Cleveland postwar suburb gets a center

The first phase of Cornerstone, a $60 million town center in Parma Heights, Ohio, will open late this year or early in 2005. Anchored by Claire’s Folly, an 84,000-square-foot family entertainment center including a dinner theater, a brewpub, and a game area, the project is seen as “bringing a ‘downtown’ to an area that grew up around the automobile,” says Matthew Taecker, principal of Catalyst, a San Francisco firm that produced the master plan, streetscape, and park design. The development is under construction in a blighted strip commercial corridor in Parma Heights, a 4.2-square-mile, postwar suburb 11 miles southwest of Cleveland. To undertake the project, the 21,000-population City of Parma Heights worked with Leonard Corsi’s Greystone Realty Group and with Joanne Schneider’s Pearl Development Company and Schneider Management. In addition to 200,000 square feet of retail, restaurants, and entertainment, the 14-acre first phase will feature 110 housing units, most of them apartments above retail in a Main Street configuration. Townhouses will be arranged as liner buildings between a parking garage and an adjacent residential neighborhood. “We have a quite large retirement population,” says the city’s economic development director, Robert Verdile. “They would like to get out of the four-bedroom colonial and move into a comfortable, smaller environment.” The project’s 20-acre second phase calls for 20 live-work townhouses, 30 traditional townhouses, 40 small-lot detached houses, and a 1.4-acre park. Part of a big-box store containing Old Time Pottery will be demolished. One of the small parks to be created will be slightly depressed so that it can be flooded in winter and transformed into an ice skating area. A boccie court will help enliven the area next to the live-work units. The Port Authority of Cleveland is issuing bonds to financing the infrastructure, including two parking garages. GSI Architects designed the commercial buildings. Catalyst, with Structura of Cleveland, is the residential architect. u