Former Cleveland Medical Mart becomes what it was always meant to be: part of city’s convention center – Commentary (2024)

CLEVELAND, Ohio — It’s widely accepted today that Cleveland’s former Medical Mart, AKA the Global Center for Health Innovation was a total flop. The proof? It no longer exists. But the building that housed it starting in 2013 is still around, and it’s taking on a new life, starting today.

At an invitation-only event at 11 a.m. the nonprofit Cuyahoga County Convention and Facilities Development Corporation (CCCFDC) will mark completion of a yearlong, $51 million renovation and expansion of the onetime Global Center funded largely with public dollars.

The goal of the project was to turn the four-story, 11-year-old building at 1 St. Clair Avenue Northeast into what it should have been all along: a fully integrated part of the adjacent Huntington Convention Center of Cleveland, located beneath the downtown Mall.

The event will conclude a 15-year urban saga marred by flawed logic, civic hubris and too much deference paid to the Cleveland Clinic, which pressured the county to combine the Global Center with the larger project in 2009-2013 to rebuild the city’s aging, outmoded convention center.

The story of the Global Center and the convention center also exemplifies the profound influence of the Group Plan District, centered on the Mall and laid out in 1903 by Chicago architect Daniel Burnham and colleagues.

“Make no little plans,” Burnham famously said. The quote also says that “a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency.”

The placement and design of the former Global Center exemplifies the insistency of the Group Plan. But buildings can also change and learn, and that’s happened here, too.

A logical conclusion

Fully booked when it opened, the Global Center gradually emptied as tenants departed when their leases expired. It failed in a hazily defined mission to sell medical equipment, stimulate the local economy, attract medically-themed conventions and educate the public about high-tech medicine.

A short-lived effort by the nonprofit BioEnterprise to turn the Global Center into an incubator for biotech industries tanked in 2019.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, the Global Center earned revenue briefly as adjunct space for the Cuyahoga County Court of Commons Pleas. The county and the CCCFDC then decided to retool the facility so it could help boost conventions.

The $51 million renovation increased usable space in the convention center overall by 25% from 414,445 to 518,790 square feet, according to the CCCFDC. Meeting and pre-function spaces, which now drive bookings more than exhibit space, have expanded 55% from 189,445 to 293,790 square feet.

The biggest move in the old Global Center building was enlarging a 10,900-square-foot ballroom to nearly 22,000-square-feet. It now rivals the big ballroom in the portion of the convention center located beneath Mall C, the northern end of the three-block space.

The newly enlarged ballroom in the former Global Center occupies a former outdoor plaza on the Ontario Street side of the building. An outdoor terrace on the second-floor roof of the ballroom can be fitted with a tent to provide shelter for outdoor events.

Onetime showrooms designed for the Global Center have been transformed into flexible meeting spaces divisible with movable wall panels. The facility now has its own kitchen, plus many more bathrooms, plenty of high tech audio visual equipment and lounges designed to capture views of the Mall and Lake Erie. The four-story atrium lobby in the heart of the building now has an escalator on its north side, and a grand staircase on the south side.

As I saw during a recent visit, the building is easy and intuitive to navigate and filled with natural light. Its glassy interiors offer a clear sense of orientation with views of some of Cleveland’s most beautiful downtown buildings and landscapes.

A chance for a boost

The $51 million project has erased the distinction between the convention center and the former Global Center. If it helps to keep the convention center full, it will boost the city’s economy. Certainly, that’s the hope.

Convention centers are loss leaders. They run deficits but contribute to regional economies by luring visitors and filling hotels. Numerous urban scholars dispute the wisdom of running a convention center, but cities across the U.S. are investing in them to stay competitive. Cleveland and Cuyahoga County, which owns the Huntington convention center, have chosen to stay in the game.

The Cleveland center suffered a severe drop in business during the pandemic but has recovered somewhat. In 2023 it hosted 101 events with attendance of 187,241 – down from a record 204 events and attendance of 319,000 in 2019, as cleveland.com and Plain Dealer Travel Editor Susan Glaser reported earlier this year.

Cuyahoga County supports the facility through net annual payments of $5.4 million a year from the county’s general fund. The return on that investment is measured in economic impact, calculated by attendance and hotel room nights.

In 2023, the convention center ran a $3 million deficit but reported economic impact of $102 million, according to data provided by Ron King, its general manager. Over the past decade, the total impact has been $1.1 billion.

King expects convention bookings to keep growing. Even before it has opened, the former Global Center is booked for 63 events through 2030, of which 44 will occur through 2026 according to the CCCFDC.

The first paying event is the Aug. 10 annual meeting of the American Society of Association Executives, a kind of who’s-who of the convention industry, which is expected to spur additional bookings through word of mouth.

Urban DNA

Cuyahoga County originally budgeted $465 million to build the Global Center and the new convention center through bonds backed by a quarter-cent increase in the sales tax approved by county commissioners without a vote by residents. The project was completed on time and slightly under budget. Debt payments of roughly $26 million a year expire in 2027.

The county also issued $30.6 million in bonds to help pay for the building’s new renovation and expansion of the building. Other county and federal sources, including money from the American Rescue Plan Act, plus naming rights and funds from the CCCFDC made up the balance.

The county and the CCCFDC have agreed to split the debt obligation on the borrowing evenly at about $24.3 million each.

So how much did the failure of the Global Center cost the county? It would take an accountant and a historian to disentangle its pluses and minuses from those of the convention center over the past decade because the two have always been intertwined. They share lobby spaces, a pedestrian ramp, escalators, offices, utilities and a security office.

While the Global Center experiment could be considered a waste of time and money, the building that contained it is a different story, architecturally speaking. It has always made sense as a component of the convention center and as part of the Group Plan District. In a sense, Burnham’s plan required something of its size to be built on the west side of the Mall.

The Group Plan called for a downtown civic and government center with neoclassical buildings rising around the 15-acre Mall — a scaled down version of the National Mall in Washington, D.C., on which Burnham also worked in 1902.

By the early 1930s, most of the buildings in the plan had been built, including City Hall, Public Auditorium and the Cleveland Public Library. A city-owned convention center exhibit hall and parking garage was built under the middle section of the Mall in 1964 and attached to the lower level of Public Auditorium south of City Hall at Lakeside Avenue.

Elected officials, civic and business leaders knew by the early 2000s that the old convention center was aging badly and had to be replaced. They explored a half dozen other sites including the Cuyahoga riverfront and the downtown lakefront. All were awful and would have precluded better possibilities, such as the new Sherwin Williams skyscraper in the Warehouse District, and the Bedrock riverfront project.

Scouring the box

The best option for the convention center was to “scour the box” by digging up the Mall and building a new center on the same spot. To build elsewhere “would have meant allowing the old facility to rot, leaving the Mall in a permanent state of decay,” said Jeff Appelbaum, the Cleveland lawyer who has advised the county on the convention center since 2009.

In other words, Daniel Burnham’s Group Plan was speaking to a new generation of Cleveland leaders and virtually dictating where the convention center had to go.

The convention center was designed with a one-story entrance on Lakeside Avenue, but fire code and other considerations required a second entry and lobby. The most logical place for them was immediately west of Mall B and south of the architecturally bland administrative offices built by Cuyahoga County in 1956.

Again, the Burnham plan was speaking to a new generation of leaders. The need to build an appendage to the underground convention center gave the county a reason to remove an unsightly architectural mélange on the west side of the Mall.

The mess included a bland, eight-story modernist-style office building at 113 St. Clair Avenue, an aging two-story garage to the west along Ontario Street, and the one-story Sportsman’s Restaurant, squeezed between the two.

As part of the project to build the new convention center and the Global Center, the county paid Cleveland $20 million for the site on the Mall, plus $18.1 million to buy the three properties along St. Clair Avenue to the west. The owners of Sportsman’s Restaurant asked for $10 million but accepted $3.1 million.

Eccentric design that fits

Architect Rafael Vinoly, of Chicago-based LMN Architects, a nephew of the eponymous architect who designed the Cleveland Museum of Art’s 2013 expansion and renovation, knew he had to follow Burnham’s lead in the design of what became the Global Center.

The building is wrapped in glass and an eccentric façade of cast concrete panels and windows of varying sizes intended to evoke DNA sequences. The symbolism is obscure and doesn’t match the Group Plan’s neoclassical style, but the building’s general form echoes the height and bulk of the earlier buildings in the district, making it a decent fit and an improvement over the previous mess on the site.

In 2016, the county replaced its old offices on the west side of the Mall with the $272 million Hilton Cleveland Downtown Hotel.

With a revitalized convention center now complete, Cleveland, Cuyahoga County and the nonprofit Downtown Cleveland Inc. need to collaborate on what happens next, including activating the Mall. The Mall remains under the city’s control, but it has never been adequately programmed. It makes little sense to have a lively conference facility next to a perennially sleepy outdoor space.

Public Auditorium, excised long ago from the county’s plans because of a disagreement with former Mayor Frank Jackson, could now be more fully integrated in convention activities.

Bottom line, spending $51 million to renovate the Global Center and fix one of the biggest civic goofs in decades was necessary and not a waste. It made sense because there was no way to walk away from the building.

Allowing the former Global Center to molder would have hurt the convention center. Just as important, it would have undercut Burnham’s still influential Group Plan, which has spoken with insistency in Cleveland for more than a century, and as he hoped, cannot be ignored.