CLEVELAND — Gwendolyn Garth has spent plenty of time looking up at the old Cuyahoga County juvenile justice center at East 22nd Street and Cedar Avenue.
To her, the empty building is another dividing line in a neighborhood full of barriers. A neighborhood that’s been cut off from Downtown Cleveland since the early 1960s, when a trench-like central section of the Innerbelt freeway opened.
“A reminder of racism,” Garth said Monday afternoon.
Now the historic building, which has been empty since 2011, will finally be razed.
On Tuesday night, Cuyahoga County Council is set to vote to amend a construction contract to allow the teardown. After spending more than $4 million to clean up hazards, including asbestos in the floors and walls, the county is moving forward thanks to a $6.8 million state grant for repurposing contaminated and underused properties.
The first wave of demolition – inside – is likely to begin in June. In November, passing drivers could see the building start to come down, said Matthew Rymer, the facilities design and maintenance administrator for the county’s department of public works.
“We’ve been working through this for a long time,” he said during an interview.
The demolition should be completed by mid-2026. It will eliminate blight at the edge of the Central neighborhood, where a handful of developers tried—but ultimately failed—to devise a viable plan to preserve the brick and stone buildings.
The project also will make way for a reconfiguration of the Innerbelt, including a new East 22nd Street bridge, flanked by landscaping and much more room for pedestrians and cyclists. The Ohio Department of Transportation will start that project next year.
Garth, a 73-year-old Central resident, won’t be sorry to watch the complex fall.
“I had a cousin who worked here,” she said. “I had a couple of nephews who were in here. … I adopted them so that they wouldn’t be caught up in the system.”
In 2022, she wrote a support letter urging the county to consider a proposal to raze the complex to make way for a park-like deck, or cap, over the Innerbelt by using part of the land to widen the East 22nd bridge – relinking disconnected neighborhoods to Downtown.
“This site has strong potential to serve as a catalyst for revitalization and connection for the neighborhood,” she wrote, “but only if the community residents and institutions can co-create best uses for the property.”
The historic juvenile court building opened in 1932, with four wings wrapped around a central courtyard and playground. The attached detention center, a boxy building next to the old Cedar-Central Apartments, was a later addition.
Cuyahoga County emptied the complex more than a decade ago, after building a new juvenile courthouse and detention facility at Quincy Avenue and East 93rd Street.
For years, officials worked with real estate brokers and the Campus District Inc., a community development organization, to preserve the historic building and find a new use. But every prospect – from apartments to a boarding school – fell through.
Rymer said the complex became a magnet for vandalism in 2017. Scrappers broke in and stripped off anything valuable they could find. The county ultimately boarded up the doors and put up a fence all around the perimeter. But trespassers still find their way in.
“There continues to be intrusion into the building,” Rymer said on Monday. “I see some new graffiti up there today that didn’t exist a few weeks ago.”
County officials agreed to pursue demolition a few years ago. In 2023, Cleveland City Council agreed to revoke the building’s status as a protected city landmark.
Rymer said the county plans to salvage significant pieces of the building, including a courtroom fireplace, a sundial, and a tree sculpture hanging over the main entrance.
Workers already have removed dozens of painted tiles from the old dormitories. Those tiles have been washed and stored at the Cuyahoga County Archives east of Downtown.
An intern working at the archives discovered that the tiles were produced by General Motors, during a brief time when the automaker had a tile division based in Flint, Michigan. The company made the tiles using the same kilns that fired ceramic caps for spark plugs.
Many of the tiles, adorned with animals, clowns, storybook characters and patterns, were hidden behind walls because of courthouse renovation projects, Rymer told a county council committee earlier this month. “We hunted for them,” he said.
The county hasn’t decided how – or where – the historic decorations will be reused.
The salvage work started during an initial wave of asbestos remediation a few years ago, when workers pulled up floors, peeled back ceilings and opened up walls.
Rymer said the remaining asbestos is hidden in trickier places, including the roof, window seals and basement utility vaults. Demolition will begin in those areas.
The county worked through the Cuyahoga Land Bank to secure the state brownfield grant for the project, as part of a major round of awards announced last summer.
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“For years, the building has been a nuisance,” Cleveland City Councilman Richard Starr, who represents the area, said in a recent news release. “People living around the facility have to look out their windows and see this eyesore. I welcome the opportunity to bring life, new development opportunities and motivation for residents.”
Once the building comes down, ODOT will acquire part of roughly 3.2-acre site for the Innerbelt project and the expanded East 22nd Street bridge. That county will keep the rest of the land for future development, in a neighborhood facing significant changes.
Across the street, along Central Avenue, demolition equipment is ready outside the former St. Vincent Charity Medical Center campus. The Downtown hospital gradually shut its doors over the last few years. Many of the buildings are set to come down, though one of them is earmarked for a new behavioral health crisis center.
To the east, the Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority is sketching out the future of the Cedar-Central Apartments, now called Olde Cedar.
County officials are talking to CMHA and the Campus District nonprofit about what to do with the southeastern portion of the juvenile court complex site, which isn’t likely to be available for redevelopment until 2030 or later.
Rymer said he’s focused on safety – and what will happen over the next 18 months.
“A large vacant building adjacent to a public housing area, to a hospital system, and to a major interstate – that’s not a good risk profile,” he said. “But at the same time, we’re working with the Ohio Department of Transportation and the city of Cleveland for the transportation and connectivity needs of the community. And it seems that this grant and this project are going to be able to align all those interests.”
Garth, an artist, has been working in East Side neighborhoods for decades.
Before the pandemic, she led a community initiative to paint murals on barrier walls along Cedar Avenue and East 22nd Street, over the freeway trench. Bright patterns and cheerful taglines still cover those concrete barricades, with messages about bridging longstanding divides.
“I would invite people: ‘Come, put a brushstroke on,” she said, describing a diverse crowd of participants from young children and college students to a local sheriff’s deputy.
Whatever comes next in that part of Central – from new roads and parks to buildings – Garth hopes it will heal more wounds.
“We always tear stuff down,” she said. “But what’s next? … When we’re talking about community development, most of the time, I think the establishment thinks about building buildings. What about building the people? I think we forget that part.”
