Type Hotel Completed 2016 | Construction started 2014 Roof 114 m (374 ft) | |
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Former names Convention Center Hotel Location 100 Lakeside Avenue Cleveland, Ohio 44114 United States | ||
The Hilton Cleveland Downtown Hotel is a skyscraper on the corner of Ontario Street and Lakeside Avenue along The Mall in downtown Cleveland, Ohio, United States. It opened in 2016, has 600 rooms and stands 32 stories in height. It is one of four Hilton properties in downtown Cleveland, the other three being Hilton Garden Inn, the DoubleTree Hotel Cleveland, and Hampton Inn.
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The building was constructed under a partnership between the city of Cleveland and Cuyahoga County for the purposes of attracting larger conventions to the city of Cleveland. The agreement was entered into under the first chief executive of Cuyahoga County, Ed FitzGerald's administration and the three-term Cleveland mayor Frank G. Jackson.
The hotel is the tallest and largest in the city. Previously, largest hotel was the Renaissance Cleveland Hotel which has 500 rooms. This is the first major hotel constructed in the city since the building of the Marriott at Key Center was erected in 1991 at a height of 320 feet with 385 rooms. The new Hilton is managed by Teri Agosta.
Impetus for hotel
Following the construction completion of the new Global Center for Health Innovation and spurred by a tax over run that was raised by the county to construct that facility, the first chief executive of Cuyahoga County, Ed FitzGerald spearheaded the notion that the county needed to mount a hotel project to meet demand for bigger conventions that would overlook Cleveland simply because it no longer had a large enough hotel to accommodate over 500 guests at a time in one location.
This was due to the fact that back in the 1990s, the Stouffer's company (who owned the hotel at the time) renovated the 1000 room Hotel Cleveland at Public Square (connected to the iconic Terminal Tower) down to just 500 rooms. Not many Clevelanders knew this, but tourist groups and convention planners certainly did. This had become something of a liability to the tourism of Cuyahoga County and Cleveland was no longer be considered a convention town. It was acknowledged that the Hilton Hotel project was instrumental in landing the 2016 Republican National Convention.
Financing
The Hotel cost $272 million. The city of Cleveland passed legislation that led to the financing structure for the hotel in December 2013. Cuyahoga County followed suit by passing approval for the project in April 2014.
Design
The lead architect on the project is the Atlanta firm of Cooper Carry. The project will be LEED certified and has an extensive use of glass to create three slender modern towers jutting up from a four story concrete pedestal base. It will have a main and junior ballroom. The hotel is an homage to the visionary civic minded Daniel Burnham Cleveland Group Plan that was instituted in 1903, as per this fact the hotel's new bar is called the Burnham. The skyscraper is being erected by the New York City firm Turner Construction.