marriage – a co-branded hotel and apartments – is a first-of-its-kind project for Cleveland. The foray into rentals is also a first for Marriott, which has for-sale W Residences in other cities, including Boston, Dallas, Dubai, London and New York.
“Located in the heart of Cleveland, minutes away from the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and the city’s most coveted destinations, the iconic Erieview Tower building is the perfect match for W Hotels, a luxury brand rooted in entertainment and bold design,” Sarah Khalifa, Marriott’s vice president of mixed-use development for the United States and Canada, said in an emailed statement.
“We can’t wait to see this project come to life and redefine the luxury experience in Cleveland,” she added.
Built in 1964, the Tower at Erieview was an anchor for an urban renewal plan drawn up by famed architect I.M. Pei, who also designed the Rock Hall.
The glassy Galleria was a late-1980s addition to the block – and a divergence from the largely unrealized vision for the broader neighborhood. The mall replaced a plaza and reflecting pool.
Now, aging office buildings across Downtown are finding new life as housing, hotels and mixed-use projects. That movement started long before the pandemic but gained more urgency – here and across the nation – in the midst of a shift to remote and hybrid work.
"Downtowns across the country are at an inflection point," Tom McNair, Cleveland's economic development director, said during a City Council committee hearing about the Erieview project last fall. "Coming out of the pandemic, I think it is critical that we find ways to kind of transform ourselves."
After renovations, the Tower at Erieview will contain less than 300,000 square feet of office space in two bands, near the middle and top of the building.
On the 38th floor, a new restaurant will offer sweeping skyline views. That space was occupied for decades by Top of the Town, a popular dining perch that closed in 1995.
“I absolutely cannot wait for the restaurant,” Taylor said. “We’re looking forward to some food options. Pickings are extremely slim!”
The Galleria will be the project's second phase – at an estimated cost of $20 million.
Conceptual plans call for tearing out the escalators and adding new ways to get into and around the two-level building. Renderings show dining and entertainment in a space reconfigured so that people can gather to watch live sports on big screens.
“You can have people under a glass dome and – in winter, like today – watching sports games, eating, drinking, celebrating the game together, watching the game live instead of being at the stadium,” Kassouf said during a recent tour of the space.
But right now, the tower is the priority – the springboard for everything else.
“You need people. Working, living and staying as a hotel guest,” said Anthony Delfre, managing director of Browns Gibbons Lang & Company, the investment bank that handled the financing for the complicated deal.
That financing includes federal and state tax credits for historic preservation. The tower gained a listing on the National Register of Historic Places in 2017.
The redevelopment also won state tax credits through a special program aimed at transformational, mixed-use projects; a state grant for asbestos remediation; and property tax breaks from the city of Cleveland.
In exchange, the developer is promising new jobs, along with tax revenues from people who will live, work, park, stay, shop and dine at the complex. And the project team signed a community benefits agreement with the city, touching on everything from minority and local construction hiring to support for area artists.
“Just to see everybody kind of come together at the end and push it over the finish line, it was awesome. It was an awesome feeling,” said Andy Wollschleger, chief financial officer of TurnDev, a local development company that is managing the project.
Wollschleger grew up in Northeast Ohio and recalls visiting the Galleria as a child.
“Being Downtown, with the glass ceiling, it was just… my memories of Downtown are that, really,” he said.
He’s thrilled to be part of an ambitious push to bring that vitality back.
Taylor, who has watched office tenants and retailers trickle out of the property over the last few years, hopes that push succeeds.
“It’s actually been kind of eerie, coming in here and it’s empty,” she said, looking at the blank storefronts and cordoned-off escalators at the Galleria. “It’ll be nice to see some new people coming in and out of the building. Some actual movement.”
