City wins compromise adding retail to garage for Playhouse Square apartment tower (photos)

CLEVELAND, Ohio - Playhouse Square agreed Thursday after some pressure from city planning officials to install a 20-foot-deep retail strip on the ground floor of a parking garage designed to serve a proposed 34-story apartment tower.

The agreement capped a back-and-forth discussion at the meeting of the Downtown Flats Design Review Committee over schematic plans for the $135 million tower, on which Playhouse Square hopes to break ground late this year for the project.

A revised ground floor plan for the Playhouse Square apartment tower garage shows how the theater district would reserve 1,900 square feet on the Euclid Avenue side of the garage for retail.Solomon Cordwell Buenz 

The tower would rise on the southwest corner of Euclid Avenue and East 17th Street.

The committee -which advises the city's planning commission - approved the schematics.

But the vote only came after the committee explored whether Playhouse Square would do more than install a row of shallow display windows across the front of the garage along the Euclid Avenue sidewalk.

Accommodating retail

Architect Devon Patterson of the Chicago architecture firm of Solomon Cordwell Buenz, which is designing the tower and the adjacent 550-space garage, said the parking structure was designed to accommodate 60-foot deep retail bays along Euclid in the future, if demand emerged.

But initially, he said, Playhouse Square was willing only to install the shallow windows on the ground floor facade of the garage, perhaps with video screens or other displays.

City Planning Director Freddy Collier asked in response whether Playhouse Square would consider building a multi-story "liner building" in front of the garage to hide it entirely and to front Euclid with retail and offices or apartments.

Art Falco, the president and CEO of nonprofit Playhouse Square, said that at the city's request, the organization analyzed the question with Hines, its development partner.

Financial limits

The upshot would be that adding a liner building with offices or additional apartments along Euclid Avenue would create a $10 million gap in project financing, requiring a subsidy, Falco said.

Additionally, the garage would have to rise from five to seven stories in height to accommodate additional need for spaces, he said.

Jack Bialosky, the chairman of the design review committee, responded that the apartment tower was well planned, and that recent changes to the design somewhat improved its glassy facades in comparison to earlier conceptual plans approved by the city in June.

"It does still appear flat to me and I wish there were more articulation," he said.

'The hill to die on'

But he added: "For me, the hill to die on here is what's happening on the street. I firmly believe there should be a retail presence on Euclid here."

Bialosky then asked whether Playhouse Square would sacrifice one row of parking closest to the street inside the ground floor of the garage to provide a single, 20-foot retail space stretching along its front.

The overall ground floor plan for the Playhouse Square apartment tower and garage.Solomon Cordwell Buenz 

"We could commit to that one bay," Falco said.

The committee asked Playhouse Square to update its design to show the 20-foot-deep retail space in its presentation to the city's planning commission for on Friday. The nonprofit agreed to do so.

Avoiding Erieview redux

After the meeting, Collier said that in the future, the city could require developers to line garages with offices, retail or residences along major streets.

The city, he said, doesn't want to repeat the example of office towers built in its downtown Erieview Urban Renewal District in the 1970s and '80s with attached garages that face sidewalks with ventilator grills or slabs of concrete.

The city could use regulatory tools such as "form-based zoning" to require developers to hide garages, he said.

"It's going to be part of the standard modus operandi to make sure developers and other interests understand that as Cleveland matures, we want to do this with the highest standards."

When asked whether he was satisfied by the compromise over the Playhouse Square garage, Collier said: "I would say the project is good. But at some point we want great projects."

Note:

This post has been updated to include drawings of the new floor plans showing retail along the Euclid Avenue frontage of the Playhouse Square apartment tower garage.