With HQ Rising, What Will Sherwin Williams Do With the Rest of Its Downtown Land?

A rendering of the corner of St. Clair Ave. and West 6th St. that depicts possible retail going up where parking currently stands. The Warehouse District’s Tom Yablonsky, recently hired as an advisor to Sherwin Williams, said the plan is feasible. Credit: Sherwin Williams

As work continues on Sherwin Williams’ new Public Square headquarters, there remain questions, and promise, about what the company will do with the land around the site in terms of ground-level activation and development.

A rotating display of Sherwin’s colorful history will adorn part of its lobby building, and some sort of retail will occupy the lower, east-facing level of its massive parking garage. The rest may just be wrapped in office park silvers and grays—more for Sherwin than for the walking public.

For a little more than a year, Sherwin Williams’ architecture division has been teasing plans for the roughly two empty acres left over from its $45 million land purchase in 2020.

The real estate team could use the space for a mixed-use build or new retail, or, as NEO-Trans reported, temporary office space for its suppliers.

A broader question raised by the prospects: Will the Sherwin HQ help lift the Warehouse District to its north?

“I think that’s very doable,” Tom Yablonsky, a building preservationist who’s worked for the past four decades on the nine-block district, told Scene recently.

Yablonsky has been in conversation with Timothy Muckley, Sherwin’s vice president of Corporate Real Estate, about the possibility of a mixed-use development outside of the buildable ‘L’ left vacant.

The company could decide, he hopes, to bring more retail and activity to the neighborhood.

A plan submitted to the Cleveland Planning Commission in 2022, suggesting the construction of a three-story mixed-use building off St. Clair Ave and West 6th St. Credit: Sherwin Williams

To which Yablonsky says, Why not?

“They’re motivated,” he said, sitting at Phoenix Coffee on St. Clair Ave., a block down from the ongoing headquarters build. (And across from a parking lot.) “They already own the land. [Sherwin] could do a joint venture and throw the land in and build a quality environment around their headquarters.

“If they have that spirit, it’s doable,” he added. “The biggest impediment to building there is land speculation.”

Land speculation, a phrase that makes Yablonsky grimace, is effectively what has stalled growth projects in the Warehouse District since at least the mid-1980s. Yablonsky, and other preservationists, like Richard Pace and Jonathan Sandvick, helped curb the razing of buildings for parking—mostly for visitors of the new Justice Center complex to the east—by formalizing it as an historic district in 1982.

But few, Yablonsky takes pride in recalling, saw “the glass as half full.” He and others fought to prevent historic structures from being torn down, while arguing with developers that such structures could be more valuable as rehabbed real estate than, well, wiped from history.

Yablonsky’s spirit was soon validated. In 1993, a study orchestrated by Cleveland State was completed to prove the Warehouse District’s viability as a place to live, for more than the mere hundreds that dwelled around its nine blocks. By then, about 45 percent of the district was standing as it was once built.

“So why does the Warehouse District feel so devoid of life?” the Plain Dealer’s Steven Litt wrote that year. “Because offices, shops and restaurants alone do not make a neighborhood. Housing is the missing ingredient.”

And housing came. Since the mid-1980s, 17 apartment complexes were built or rehabbed from century-old terra cotta buildings. Yablonsky estimates that the district today houses over 3,000 residents. “And more dogs,” he said, “than kids.”

Sherwin Williams has yet to comment directly on their plans for the empty space. But, one realizes walking east on St. Clair, there is an undeniable need for something standing, something more than storage for cars.

“There needs to be closure. There’s no sense of space now,” Yablonsky said, looking across St. Clair. “Spaces feel good when they’re defined. There’s no definition to that,” he added pointing to the lot.

“I mean, when you’re walking past buildings that [English architect] Frank Cadell designed—he who was one of the grand architects of America in the late 19th century!” Yablonsky said. “I don’t know; there’s just a sense of place.”