Playhouse Square's Bulkley Apartments Open as District Continues to Strive for Neighborhood Status

The Bulkley Building, despite its residual scaffolding and window boards, opened up for leasing on Wednesday. Its 84 apartments will be open for move-ins on April 15. Credit: Mark Oprea

After two-and-a-half years of scaffolding and construction crews on Euclid Avenue, Playhouse Square’s Bulkley Building wrapped up its renovation and opened up to the leasing public on Wednesday.

That debut comes after a $44 million bet that renewing the century-old building’s nine stories, along with installing a French bar and café, would contribute to the theater district’s mission of being a place to be, other than just a stop-through place to see theater.

There are 84 apartments on four floors, about 20 of which will be reserved for traveling cast and crew in need of lodging while working the stages downstairs.

“I want to move towards what I call a grazing mentality,” Playhouse Square CEO Craig Hassall told Scene, standing in one of the Bulkley’s two-bedroom apartments on Wednesday.

“So, it’s not [just] a time ticket,” he added. “You come and you think, ‘Oh, that looks good. Let’s go there!’ Or, ‘What’s that noise? Oh, I wouldn’t mind having a coffee here. Or working with my laptop there.”

One of the Bulkley’s one-bedroom apartments. Rents range from $920 to $2,295, from studios to two-bedrooms. Credit: Playhouse Square

The Bulkley’s third floor contains a range of common amenities for downtown apartments—a game room, common area, a gym and about 10 bike racks. Credit: Playhouse Square

Ever since 2022, when Hassall moved from managing London’s Royal Albert Hall to Cleveland’s Playhouse Square, the organization been more vocal and adamant about growing the district as a real neighborhood.

One that, as Hassall reasserted Wednesday, trails the same 15-minute city philosophy touted by Mayor Justin Bibb and his city planners. That, in the case of the Bulkley’s future 100 or so residents, any needed amenity—food, beers, bandaids, books, socks—should (ideally) be accessible within a short walk or bike ride.

That mentality will come together formally in a Playhouse Square Master Plan to be released “in about a year” with a plan that will take stock of Playhouse’s properties with the aim of bettering the public realm connections between them, though Hassall didn’t specify exactly how.

Bringing in former CRESCO director Nate Kelly as president of real estate services last October adds to that plan, Hassall said. How could Playhouse’s 11 venues mesh better with its recent acquisitions—the Greyhound Building off Chester Avenue, a future rehearsal space off East 17th, to name two — for example?

The Bulkley seems to be a notch in bringing in the obvious fuel to Hassall’s neighborhood dreams: more neighbors themselves.

“We’ve got a disproportionately large downtown residential population already,” Hassall said. “And they’re not here yet. They’re in The Lumen, in The 9, The Statler, all these buildings. So we’re adding to the mix.”

And to Downtown’s tough-to-crack retail problem.

Though Playhouse welcomed a bar-café combo inside the Bulkley in November, and opened the Capucin-themed Friar’s Table in December, its sidewalk activity outside still seems well below its potential.

It still hasn’t replaced a former flower shop on the ground floor of the Hanna Building. And the U.S. Bank Plaza kiosk has sat empty for years since its burger shop left in 2020. A recent tenant trying to open a café there, Hassall said, abandoned the project last year.

Hassall said that a plan for the future of the Greyhound Building, which is to include a museum concept and vintage buses, will precede the greater master plan.

“Resident-friendly, visitor-friendly, pedestrian-friendly,” he said. “That’s what’s in my head.”