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A proposed boutique hotel for Cleveland’s Ohio City neighborhood was significantly redesigned after conceptual plans were first presented to the city’s Landmarks Commission six months ago. Members of that same commission praised those changes and the additional design and material details that were presented today by the hotel’s development team.
The result, the team and commission members said, is a shorter, more attractive and more cost-effective hotel. It would rise on a surface parking lot owned by Ohio City Inc. at 1960 W. 26th St. at the northwest corner with Lorain Avenue.
And the team, led by Dan Whalen’s Places Development, revealed the hotel’s operator — Marriott’s Tribute Portfolio brand, a premium boutique hotel with independent owners who provide a high-level of design and comfort. Whalen, an Ohio City resident who has experience in hospitality management, said he would continue to be involved with the hotel after it is built.
Development team members will return in the coming weeks to the commission with a plan for final approval, providing additional details and a transportation demand management plan to provide less parking than would be required under the building code. Whalen also will likely make a separate request — to remove the existing lot’s parking booths and trash bins and prepare the site for construction.
The 129-room, seven-story hotel will measure 98,931 square feet and just shy of 89 feet tall — shorter than the neighboring, 10-story, 118-foot-tall United Bank Building. Its previous design was for an eight-story hotel but Whalen removed its second-floor parking level in favor of working out parking deals with lot owners nearby. Only nine parking spaces on the property remain for the hotel.
“We don’t see parking as an issue,” Whalen said. “I know in Ohio City it’s always a lightning rod. Parking is always the thing that, in a lot of ways, economically destroys the ability to get a deal done.”
For this project and his previous endeavor, developing Intro at Lorain and West 25th Street, he said he has learned that hotel parking demand is at the opposite hours of Ohio City’s parking peak. St. Ignatius High School and the West Side Market require two of the Market District’s biggest demands for parking — during the day.
“Parking is primarily a perception thing and is a finite period of time where 80 percent of the time, lots are 20 percent full and 20 percent of the time they’re 80 percent full,” Whalen added.
“I think, in addition to shared parking, this is an incredibly transit-rich area,” said City Planning Director Calley Mersmann. “You have the Rapid station that connects right to the airport and into downtown. We have really high-frequency and great transit on Lorain and West 25th Street. RTA is investing in those corridors (to provide bus rapid transit) and on new railcars.”
There will be several food and beverage venues within the hotel. The largest will be a 6,500-square-foot restaurant-bar and kitchen on the ground floor at the corner of Lorain and West 26th. It will also have outdoor seating along West 26th. A first-floor coffee shop also is planned in the hotel’s lobby whose main entrance will be on West 26th, opposite of Market Avenue.
Two more venues will be on the top floor. One will be 4,300-square-foot bar-lounge and kitchen whose space measurements don’t include a covered rooftop terrace. That terrace has an eastward view of the Market District and downtown’s skyline. Down the hall on the top floor, a 763-square-foot cocktail lounge is planned.
On the second floor, a 4,500-square-foot, two-story-high ballroom and pre-function space plus catering set-up area will be provided. It will have a large, L-shaped terrace overlooking Lorain and west 26th. Also on the second floor will be the hotel’s fitness center, plans show. Whalen said that when he led the hospitality offerings at Intro, hosting meetings, weddings and other events, they were often booked solid.
Among the hotel rooms, there will be 18 suites with nearly 400 square feet each and placed primarily at the corners of the building. At the north end of the sixth floor, an 891-square-foot presidential suite will be offered.
Whalen said that, since the hotel was first presented to the commission in December 2024, he and architect DLR Group looked at what he called “inspirational neighborhoods anchored by public markets” — Chelsea in New York, Fulton Market in Chicago and others.
“One of the things that I think this is a challenge as a developer is, when we’re building new construction, is making stuff not feel so commercial and really making it feel, for this location, part of the neighborhood consistent with the scale and the charm and the character of the Market District,” Whalen said. “So we really leaned into the heavy use of masonry as opposed to other materials.”
A notable addition was the use of glazed green brick on the exterior of the hotel’s first floor. Whalen said it is “a tip of the cap” to the glazed terra cotta inside the West Side Market. That and other design features, including depth variations on the building’s exterior, won a lot of praise from Landmarks Commission members and Ohio City Inc. which chose Whalen’s team to develop the site.
“We chose Mr. Whalen because of the high-quality project he delivered across the street (at Intro),” said Ben Trimble, senior director of real estate and planning at Ohio City Inc. “I’d like to thank the team at DLR for exceeding our expectations on the design of this project which was a major concern of ours.”
“We didn’t want it to feel flat,” said Brian Murch, hospitality design leader at DLR, on the exterior texture and its creation of shadows on the building’s façade. “So throughout the day, as the hotel goes from day to night and really starts to light up in the evening when the hotel becomes more active, I think that was the notion that we were trying achieve.”
Trimble said the hotel is needed to fill a void of supply between downtown, the airport area and Crocker Park. A hotel was identified as a need in Ohio City Inc.’s strategic plans going back to 2015 but hasn’t been successful in getting one built. Two hotels were recently planned in Ohio City but both were dropped with the Hulett Hotel being the latest casualty of difficult hospitality financing market.
“We think it’s vital to keep the ongoing growth of our district as well as to really meet the demand that we’re seeing right now in our neighborhood that is being filled by illegal Airbnb’s,” Trimble added.
Whalen also said this project will replace many of the cracked and broken sidewalks near the development site and bury the utility lines along Lorain and West 26th to have “a much better public realm and pedestrian approach to the building,” he said.
In partnership with others, he also is pursuing another development two blocks south on West 26th — a 109-unit apartment building next to the Carriage Co. redevelopment.
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