Downtown Cleveland has always been the place to be for Joe Marinucci.
It started with trips to the old stadium to watch baseball and to the Hippodrome Theater to catch the latest movies. “I always experienced downtown over the years,” he says. “And Cleveland has always been a passion of mine.”
Once Marinucci launched his career, that passion became a mission, leading to four decades of development projects that transformed the city from Playhouse Square to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, while also attracting thousands of new residents.
Marinucci’s career began in 1980 working in community development for Cuyahoga County and just ended this year (officially, he still remains on a handful of boards) when he retired as president of Downtown Cleveland Alliance (DCA), a group he’s led since the nonprofit’s inception 15 years ago. He also served as executive vice president, then president and CEO, of Downtown Cleveland Partnership from 2002 to 2006.
Downtown Cleveland was a very different place when he took the helm in 2006. At that time, the city had less than 10,000 residents — and office space had also taken a big hit. “We had a portfolio of vacant office spaces,” he says, referencing the loss of British Petroleum and LTV Steel. “That created a vacuum in terms of empty square footage.”
Marinucci and his team began a quest to convert old office spaces into residences and hotels. During his tenure, Euclid Avenue was wholly reimagined. “What you now have is nearly 4,000 residents who live on Euclid, as well as six hotels, which animate the space in a great way,” Marinucci says. “When you overlay that with the improvements from the Euclid Corridor project, we were able to fully transform Euclid Avenue.”
Marinucci is also credited with helping secure $7.3 billion of investment for Downtown Cleveland, assisting in bringing the 2016 Republican National Convention to Cleveland and forming the Downtown Recovery Response Fund in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Before joining DCA, Marinucci served in various roles for the Ohio Department of Development from 1983 to 1990, followed up by a four-year stint as director of economic development for the city of Cleveland under then-Mayor Mike White. Those were the years that laid the groundwork for landscape-changing projects like the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and Great Lakes Science Center.
“It’s not often that you get to work on those kinds of things,” Marinucci says. “Those were fun years.”
In 1994, Marinucci joined the Playhouse Square Foundation as vice president of real estate development. During that time, the foundation lifted its gaze from its theaters to the neighborhood surrounding them.
“We recognized that the theaters were beautiful,” he says. “But the reality was that the neighborhood really had not seen much investment since the 1940s or ’50s. We recognized that we needed more vibrancy — and we needed to control more of the neighborhood.”
So the foundation got into the real estate game, buying buildings and opening a hotel on Euclid Avenue, as well as what’s now called U.S. Bank Plaza. “We created a mixed-use neighborhood,” Marinucci says.
Art Falco was the president and CEO of the Playhouse Square Foundation while Marinucci worked there and now serves as a senior adviser of special projects. He credits Marinucci with pushing for business improvement districts downtown.
“It has been very successful,” Falco says. “Joe is understated, but persistent, and clearly is excellent at executing a strategy. Joe gets it done. He’s a doer.”
Now, as the city faces an uncertain future yet again, Marinucci is able to take a step back — and stay calm. While it’s true that the pandemic has poured fuel on the work-from-home trend, Marinucci knows the city can transition once again. “We’ve been through this before,” he says. “We have the foundation in place to recover.”
Specifically, that means housing.
“We have the expertise in place to take some of the underutilized spaces and transform them into additional housing,” he says. “We can pivot.”
Marinucci says 20,000 people living downtown — and the next goal is to bump that number to 30,000 by 2030. Marinucci is confident that can happen because other people feel the same pull to downtown that he has felt his entire life.
“It’s a type of environment you can’t find any place else,” he says. “Because of that, companies will still want to be downtown. It’s still a place where I can live and work without getting in my car. That’s the type of lifestyle that isn’t going to change because of the pandemic.”
That’s the kind of carefree exploring Marinucci plans to do himself now that he has more free time. He and his wife, Dani, have four grown children, all of whom live in the area. For his retirement present, they bought him a new bike and he’s out on two wheels at least four times a week.
Marinucci still serves on three boards — Global Cleveland, the Cleveland International Film Festival and the Cleveland Restoration Society. You can also find him watching the world go by with Dani at Collision Bend Brewing Co. along the Cuyahoga River in the Flats.
“There are a lot of cities that have a lakefront or oceanfront,” he says. “What they don’t have are the intersections of a river like the Cuyahoga. Those are experience you can’t have anywhere else in the U.S.”
He’s able to relax some because, after years spent pushing to bring the best to Cleveland’s core, he sees that we have momentum — and a plan.
“I think that downtown is much better positioned than it ever was,” he says.
