Vacant factory that built Hulett ore unloaders purchased by Cleveland’s new $50M Site Readiness Fund

CLEVELAND, Ohio — An immense vacant factory in Cleveland’s Central neighborhood, where massive Hulett ore unloading cranes were made more than a century ago, will have a new shot at economic life as the first major acquisition of the city’s $50 million Site Readiness for Good Jobs Fund.

The city announced Monday that the site readiness fund closed on an $845,000 deal to acquire the triangular, 10-acre property at 7000 Central Ave. on Cleveland’s East Side that includes the 183,000-square-foot Wellman-Seaver-Morgan factory.

The purchase of the rusting, graffiti-decorated building from Orlando-based Christie Lites Co. will set the stage for an engineering and marketing study by the nonprofit site fund to explore new uses that could include food, microelectronics, energy, vehicle manufacturing or other businesses.

The $50 million site fund is a major initiative of Mayor Justin Bibb, who proposed endowing it with nearly 10% of the $511 million the city received through the federal American Rescue Plan Act of 2021. City Council agreed with the proposal, which could pay dividends over decades.

The goal of the fund is to assemble and acquire 1,000 acres of vacant, disused or abandoned industrial sites and to create 25,000 jobs in its first 15 years to help rebuild the city and bring new wealth to neighborhoods by repurposing brownfields.

The creation of the fund follows decades of decline in the city’s tax base. Research by Cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer showed that between 1960 and 2018, Cleveland’s residential, commercial and industrial tax base shrank 66%. The decline made Cleveland the biggest loser among 226 communities in seven Northeast Ohio counties where sprawl development enabled by interstate highways redistributed wealth, dividing the region into tax base winners and losers, even while the region’s population fell.

Answering a need

Bibb, who visited the Wellman-Seaver-Morgan factory for a pre-closing look on Thursday, said the No. 1 complaint he has heard from local industries is that they lack room to expand because thousands of acres of abandoned, vacant and contaminated sites are unavailable for reuse.

Cleveland has about 4,000 to 5,000 acres of vacant, abandoned or underutilized industrial property, according to a news release accompanying the announcement of the Wellman-Seaver purchase. The amount is roughly equivalent to the area of the Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights.

The site fund is working in with Cuyahoga County’s land bank to assemble, clean and market sites ranging from 10 to 30 acres or more. Other partners include JobsOhio, Team NEO, The Cleveland Foundation, the Greater Cleveland Partnership, the Fund for Our Economic Future, and Ohio Means Jobs.

The site fund has a 12-member board appointed by the mayor and City Council President and Ward 6 Councilman Blaine Griffin. It is chaired by Ahmed Abonamah, Cleveland’s chief financial officer.

“We need land that’s shovel ready and ready to go,” Bibb said, while standing on the grimy Wellman-Seaver factory floor in his black suit and polished brown loafers amid shards of glass and crumbling fiberglass roofing panels. “Instead of having a mid-size company that wants to expand, and they go to Bedford or Twinsburg or Strongsville, they should be expanding in the heart of Cleveland,” he said.

Roman scale

With a soaring central bay flanked by lower sections on either side, the factory evokes the grand scale of major European cathedrals and basilicas. The central bay is roughly 615 feet long, slightly less than the length of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

“Wow!” Bibb said when he entered. “It’s unbelievable. The sheer breadth and scale of this site is unbelievable.”

The Wellman-Seaver Engineering Co. was founded in 1896 by Samuel T. Wellman, inventor of the first open-hearth furnace in the U.S. The firm built the Central Avenue plant in 1901. It became known as the Wellman-Seaver-Morgan Co. in 1903 after Thomas R. Morgan joined the company.

Company executives included George Hulett, designer of his eponymous ore unloading cranes, which once dotted industrial ports across the Great Lakes. The four last unloaders in Cleveland were dismantled by the Port of Cleveland at its Cleveland Bulk Terminal dock on Whiskey Island in 1999. Two were stored for a potential reassembly project, but the Port is having them scrapped this spring.

Brad Whitehead, the inaugural managing director of the year-old site fund, said the Seaver-Wellman factory became largely inactive starting in the 1970s and has been all but vacant since the 1990s.

Christie Lites, which describes itself on its website as the largest stage lighting company in North America, bought the property in 2017 as a distribution hub but didn’t pursue the project, Whitehead said.

“We’re imagining all kinds of uses that could go here,” he said.

Whitehead credited Ward 5 Councilman Richard Starr for highlighting the factory for potential acquisition by the site fund.

“The redevelopment of this pivotal intersection will eliminate an eyesore, address safety issues, and foster economic prosperity,’' Starr said in the fund’s news release.

Whitehead and Rick Barga, the site fund’s manager of site identification and development, emphasized that the organization would work closely with residents in the surrounding neighborhood to explore the future of the Wellman-Seaver site.

Money could flow to neighborhood

When Bibb originally announced plans for the site fund in 2023, he said it would grow to $100 million with grants, loans and philanthropic donations. Whitehead said that’s still the plan.

Early announcements also said the fund would generate 65,000 jobs. Whitehead said the figure included direct and indirect employment generated by the fund’s investments. The goal of 25,000 direct jobs within 15 years still stands, he said.

The site fund will seek a dollar-for-dollar recovery of expenses for its role in redeveloping properties such as Wellman-Seaver, but is not expecting a market rate of return. Money will circulate as in a revolving fund, Whitehead said.

Residents within a district to be defined around the property could hold a stake in the project through direct ownership by a neighborhood real estate investment trust or indirect ownership through another type of trust, Whitehead said.

The revitalization of the site is intended to create walk-to-work jobs aligned with Bibb’s vision of turning Cleveland into a 15-minute city, in which all basic necessities can be met within walking distance.

The 15-minute concept was originated in 2016 by Carlos Moreno, a professor at the Sorbonne in Paris, although in the case of the Cleveland factory, it harkens back to worker housing that sprang up in the 19th and early 20th centuries near rail lines and factories in Cleveland’s industrial valley.

Rough but ready

The Wellman-Seaver factory flanks the elevated Norfolk-Southern rail line that cuts diagonally across Cleveland’s East Side, with residential neighborhoods to the east and west. Two spurs from the main line enter the factory’s upper level, where two cabooses are parked inside. They come along with the purchase, Whitehead said.

Inside the factory, concrete floors were coated with ancient layers of oily soot that felt greasy underfoot. Water had pooled in spots, reflecting daylight that poured in through gaps in the roof and facades.

Fifteen ton cranes mounted high overhead were frozen on their tracks. Curiosities scattered on the floor included a rail inspection reported dated January 11, 2011 and a vinyl Joan Jett and the Blackhearts 45 single.

From the outside, the old factory appeared to be peeling layers of decaying fiberglass in spots, like the skin of a snake.

Barga said the property, which has undergone a Phase II environmental assessment — the more stringent of two levels of analysis — is considered relatively clean under standards for commercial and industrial use. The property would not be considered safe for housing or a daycare center but could be suitable with modifications for food-related industries, he said.

The site is less than a mile north of the Opportunity Corridor development zone and just over a half-mile south of the Health Tech Corridor along Euclid Avenue. It has plenty of sewer and water capacity and electrical service through Cleveland Public Power, Barga said. And, because most of the roof is intact, the factory has not suffered from the kind of structural damage caused by water intrusion in other aging factories across the city, he said.

Much of the interior and portions of the exterior within easy reach are painted with graffiti tags and vast murals of the kind that have been preserved as part of adaptive reuse of other industrial buildings in the U.S. and Canada, including the Don Valley Brick Works in Toronto.

Saving an icon

A major issue concerning the future reuse of the factory is the structural stability of its steel frame, Whitehead said.

“We don’t know whether it can be preserved and load bearing,’’ he said. One possible option could include preserving the steel frame while building other structures inside it, following the example of the 265,000-square-foot Mill 19 building at the Hazelwood Green innovation district along the Monongahela River in Pittsburgh.

Mill 19, once one of the region’s most productive steel plants, is now the headquarters of Carnegie Mellon University’s Manufacturing Futures Institute, housed in structures built within the exposed skeleton of the old mill.

Inspired by that example, Whitehead said, “you can imagine taking some of the cladding off the outside using glass and more natural lighting’' at the Wellman-Seaver building.

Barga said that the building has a majesty worth preserving. Just as important, he said, the entire 10-acre site is very much needed in Northeast Ohio, where he said the vacancy rate for industrial sites is 2% to 3%.

“We have an enormous amount of demand and very little supply,’’ he said. “It is stopping companies from growing and it is stopping us from attracting new jobs.’’

The need for the site is urgent, Whitehead said.

“We’re trying to bring jobs to neighborhoods and we’re trying to bring employees back to our city,’’ he said. “We believe employees will want to live to where they work because they’ll want to be part of a more connected community.”