Thought this might be an interesting read. (remember, it was written 20 yrs ago)

 

Focus: Cleveland; High-Rise Completes 1903 Plan

By JAMES BARRON

WITH the construction of the 45-story Standard Oil Headquarters, Daniel Burnham's ambitious 1903 master plan for downtown Cleveland has finally been completed - but not in the way the 19th-century architect imagined.

 

Burnham, whose 1893 master plan for Chicago is considered his finest project, had grand ideas for Ohio's largest city - an elegant public square surrounded by tall buildings, a mall leading to Lake Erie and a lakefront train station. What he suggested was consistent with his belief that city planners should ''make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood.''

 

It was no little plan, but except for the public square and the mall, what Burnham envisioned for Cleveland was never built. And the railroad station ended up on the public square, not on the lake. But seven years ago, when Standard Oil decided to go ahead with the $200 million headquarters project, the architect, Gyo Obata of Hellmuth, Obata and Kassabaum of St. Louis, decided to take his inspiration from Burnham.

 

The new building, formally dedicated this spring, houses more than 2,500 Standard Oil employees and has seven floors of space rented out for $24 to $28 a square foot, the highest prices in the city. It came on the market during what city officials say is a downtown construction boom. According to Mayor George V. Voinovich, $1.8 billion worth of new buildings have gone up in the downtown area since 1981.

 

With so much new construction, some leasing agents say that Cleveland now has a surplus of office space. There is 17 million square feet of rentable space in downtown Cleveland, with 13.4 percent of it vacant, according to an annual survey of the office market by Peter Galvin, a local broker. But other brokers say the vacancy rates in some buildings are twice that. Among the office buildings that have opened recently or are scheduled for completion this year are the 28-story Eaton Center, a $41 million Ohio Bell headquarters building, the $34 million Northpoint office building and the 31-story One Cleveland Center, designed by Hugh Stubbins & Associates, responsible for the Citicorp Building in Manhattan.

 

''There's something of a glut,'' said Holli Birrer of Forest City Development, which owns the Terminal Tower. ''But downtown retailing is strong, so we are capitalizing on that.''

 

Forest City plans a $163 million renovation of the cavernous spaces on the Tower's street level, with 300,000 square feet of retail shops, as well as a multiplex cinema, a health club and 25 restaurants with 2,000 seats. To give restaurant patrons a view of the tugboats on the Cuyahoga River behind the Terminal Tower, a 600-foot section of an exterior wall is to be replaced by floor-to-ceiling glass.

 

The project is aimed at the same affluent customers Standard Oil hopes will patronize the eight-story atrium in its building, which contains a two-level gallery of shops, restaurants, more than 1,500 plants, a fountain and open spaces where shoppers can relax.

 

A new hotel is also on the drawing board. There is already one hotel in the Terminal complex, but Miss Birrer says it is not enough. ''Cleveland lacks the critical mass of hotel space to get the big conventions,'' she said. ''You need 1,000 rooms, so we'll build the 500 we don't have now.''

 

Until its employees began moving into the new office tower last year, Standard Oil was the largest tenant in a three-building complex behind the Terminal Tower. Moving vans are busy at the Tower, too. WCLV-FM, a classical-music radio station that has been broadcasting from a penthouse suite for more than 20 years, is moving to the suburbs.

 

CLEVELANDERS see all the activity as a symbol of the city's progress toward recovery. Like other cities in the nation's industrial crescent, it was hit hard during the recession of the late 1970's and early 1980's. A fourth of its residents left between 1970 and 1980, and the city's plunge into municipal default in 1978 hurt its reputation and its credit rating.

 

Hospitals and health services have become Cleveland's growth industries, providing 17,000 new jobs between 1977 and 1985, a 35.2 percent increase in that category, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.

 

Cleveland's turnaround has cheered Standard Oil, which considered moving elsewhere but decided to stay where John D. Rockefeller founded it in 1873. The company, which called itself Sohio until a few months ago, was the first of a group of related companies that dominated the petroleum business until 1911, when the United States Supreme Court broke up its holdings into 34 independent companies. Mr. Obata, whose firm designed the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, studied Burnham's sketches for Cleveland, then aligned the new office tower on the north-south axis of Burnham's mall. He angled it to frame Public Square as well, reducing the building's apparent mass by a series of facets that ascend in steps to the top floor. This gave the Standard Oil building a distinctive profile on the Cleveland skyline, which for years had been dominated by the neoclassical Terminal Tower and the glow of steel mills.

 

Some Clevelanders have complained that the new building's stark design is does not harmonize with the 60-year-old Terminal Tower, which is similar in size and shape to the Municipal Building in Manhattan. But others say it fits right in.

 

''The building is certainly not out of character with what the city long envisioned as a master plan for the mall,'' said John D. Cimperman, director of the Cleveland Landmarks Commission. ''To walk the mall is to realize just how well the Standard Oil building rounds out the vision Burnham had for its own public space.''

 

But it was a vision not shared by Orris and Mantis Van Swearingen, the former office boys who built the Terminal Tower atop a railroad station that served a commuter line as well as cross-country passenger trains. The commuter trains still go there, but intercity service from the Terminal Tower ended in the 1960's. Now there is an Amtrak station near Lake Erie, though not on the site Burnham intended in the plan he drew up with Eugene Carrere and Arnold Brunner.

 

''Burnham's plan called for passengers to get off trains onto a public vista,'' Mr. Cimperman said. ''That didn't fit with business plans. Also, I'm certain that Burnham came here in the summer. If he'd come in the winter, he would have felt the north wind off Lake Erie. I walk there all the time and it's cold.''

 

 

I was an intern at SOHIO at that time.  Sigh

Is Wim playing on Lexis?  How I miss free access.  I came across that same article while procrastinating at work by doing NYT archive searches on "Cleveland" sometime last year.

 

I like how some were calling the 13.4 percent vacancy rate downtown a "glut".

Yeah, and downtown retailing was "strong." Imagine!

Yeah, and downtown retailing was "strong." Imagine!

 

I don't remember it being so strong at TowerCity was tornup, but all of the floors at higbees were open.  I guess they meant the Galleria.

^ It was still pretty strong wasn't it.  May Co was still open too and most storefronts on Euclid were full of national retailers like Woolworth, Bakers, Thom McAn, Radio Shack....etc.  Though most of the storefronts looked pretty run down by then.

 

Thanks for that interesting article, the future seemed bright then.  And as I recall, Standard Oil purposely shunned tax abatements and help from the city, and built the building on their own.  They were one of the city's best corp citizens back then.

 

^ It was still pretty strong wasn't it.  May Co was still open too and most storefronts on Euclid were full of national retailers like Woolworth, Bakers, Thom McAn, Radio Shack....etc.  Though most of the storefronts looked pretty run down by then.

 

Thanks for that interesting article, the future seemed bright then.  And as I recall, Standard Oil purposely shunned tax abatements and help from the city, and built the building on their own.  They were one of the city's best corp citizens back then.

 

Yeah those stores were still open, but I am hoping for better stores to replace those as Euclid Avenue returns to her former glory.

 

Yes SOHIO WAS AN AMAZING COMPANY!  It was my very first "real" job out of college.  It was the one of only two companies I wanted to work for, the other being Higbee's.  My best friend of what seems like 101 years and I both applied (after interning for several summers) and were hired.  Then we became good friends with a coordinator in the group and we were the three musketeers..who knew nothing, but thought we knew it all!  I was a proud employee, of the Corporate Communications Group, which opened my eyes to a whole new world, especially since I was in Community Affairs--- AKA the "riverfest" folks and got to work with some amazing people in Cleveland.  I can still remember George Schilling, the guy who built an entire Terminal Tower complex out of empty Coke cans;  watching Gateway be built and having it filmed from my office;  the "move" from the midland building; working on "free" stamp scandal; getting dropped on an oil rig; and watching caribou cross under the pipeline, working with other company's community affairs groups to reinvest in the city.     Low and behold, 20 years later...we're all PR/Communications Sr. Execs...in NYC...for multinational companies.   Who'da thunk it?  When that asinine oil company moved to Chicago, a lot of young talent was affected and the ripple affect it had on other businesses was like tsunami.

 

One thing we've never figured out is why a Heinens "heiress" in our department wanted to be in PR or why she wanted to work?  Or why our boss is still a mid level VP after nearly a ½ decade of service?