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Better times ahead: The long-vacant Ameritrust banking complex at East Ninth Street and Euclid Avenue, could be on the upswing if a rehabilitation plan by Geis. Cos. of Streetsboro is carried out well architecturally and financially.
(Joshua Gunter, The Plain Dealer)
It's too soon to tell how successful the Geis Cos. of Streetsboro will be financially and architecturally in their ambitious project to renovate the long-vacant Ameritrust complex in downtown Cleveland with apartments, a hotel and a supermarket.
But for now, anyone who cares about the preservation of important local landmarks ought to be pleased by this $250 million project.
That’s because developers and brothers Greg and Fred Geis have charted a credible forward path for an historically and architecturally important group of buildings on the southeast corner of East Ninth Street and Euclid Avenue whose future has been in question for well over a decade.
Once threatened with demolition, the Ameritrust Tower, the only tall building design by Marcel Breuer that was ever built, appears on path to revitalization as a hotel and apartment building.
The stakes are high, but if all goes well, the brothers could go down in history as heroes who rescued an important Cleveland legacy while fueling a downtown residential boom and making a bundle doing it.
That’s a far happier potential fate for the Ameritrust complex than a kooky and ill-advised plan developed by Cuyahoga County in 2005-07 to relocate its administrative office to the site and to tear down the 1971 Ameritrust Tower, the world’s only office tower designed by Marcel Breuer, an instructor at Germany’s famous Bauhaus and one of the 20th century’s most important architects.
The county plan, allegedly tainted by a corruption scandal that helped lead to voter approval of a new charter government for Cuyahoga County in 2009, was to replace the Breuer tower with a new administrative center designed by the New York architecture firm of Kohn Pedersen Fox, on the theory that it was impossible to renovate the older building as an efficient office building.
Architect George Browne Post designed the Ameritrust Rotunda in Cleveland with 13 columns to reconcile the building's interior with the odd shape of its site, formed by the acute angle of Euclid Avenue with East Ninth Street.
The county’s demolition plan never threatened the adjacent and much-beloved Ameritrust Rotunda building just north of the tower on the southeast corner of East Ninth and Euclid, a Beaux-Arts banking hall designed by George Browne Post, built in 1906-08 as the headquarters of the Cleveland Trust, later known as Ameritrust.
But Cleveland would have been a laughingstock if it had torn down the office tower, at least in architectural circles, if not the wider world of culture.
Enthusiasm for the preservation of mid-century Modern buildings such as Breuer’s is on the rise. The Ameritrust Tower is an excellent example of the Brutalist style, which emphasized massive forms in molded concrete.
The style is often derided as an expression of the paranoid, fortress-like approach to urbanism during the civic unrest of the 1960s, but opinions are changing.
Yale University, for example, won praise in 2008 for a top-notch, $126 million restoration of its 1963 Art and Architecture Building, a Brutalist masterpiece by American architect Paul Rudolph.
Francis Millet went down with the Titanic, but his colorful murals live on in the Ameritrust banking Rotunda.
The Geis brothers' ingenious plan for the Ameritrust complex could merit similar attention. In February, they bought the group of buildings for $27 million from Cuyahoga County, which was thrilled to get out from under the property after having bought from the Richard E. Jacobs Group in 2005 for $21.7 million and having sunk millions more into it for asbestos removal and other expenses.
As part of the new deal with the county, Geis Cos. demolished two buildings south of the Ameritrust Tower along East Ninth Street and is replacing them with a new, $75.5 million county administrative office, a handsome if understated eight-story, modern-style structure designed by architect Denver Brooker of Cleveland-based Vocon.
That project, at the northeast corner of East Ninth Street and Prospect Avenue is underway and scheduled for completion in late 2014.
The Breuer tower will be renovated as a 156-room Metropolitan Hotel affiliated with Marriott's high-end Autograph Collection, plus a luxury residential building with 105 apartments.
The Rotunda will house the prepared foods section of a Heinen’s supermarket on its ground floor, plus a wine shop and dining area on the second floor, and offices on the third level. The adjacent, 13-story Swetland Building, also part of the Ameritrust complex, and located just east of the Rotunda at 1010 Euclid Ave., will also house part of the Heinen’s, plus 100 apartments. These components are also set for completion in late 2014.
The plan makes sense at a time when downtown’s population is surging with millennials, empty nesters and retirees who have sopped up nearly all rental apartments on the market, and are clamoring for high quality neighborhood services, such as a grocery.
The Geis Cos. are promising to recreate a bank lobby window designed by Marcel Breuer for the Ameritrust Tower that was demolished during asbestos removal in the building.
Among other things, the Geis project could help lure wealthy residents back to the city from the suburbs to which Cleveland’s upper class migrated a century ago.
The project should also re-focus public attention on the Rotunda and the tower as an architecture odd couple that encapsulates the highest aspirations of two wildly different eras in history and design.
The Rotunda is a robust celebration of wealth and power and a reminder of the one-time clout of Cleveland Trust, which ranked as the 6th-largest bank in the U.S. in 1924.
Post designed the building just a few years after designing the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad streets in Manhattan, a global symbol of capitalism.
The white granite facades of Cleveland Trust are emphatic odes to financial might, with pairs of fluted Corinthian columns that strike the eye like the sound of a pianist banging both hands on the keyboard for emphasis.
The triangular pediments on the bank’s facades feature elaborate sculptures by Austrian artist Karl Bitter on the theme of “The Main Springs of Wealth.”
Inside, the soaring Rotunda dome is lined with a stunning, backlighted stained glass window often attributed to Louis Comfort Tiffany, but without documentary evidence according to Sandvick Architects of Cleveland, a consultant to Geis Cos. in the renovation.
The stained glass dome of the Ameritrust Rotunda is widely attributed to Louis Comfort Tiffany, but architects who have examined the building's documentation say there's no record of the connection to Tiffany.
The Rotunda also features a cycle of 13 historical murals by Francis Millet, who died in the sinking of the Titanic, that narrate the settlement of the Great Lakes region.
The Breuer tower is a period piece in its own way. It’s a tough, brooding and monumental structure with rows of molded concrete windows that are deeply recessed to provide shade, and a gigantic, square, cyclopean aperture cut into a band of polished black granite on its top.
Breuer won the commission for the tower at the same time he was hired to design a 1971 addition to the Cleveland Museum of Art, thanks to his close relationship to Severance Millikin, nephew and heir of industrialist John Long Severance, and a board member of the bank and trustee of the museum.
The Geis brothers and their staff, including designer Brandon Kline, who showed me around for several hours on Tuesday, brim with excitement about their project.
The floor plan for a 400-square-foot guest room in the Metropolitan hotel includes a sculpted glass shower stall and a generous sitting area.
Even if you discount for salesmanship, their reverence for the tower and the Rotunda appear sincere. They promise state-of-the art treatment for both buildings, and have come up with floor plans and interior designs for the hotel and apartments that emphasize a Modernist, open-plan approach very much in sympathy with the aesthetics of Breuer’s time.
In an especially nice touch, Kline said that the Geis Cos. would go so far as to recreate the glass and black granite window that once graced the banking lobby of the tower. It was demolished by Cuyahoga County when it hired contractors to remove asbestos from the tower prior to its planned demolition.
Elsewhere throughout the project, Kline said the developers would take pains to preserve as much original architectural detail remaining after the asbestos removal as possible.
The attention to detail is laudable, but it’s also required by the Ohio Historic Preservation Office as a condition of qualifying for $26.9 million in state historic preservation tax credits that are an essential part of the developers’ financing package.
Cuyahoga County applied for the credits for the Rotunda and the 1010 building in 2009 in a process shepherded by Historic Gateway Neighborhood Corp. to help facilitate the sale and redevelopment of the Ameritrust complex.
So far, the Ameritrust project is receiving positive reviews from the state, which is scrutinizing the plans for compliance with requirements for tax credit projects.
A typical floor plan for an apartment floor in the Ameritrust Tower shows how eight luxury units, starting at $1,600 a month for 850 square feet, would be laid out.
“I’m very pleased that both parts of the building, the tower and Rotunda are being rehabilitated,” said Judith Kitchen, head of Technical Preservation Department Services in Columbus.
She said, for example, that the developers have followed her requests that they preserve a bronze railing on a mezzanine overlooking the tower’s entrance lobby, and a cast-terrazzo coat check counter on the building’s second floor.
Still, the plans for the project are not complete, and accordingly have not yet been entirely reviewed. The developers have yet to release designs for lighting and signage, which could affect the historical appearance of the two buildings, and which will require approval from the city as well as the state.
Numerous details need to be resolved, including the potential addition of a staircase in the tower’s banking lobby where none existed before.
If such changes comply with federal requirements that they be distinguishable from Breuer’s architecture but sympathetic to it, no one should complain.
With help from tax credits, rising demand for hotels and a welcome demographic shift toward city living, the Ameritrust complex has a chance for a new life never envisioned by George Browne Post and Marcel Breuer.
That’s good for downtown Cleveland, and for the cause of historic preservation.