Cleveland Landmarks Commission OKs new Hessler Road apartments over neighbor opposition

CLEVELAND, Ohio — The Cleveland Landmarks Commission on Thursday gave its blessing to developers who want to build new apartments along historic Hessler Road in the city’s University Circle neighborhood over the opposition of longtime residents.

The commission voted 7-2 to grant a “certificate of appropriateness” for plans to build the three-story, 12-unit apartment building. It wasn’t immediately clear when construction could begin, though the approval is a major step forward for the plans developers Rick Maron and Russell Berusch have for the property.

The building, which will contain “micro units,” or small apartments that will allow tenants to move or hide away certain components to make more space, is slated to go on land formerly owned by the University Circle Inc. development corporation. The developers hope the apartments will appeal to Case Western Reserve University students.

It is also the site of a garage that the development corporation used for storage and, when organizers held the annual Hessler Street Fair arts and cultural festival, redecorated as the festival’s museum. Many of the street’s longtime residents, who organized the fair until it went on hiatus after 2019, sought to preserve the garage and prevent Maron and Berusch from building on the site.

To them, the demolition and new construction of market-rate apartments represented an effort to change the neighborhood’s feel. Its closely packed houses and brick streets has for decades felt less like other neighborhoods in Cleveland and more like the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, famous for producing the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane in the 1960s.

But their efforts, which included dozens of letters and phone calls to the Landmarks Commission, a myriad of social media posts and an online petition, was not enough to sway commissioners.

The 7-2 vote for the new building, accompanied by unanimous approvals for demolishing the garage and renovations to two small apartment buildings on the intersecting Ford Drive, came after a local design review committee declined to give its recommendation to the project.

However, the local councilman, Blaine Griffin, voiced his support.

“I think overall, this is a very interesting and unique proposal that actually is additive to to the district and really fills in a gap,” Planning Director Freddy Collier said during Thursday’s virtual meeting. “I think that having that investment and having the new residents be a part of the Hessler family, I think is very important.”

Commissioner Michele Anderson, who with fellow Commissioner Allan Dreyer voted against the new building, said she felt that the plans were too large in comparison to the rowhouses with which it will neighbor.

Chairwoman Julie Trott also said she felt that the 7,600-square-foot, 47-feet tall building felt large when compared to the neighborhood, though voted yes and encouraged the developers to shrink the scale of the building “to help it blend in with the neighborhood.”

The controversy surrounding the plans for Hessler Road heated up in February, around the time of a public meeting University Circle Inc. held to discuss the project. Longtime residents complained that they first heard of the project when the meeting was announced on Jan. 29.

That led to months of activism from the residents, now far outnumbered by the number of Case students who live on the street, who felt they were continuing a tradition that went back decades. Residents were behind the push to get Hessler Road and Hessler Court included in the city’s first Landmark District in 1975. The following year, they conducted rent strikes to force University Circle Inc., which owned several homes on the street at the time, to make repairs.

The nonprofit later sold five properties to the Hessler Housing Cooperative.

A contextual photo of a planned new apartment building on Hessler Road.

While some residents worried that the market-rate rents will cause their already rising property values to increase, others said the building itself is too large for the neighborhood, something echoed by Mark Fremont, an architect who owns property near the site.

“We think the building in general is out of scale,” Fremont said. “Now, I want to say there’s ways to probably make this building work, or a building work here. But this is not that building.”

Still, University Circle Inc. President Chris Ronayne characterized parts of the dispute not in terms of the size of the building, but rather alluded to the idea that some longtime residents may not consider people who travel to Cleveland from all over the world to study and conduct research who need such housing to be members of the community.

“Our view of residents, from UCI’s perspective, needs to continue to be broad,” Ronayne said. “It cannot be as, one person said to me – a rather offensive comment – the real residents. Everybody we consider to be a resident.”

Maron, who also led efforts to develop East Fourth Street and Uptown, and Berusch made substantial tweaks to the plan in the months following the initial rollout. They cut the number of units slated for the building in half. They also scuttled plans to build a parking lot on a piece of land controlled by a company owned by a member of Maron’s family.

Laura Cyrocki, a long-time resident who has led organizing efforts against the new building, said in a message after Thursday’s meeting that “though Director Collier talks about a ‘democratic process,’ it’s clear again today that the voices, lives and interests of current residents do not matter.

“The system is broken from our CDC to the Landmarks Commission, to the City Planning Commission,” she wrote. “Same story, different Cleveland neighborhood.”

Read more:

Developers propose smaller apartment building on historic Hessler Road in Cleveland following residents’ concerns

Apartments planned for Hessler Road leads to tension between residents, University Circle development corporation

Hessler Street Fair going on hiatus after 2019 event

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