Cleveland Clinic’s Main Campus $1.1 Billion Plan Works Like a Slide Puzzle

This article was published through an exclusive content-sharing agreement with neo-trans.blog.

If you’re a health system earning $18 billion per year and you want to build a new bed tower where your aging Central Utility Plant sets, you move the utility plant. But if the place where you want to build a new utility plant has a police station and a neighboring multiple sclerosis care center, you move those uses, too.

Such is the slide-puzzle real-estate world of the Cleveland Clinic Foundation. For the Clinic to be able to move those puzzle pieces around, they have to be moved in the proper order with the right amount of planning, patience and, of course, money.

Although Cleveland Clinic media relations staff said they don’t have any information to share publicly at this time, two sources who said they are familiar with the Clinic’s plans spoke to NEOtrans on the condition of anonymity.

The puzzle pieces began to move when the Clinic began building its $1.1 billion Neurological Institute three years ago. The new, 15-story, 1-million-square-foot structure on Carnegie Avenue at East 89th Street is due to open in early 2027.

Before its opening, the Mellen Center for Multiple Sclerosis, now located at 1950 E. 89th St., will relocate its care services to the new Neuro building. That would leave the Cleveland Clinic Police Department as the only occupant of the 93,873-square-foot building.

The first portion of the building, the roughly 13,000-square-foot police station fronting Euclid Avenue, was constructed in 1935. It was expanded and modernized by the Clinic over the decades.

But the police station will be moved, too. Plans were submitted to the city Building Department last week to renovate the closed Rite Aid drug store at 10090 Chester Ave. as the new Cleveland Clinic Police Department. The 2007-built store, set on Clinic-owned land, closed in September 2024.

The cost of renovating the 11,870-square-foot store as a police station is estimated at $3.5 million, according to Brian Roth, a senior associate at IKM Architecture based in Pittsburgh but with an office in Downtown Cleveland. He submitted the renovation plans to the city.

Ironically, it’s just two blocks west of where the former Cleveland Police Department’s Fifth District police station stood for 60 years at 10507 Chester. It was razed in 2020 to make way for the Circle Square development — specifically the 24-story Artisan apartments.

Once the Mellen Center and the police station are vacated, they will be demolished so construction can start on a new, larger, more modern Central Utility Plant. The existing plant, on East 90th Street just south of Euclid, is marked by a pair of smokestacks.

The existing Central Utility Plant, despite many upgrades and updates, cannot significantly expand because it is surrounded by other Clinic buildings. According to Karpinsky Engineering, the plant is designed to provide emergency power to 3 million square feet of inpatient facilities, but the Clinic’s Main Campus is growing beyond that.

Sources said the new plant will need to provide thousands more pounds of chiller capacity, more than 100,000 pounds per hour of steam capacity, and additional megavolt-amperes of normal and emergency electric power. The existing plant also cannot accommodate a combined heat and power system.

In a recent news release, the Clinic noted that a new utility plant was in the works but didn’t say where it would be built. The news release followed NEOtrans breaking the story that the Clinic was about to engage in a new round of Main Campus development.

“Cleveland Clinic is evaluating a range of opportunities as part of this planning effort,” the Clinic’s release said. Projects may include additional inpatient capacity, modernization of existing facilities, expanded specialty care spaces including neurosciences and cancer care, and improvements to the overall campus environment.

Specific projects involve two new parking structures, expansion of the Emergency Department with a Level I Trauma Center, enhancements within the Taussig Cancer Center, and addition of green space across the Main Campus. Sources add that a relocated hotel, new hospital bed towers, and a lab on Opportunity Corridor are planned.

The existing location of the Central Utility Plant is a favored location for a new hospital bed tower owing to its proximity to other Clinic care services including the new Neuro building, the to-be-expanded Emergency Department and existing buildings like the Miller Family Pavilion and Glickman Tower.

But sources say that, given the long time horizon between moving the Mellen Center/police station, demolishing them, building a new utility plant in their place and demolishing the old utility plant, a new hospital bed tower may not see construction until the early 2030s at least.

Thus, at this time, there is no specific description as to the potential size of the inpatient care building. The sources said recently that any new care buildings are likely to be at least eight stories tall to efficiently utilize space at the urban campus while also leaving room for creating some new open green spaces.

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