CLEVELAND — An early Friday break-in at the Rockefeller Building was just the latest in a string of setbacks for the Downtown Cleveland landmark.
The empty office building has been languishing since last spring, when a residential redevelopment deal fell apart and the owners put the property up for sale.
In November, the fire department flagged the building as a hazard, citing water in the basement and an open elevator shaft. City building records show a slew of complaints and board-up requests.
And a major local real estate developer recently walked away from a potential deal to buy the property. The damage inside is too great, and the cost of construction is too high, Doug Price, the chief executive of the K&D Group, said during a phone interview.
“There was just no way to put the deal together,” he said on Friday afternoon.
The property at West Sixth Street and Superior Avenue hit the market 13 months ago and has yet to find a buyer, according to public records. The listing, from the CBRE Group real estate brokerage, is no longer publicly available online.
Meanwhile, boarded-up windows and a cement-block wall in front of the main door on Superior aren’t keeping out vandals, squatters and urban explorers.
On Friday, Cleveland police responded to a call about the building at 3:27 a.m. They heard glass breaking and made their way inside.
Officers caught a handful of people – “four or five,” the department said – and escorted them out the back, through a battered gate between the building and a dilapidated parking garage. Police said they cited and released everyone.
News 5’s overnight photographer was at the scene.
CPD caught 5 males inside the vacant Rockefeller Building at W6 and Superior overnight. All 5 were given multiple tickets and sent on their way. This building is marked by CFD as unsafe to enter. The call was for the sound of breaking glass. Likely urban explorers. pic.twitter.com/gp8b2SG7Tc
— Mike Vielhaber (@MVielhaber) May 23, 2025
“It’s become more of a place where kids have been hanging out. We notice people in the building all times of day and night,” said David Flowers, the general manager of Johnny’s Downtown, a nearby fine-dining restaurant that’s a mainstay in the city’s Warehouse District.
Johnny’s used to draw a lunch crowd from the Rockefeller Building, which was home to law firms and other small businesses.
In 2020, though, real estate investors Kenny Wolfe and Agostino Pintus purchased the property for residential redevelopment. They paid $13.35 million for the outdated office tower, the run-down parking garage and a parking lot next door.
The office tenants trickled out. But the apartment project – 436 units, plus first-floor retail – never materialized. The developers ran out of money and time.
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Since then, the Rockefeller Building has deteriorated visibly from the street.
There’s graffiti on the roof. Shattered windows. On Friday, a forgotten office phone dangled out of an open window on the rear facade, near the battered parking garage that was earmarked for demolition in 2021.
Pintus didn’t respond to an inquiry about the break-in and the status of the sale effort on Friday.
“It was a working building before. … A brick shell, that’s all that’s left,” said Price, a major Downtown apartment landlord who has tackled other historic preservation projects.
He said K&D looked at putting 300 apartments in the building and replacing the old garage, at a cost of about $100 million. But the developer ultimately decided not to move forward on a letter of intent to purchase the property.
At this point, Price believes most of the real estate's value is in the land, right across West Sixth from the Sherwin-Williams Co.’s future headquarters.
“My feeling is, now, it’s a demo,” Price said of the Rockefeller Building.
Longtime preservationist Tom Yablonsky is appalled by that suggestion.
“I’ll respect his ability as a developer,” he said of Price. “But this is one of the ones you lay it all down for.”
The building is protected from demolition as a Cleveland landmark– though the city has lost other landmarks to neglect and vandalism over the years.
The property is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, making it eligible for federal and state historic tax credits for renovations. And Yablonsky says there are other creative financing tools that could help a developer fill funding gaps.
“You make sure you figure it out,” he said. “It might take some community resources. It might have some unusual funding sources. … There are people who, probably, this would be the only project they would be involved in, if they could be convinced.”
Yablonsky said that industrialist John D. Rockefeller, who built the office tower in the early 1900s, would be appalled by the building’s current condition.
“A building should be able to be secured, where somebody can’t break in,” he said.
Flowers, over at Johnny’s, would love to see the long-shuttered Rockefeller parking garage come down. He hopes a buyer with a vision – and enough money – will come along to revive the historic office building. To fix all those broken windows, clean up the graffiti and get rid of that air of abandonment.
“It was a thriving building that had a lot of life in there,” he said. “And for the last four or five years, it’s just been empty. … And that hurts our business.”
