The Plain Dealer’s Steve Litt reported Tuesday that Cleveland Heights entrepreneur J. Duncan Shorey intends to redevelop a vacant metal casting plant at E. 71st and Platt as a hip multi-use project that capitalizes on Cleveland’s “hot themes.”

First and foremost (if not the hottest) among these many uses at the “Foundry Project”?

A $4.5 million, 40,000-square-foot “high-tech” fish farm in which Shorey would produce thousands of pounds of Mediterranean Sea Bass every week. 

BRANZINO, BABY. 

Like all the development projects around here, Shorey wants the fish farm up and running, with high-tech Branzino on the tables of Cleveland’s finest restaurants (certainly Doug Katz’s!) by the Republican National Convention. 

Shorey’s got commitments from a fish brokerage in Toronto and a fish farm in Indiana to buy huge quantities of of the Branzino, but with endorsements from Katz and the Flying Fig’s Karen Small, we might be seeing more Sea Bass on the menu in local haunts.

(Martha Stewart’s got this shit on lock).  

Shorey’s Foundry project also intends to use a small percentage of the fish farm’s profits to fund a non-profit studio art center on the building’s top three floors. (This may include a glass-blowing furnace. Can you say #HotThemes?) 

Shorey hopes to get a computer server farm online within the next six months or so as well, but his primary focus will be on improving the food desert in the surrounding area. His plans include a culinary school and a farmers’ market. 

And due to all the toxic dredging in Lake Erie which may mean we can only safely eat mutant Walleye once per month — ONCE PER MONTH?!?! — fish-lovers may have no choice but to find a new favorite  locally sourced seafood dish. 

This article appears in May 13-19, 2015.

Sam Allard is a former senior writer at Scene.

3 replies on “Next Unique East Side Redevelopment Proposal: FISH FARM”

  1. That sounds pretty good to me, at least we wouldn’t have to worry about all the chemicals in the fish. Now, if the tanks or whatever the fish are in catch on fire, then we have a classic Cleveland problem rearing its ugly head once again…

  2. But we may have to worry about chemicals in the fish…they often feed these fish crops like corn and soy, which are often GMO and often doused with glyphosate…which the World Health Organization says is probably carcinogenic. Add to that, farmed fish just isn’t as high quality as wild caught fish. It depends on how the farm is operated as to whether chefs will really want to use it.

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