City Planning Commission Approves Warner Swasey Redesign, Demolition to Come This Summer

Moody Nolan and Pennrose’s redesign of the long-vacant Warner Swasey Building in Midtown is a $52 million haul that will kick off with a demolition of two adjacent buildings this summer. Credit: Moody Nolan

The Warner & Swasey Building, that massive ship of red brick that’s been empty off Carnegie Avenue since 1992, is set to start its major redesign process this summer.

That’s what the City Planning Commission okayed on Friday, when it approved both Moody Nolan’s schematic design and a demolition of two adjacent buildings to make way for parking.

The demolition, which still has yet to receive a precise date, will include the razing of both Building 6 and the site’s sawtooth sheds, the semi-outdoor structure that’s long been popular with postindustrial photographers.

“They’re just not structurally sound,” Stephanie Hayward, a project manager at Moody Nolan told City Planning on Friday. “The feasibility of keeping them—it’s just not feasible.”

Warner Swasey’s sawtooth sheds, long popular with area photographers, will be demolished sometime this summer. Credit: Jeffrey Stroup

Constructed in 1886 for businessman Ambrose Swasey, the building housed manufacturing for a variety of telescopes and wartime plane parts. That production reign ended about a century later, when the company relocated 2,000 of its employees to Solon.

But a rehab of a hulk of a long-ignored structure allows Midtown to continue its itch to attract neighbors who actually want to live there.

Just a few blocks over, on Euclid, the new, $22 million headquarters of the Cleveland Foundation is aiming to be a kind of focal point of this new era—one flanked by the Foundry Lofts, a Tru by Hilton Hotel, One Midtown Townhomes and Chester75 — all built in the last five years.

As reiterated by architects on Friday, the makeover is set to include 140 apartments on four stories, with 56 senior apartments, 56 family-oriented apartments and some 28 market-rate ones. The parking lot behind the building is slated to have 75 spaces.

A first phase, Will Basil, a developer at Pennrose, told the CPC, will include two affordable condos for sale with three more built in a future phase.

All five stories’ worth of Warner & Swasey’s windows are to be restored “back to size” and to historic specs, Hayward said. A restoration of its roof and masonry is also planned. Oaks and crabapple trees will line pathways around the site.