A successful business finds an unmet need in a market and fills it. According to Places Development founder and Managing Principal Dan Whalen, the lack of a hotel west of Downtown Cleveland to near Hopkins International Airport is just such a gap in the market. To fill that void, he is submitting plans for a new, eight-story boutique hotel at 1960 W. 26th St. in the Ohio City neighborhood.
The site is currently a 90-space parking lot and surrounded by things to see and do. To the west is St. Ignatius High School which is undergoing a $40 million expansion of its athletic facilities. Those facilities host teams and visitors who often need overnight lodging.
To the east is the West Side Market plus the event facilities of Intro. To the north is Mitchell’s Ice Cream Kitchen & Shop and the Great Lakes Brewing Company microbrewery, both popular tourist venues.
But filling that gap has proved to be a challenge for others who have come before and come up short. Last month, partners seeking to build Bridgeworks in Ohio City dropped from their plans a 132-room Cleveland Motto By Hilton hotel and instead are pursuing a residential-only project.
Graham Veysey, principal of Grammar Properties which is partnering with M Panzica Development to deliver Bridgeworks, told NEOtrans the “Lending landscape is prohibitive for hospitality.”
Nearby, Ohio City Hostel owner Mark Raymond released plans in 2023 for a 63-room Hulett Hotel. It included six concierge apartments, two street-fronting retail spaces, a new ground-floor restaurant with sidewalk patio and a rooftop bar overlooking the planned Irishtown Bend Park. But so far it has not visibly progressed either.
That hasn’t discouraged Whalen. He said he gained insight into the need for a hotel from his prior experience as president of Harbor Bay Hospitality.
In the 2010s, Whalen encouraged Chicago-based Harbor Bay Real Estate Advisors to build Intro, a mass-timbered, $150 million, 512,000-square-foot mixed-use development at Lorain Avenue and West 25th Street in Ohio City. The building reached 95 percent occupancy before its grand opening, and it did so at top-of-the-market rents.
In addition to nearly 300 apartments and ground-floor commercial, the nine-story building has a rooftop event center called Truss. It has been able to attract more than 150 events per year. But it could have attracted even more if there was a hotel close by in Ohio City’s bustling Market District, Whalen explained.
“The neighborhood is screaming for something,” he said in May when announcing his new company Places Development. “This neighborhood desperately needs and would benefit from a neighborhood-driven boutique hotel.”
So, two days ago, Whalen rolled out his plans for a hotel in Ohio City to the Bridge Carroll Jay Block Club. According to residents who attended the meeting, they said the club’s reactions to the plans were mostly positive. Residents’ concerns surrounded parking as they often do at block club meetings.
Here, the existing, 90-space parking lot on site would be replaced by an 80-space underground garage in a busy area that would likely get busier with the addition of the hotel and its accessory uses. The block club’s Chair Mark Musson did not respond to an e-mail from NEOtrans seeking more information prior to publication of this article.
“I think the meeting went well,” Whalen said. “The neighbors are excited about the prospect of a hotel here, and are cautiously optimistic about impacts on existing parking.”
Proposed is a roughly 95,000-square-foot building with a 130-key hotel and three food and beverage venues — two on the ground floor and one on the roof. Whalen said it was too soon to reveal the name of the hotelier, partners or financing. But he said he hopes to start construction by late spring.
Additional features of the project include about 4,500 square feet of meeting and event space, 3,500 square feet of wellness facilities, and guest parking below the building. Access to the parking would be from West 28th Street via a ramp on a narrow strip of land that’s included in the pending purchase, preliminary plans show.
Construction costs weren’t yet available but will likely be in the tens of millions of dollars. The presentation included a pallet of architectural samples from other boutique hotels for audiences to consider. Final architectural details will be added to the design throughout the course of the public involvement process. However, unlike Intro, it will not be constructed of mass timber, Whalen said.
“Architecture and visuals shouldn’t be taken literally at this point, as we are in very early stages and will be refining design as we better understand the affiliated construction costs,” Whalen cautioned. “We will present this same package at Ohio City’s monthly community meeting next week.”
Ohio City Inc. (OCI) Interim Executive Director Jane Platten also did not respond to an e-mail from NEOtrans seeking comment. But it was OCI that made the property available at Lorain and East 26th, just one block west of Intro.
In Spring 2022, OCI issued a request for interest in two adjoining parcels totaling 0.83 acres it owns at Lorain-West 26th. Whalen, while still at Harbor Bay, was interested in the site and responded to OCI. He later had the response transferred to his firm and reached a purchase agreement with OCI.
Although the fate of the neighboring, space-constrained Great Lakes Brewing Company facility is still up in the air, the hotel is designed with the assumption that the microbrewery will continue to be there in some form. Site plans show access from West 26th and West 28th to loading docks for the brewery are accommodated north of the hotel.
The west side of the hotel has its Lorain façade reduced to scale to match the heights of neighboring, historic buildings. It is topped by a pool deck. Zoning for the site allows a structure of up to 115 feet tall to be built. This hotel is proposed to be just about 90 feet tall.
While the concept design has the rest of the hotel rise to eight stories, the lower roofline from the west side of the hotel is continued around to the West 26th side and then stepped back to the taller part of the hotel so the overall structure doesn’t overwhelm its neighbors.
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