CLEVELAND — Brittany Orlando’s passengers come to the Cuyahoga River to mark life’s big moments – birthdays, weddings and other milestones.
As the owner of CLE Tiki Barge, she’s become an unofficial tour guide, chronicling a changing landscape where industry and recreation meet.
Rowers glide over the water. Freighters lumber by. At one bend of the winding river, workers are regrading a crumbling hillside to protect the shipping channel – and to lay the groundwork for a park. At another turn, new apartments are climbing skyward.
Then there are the pitted parking lots behind Tower City.
“What are we gonna do with all this land?” Orlando says, looking at a sea of asphalt. “There’s just so much potential. And I feel like all of our space here is underutilized.”
Now, workers are moving dirt for a project that will change that view. On Monday, the Cleveland Cavaliers broke ground for their new riverfront training facility, the first building in a $3.5 billion plan for 35 acres near Collision Bend. It took years of discussions – and an unprecedented agreement between the city and a private developer – to get to this point.
“It’s a huge plan, and it’s going to take a while to get it done,” said Jessica Trivisonno, the senior advisor for major projects to Mayor Justin Bibb. “But the amount of transformation that we’re gonna see on the riverfront is just, I think, hard for people to wrap their minds around.”
Bedrock, the real estate arm of Cavs owner Dan Gilbert’s Rock family of companies, owns a huge sweep of the riverfront and the ailing Tower City shopping mall. The company’s development footprint stretches from West Third Street and Eagle Avenue – where the Cavs will go – to Carter and Canal roads, with a layer-cake of parking lots and garages in between.
“It is the toughest site I have ever personally worked on,” said Deb Janik, a Cleveland native who is serving as Bedrock’s senior vice president of business development.
“You really start to appreciate the fact that this is a 100-foot drop. … You’re talking about 10 stories – minimum – that we’re trying to navigate,” she said, referring to the span between the rear of Tower City and the riverfront parking.
“We’re sitting at the bottom of the bowl,” she added. “And we need to get to that city on the hill.”
Three years ago this month, city council passed the first legislation for the Bedrock project. The developer unveiled a master plan for the site in late 2022 and has been refining that vision - and laying the foundation to make it happen.
Last fall, Bedrock and the city inked an overarching development agreement outlining the roles that each party will play. Since then, city council has signed off on a public-financing package worth an estimated $1 billion over almost half a century.
That funding arrangement will let Bedrock use some of the new property-tax revenues from Downtown growth to help pay for the project.
A sweeping tax-increment financing district – designed so property appreciation Downtown will fuel investments along the riverfront, lakefront and across the city – will cover part of the bill for public infrastructure. That includes new roads, parks and utilities, plus bulkheads at the water’s edge. The city pledged up to $400 million to that infrastructure work, before inflation.
Bedrock has already spent millions of dollars on site work and is pursuing state and federal grants to help offset some of the costs for the city and the developer.
As Bedrock erects buildings, the company will also get back a slice of the property-tax revenues created by new residential towers, offices, a hotel and the Cavs training facility. The money will flow from a second tax-increment financing deal for private buildings instead of public assets. That funding structure will not cut into existing or future tax dollars for the city’s schools.
The project-specific agreement will run for 45 years, starting in 2027.
“There’s a significant amount of public investment going into this project, but it’s all in that increment – the value that’s generated by the project itself,” Trivisonno said.
She said the city expects the tax benefits to far outweigh public spending on the site.
“This is a long-term project that we’re looking at,” she added. “How do we really transform the city? Not just today … but how do we do that for the next 10, 20, 30 years and, in the process, make the health of our city better?”
As part of the public-financing deal, Bedrock agreed to a series of conditions, including commitments to hiring minority contractors, building affordable housing and spending in neighborhoods beyond Downtown. The company also pledged to carve out retail spaces for small businesses and provide avenues for mentoring, training and apprenticeships.
“Not only is it a transformational economic development project,” Trivisonno said. “It is also, by far, the most ambitious community benefits agreement that the city has seen to date.”
A new conceptual fly-through video provided to News 5 by Bedrock shows some of the planned investments in public spaces, from a kayak launch and an amphitheater to a series of steps and ramps that will cascade down the hillside from the heart of Downtown.
The project will also include a riverwalk and other walking paths through the site, where Bedrock plans to build up the lowest-lying land, at points to 20, 30 or even 40 feet above where it sits today.
The developer expects to work from the eastern end of the curving property around to the west, where Bedrock owns the Sherwin-Williams Company’s old research and development center – which will be razed – and the historic B&O depot on Canal, which will be preserved and revived.
The entire master plan, which also calls for reimagining Tower City, could take 15 to 20 years to pull off. Conceptual drawings show 12 acres of public space, 2,000 rental and for-sale homes, and 1.4 million square feet of commercial development.
Janik said the biggest hurdles, aside from the complexity of the site, include timing and broader economic and market forces.
“But when the vision’s aligned and the partners are all working together, it does enable you to have certainty. And with certainty comes momentum,” she said.
At Monday’s groundbreaking, Bedrock CEO Kofi Bonner said there’s more to come – but he stopped short of saying what’s next.
“When we say something, we like to mean it and do it,” Bonner said. “And there are a number of really exciting things in the works and, believe me, we’ll be very excited to share those plans over the next several months.”
He stressed that the Gilbert family and Bedrock are committed to Cleveland and building on a broader riverfront plan, the Vision for the Valley, that city planners adopted in 2021.
“We absolutely intend to be good stewards of this fabulous piece of real estate,” he said.
For Orlando, who travels the river every week, change can’t come soon enough.
“Restaurants. Bars. Retail. Walkability,” she said. “I would like to see more people walking. Biking. Outside. Enjoying the six months out of the year that we actually get nice weather.”
She launched her tiki-boat business in 2020, despite the pandemic, and added her fifth boat this past summer. On sold-out Saturdays, the company runs 26 tours on the lake and the river. Orlando's captains have carried roughly 20,000 passengers this year.
“Everybody wants the ‘woo-hoo’ effect, I call it,” she said. “People want to be seen. So it’s anything where you get the ‘woo-hoo, look at me!’ effect.”
The new Cavs training complex is scheduled to open in 2027. It will also be a high-tech sports-medicine hub, open to the public through the team’s partnership with the Cleveland Clinic. And it will rise at the eastern end of the river cruise route that Orlando’s boats follow.
“It’ll bring more people to the waterfront,” she said. “It’ll bring more woo-hoo effect. It’ll bring more traffic for us. It’ll just bring a lot more to Cleveland.”
