Tall & Urban News

Cleveland’s nuCLEus Building Will be Shorter than Previously Thought

nuCLEul photoshop
nuCLEul photoshop
14 February 2019 | Cleveland, United States

The proposed 54-story nuCLEus skyscraper in downtown Cleveland looks to be trimmed by half in images of the project that surfaced Wednesday, January 23, 2019. The new drawings showed a pair of shorter towers, an office building with 16 floors and an apartment building of 15 floors, both on a nine-story base that includes first-floor retail and eight floors of parking. They have a total of 25 and 24 floors, respectively. It’s a big switch from the lanky, Jenga-esque design of the building when it was first proposed in 2016.

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Cleveland-based Stark Enterprises is a partner on nuCLEus along with J-Dek Enterprises of Solon.

Ezra Stark, chief operating officer of Stark, said in an email, “This is an old version. We have updated it since then.”

Stacie Schmidt, Stark’s spokeswoman, said in a separate email that the company has had “hundreds of different models” but none will be confirmed until one is submitted and approved by the Cleveland City Planning Commission.

The project has languished for years, with the only updates being when Stark pursued financing for the project through the city of Cleveland and a proposed change in state law that would allow insurance companies that invest in mixed-use projects of scale to receive a credit on a state fee levied on premiums.

Ezra Stark has declined to discuss the project in any detail until the company submits it to city and Cuyahoga County officials.

The structure is proposed for a massive parking lot at East Fourth Street between Prospect Avenue and Huron Road, immediately north of Quicken Loans Arena.

The re-designed NuCLEus would be much stockier than the original two proposed, also on a massive parking garage. However, the program for the project is unchanged in both versions: 500 apartments or condos, a luxury hotel, 200,000 square feet (18580.608 square meters) of office space and 150,000 square feet of national restaurant and retail space.

The only element of the plan that’s been reduced — aside from height — is the parking garage for both towers. It has 1,550 spots in the latest version, compared to 1,800 in the original.

When built NuCLEus will join a host of newly built and soon to be completed skyscrapers in the city including Playhouse Square Foundation’s Lumen skyscraper, the late Nathan Zaremba Sr.’s Avenue Tower and Avenue Townhouse projects and Wolstein Group’s EY Tower and Aloft Hotel in the Flats East Bank Neighborhood.

For more on this story, go to Crain’s Cleveland.