Cuyahoga County Sin Tower
Situation:
1. The Cuyahoga County Commissioners’ faltering, ham-fisted plans to demolish Marcel Breuer’s Cleveland Trust Tower have left the County with a large piece of vacant real estate, including the Rotunda, Tower, and an adjoining parking garage.
2. The Mayor of Cleveland needs to move adult entertainment establishments from several parcels in Cleveland’s Flats East Bank to some other areas of the city to make way for a massive mixed-use re-development scheme.
3. The City and County are losing tax revenues due to migrating populations and businesses (One person leaves Cleveland every 50 minutes). The region’s economy is losing revenues to entertainment + gambling interests in neighboring states and provinces, such as Michigan, West Virginia, New York, and Ontario.
4. Cleveland’s East Ninth + Euclid Business district is generally a 9 to 5 zone of corporate urbanism, lacking the vitality necessary for a burgeoning downtown core.
5. Preservations, historians, architects, bloggers, and other activists want to save the Tower from demolition, preserving one of Breuer’s lone tall buildings and a jewel of Cleveland modernism.
Solution:
The solution does not reside in design. Rather, designers need to recognize the terrain of Cleveland politics and utilize tactics and strategies of re-zoning and re-programming.
The County should transform the currently flaccid Cleveland Trust Tower into the Cuyahoga County Sin Tower. The Sin Tower can host 28 stories of adult-themed entertainment and debauchery over 240,000 leasable square feet. The property can be zoned, regulated, and abated so as to serve as a sin-based business incubator for the Northeast Ohio region and the country. As it was said in the early days of Rock-n-Roll, “If it plays in Cleveland, it will play everywhere.”
Similar to their international counterparts, the County and City can regulate, contain, and control the businesses within their buildings, and more importantly generate tax revenues to sustain other programs and projects, such as the proposed Convention Center and Medical Mart (Cuyahoga County already collects sin taxes on alcohol and cigarettes for stadiums and community arts funding). The County would also generate revenue from patrons using the attached 1000-car parking garage. In order to maintain safety and control of the property, the Cleveland Police Department and Cuyahoga County Sheriff would place downtown sub-stations in the Tower.
Due to the nature of the programming, like casinos, off-track betting parlors, gentlemen’s clubs, bath houses, and other blue endeavors, the Tower would be open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, therefore generating businesses in adjacent vacant properties. The Sin Tower, located at the intersection of East Ninth Street and Euclid Avenue, will also be served by the soon-to-be realized Euclid Transit Corridor, a 5-mile public transportation conduit connecting Public Square and University Circle, effectively providing access to high and low cultural activities along a single transit line.
Architecturally, the Rotunda would be sensitively restored and filled with financial programming, hosting various bank outlets, automated tellers, pay-day loan businesses, and pawn operations. The Tower would maintain its exterior aesthetic, tectonic constitution, so reviled by much of the populace, yet so intriguing to the intelligentsia. The usable floor plates, which possess approximately 8500 net square feet will be built-out as needed by business operators, who would lease the spaces from the County. The interiors possess no real intrinsic architectural value, and therefore could be altered in any manner.
County and City leaders, of course, would be afforded the 28th Floor suite for their “use.”
