CLEVELAND — Craig Hassall never planned to fall in love with a bus station.
But his romance with the old Greyhound terminal on Chester Avenue started even before Hassall moved to Cleveland in early 2023 to take the top job at Playhouse Square. During a visit from London, he caught a glimpse of the sleek building — and couldn’t help picturing it as a Las Vegas-style supper club, a cabaret or a place for red-carpet movie premieres.
“And I said to one of the trustees, ‘what’s that?’” Hassall recalled. “And he said, ‘Oh, that’s the Greyhound bus station. We have to buy that one day.’”
That’s exactly what Playhouse Square did in early 2024, in a defensive move meant to protect the theater district’s northern flank. And in February, the nonprofit landlord and performing arts steward took full control of the space after Greyhound left for the suburbs.
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Now Hassall and his team are cleaning up the historic building and imagining what it might become. During an interview and tour this week, he talked about ideas ranging from a more intimate performance space to a food hall to a blend of entertainment and dining.
“I want to make sure that we open the building up to the outside,” he said, “so that maybe there’s a café spilling out. Or a restaurant. Or a brewery. … So it’s not a fortress.”
But there’s not a firm vision yet. Renovations are probably three to five years away, Hassall said.
For now, Playhouse Square is using the property to stage loading trailers for traveling shows and park school buses during field trips.
“We’re not in a crashing hurry to turn this into a public space,” Hassall said, noting that Playhouse Square already has 12 venues and certainly doesn’t need another theater.
That doesn’t mean the building will be sitting idle, though. The nonprofit is exploring opportunities for pop-up events, from art installations to flea markets and food festivals.
Covered outdoor bus bays, where travelers once lined up for boarding, could allow for year-round events.
“Imagine doing Christmas markets,” Hassall said. “You have stalls here. You can wander around, have food and drinks inside. And even in the back, it’s beautiful.”
Playhouse Square’s immediate priority is working with the city to fix up the surrounding streets, turning what’s essentially the district’s back door into a true gateway.
Though the marquees line Euclid Avenue and East 14th Street, most theatergoers enter and leave the district from the north. They park in Playhouse Square’s garage along Chester, directly across the street from the former Greyhound station.
Hassall said he’s focused on making Chester “a little less of a freeway.”
The area around Chester and East 13th Street is filled with sparsely used parking lots and buildings in transition, from the enormous Reserve Square apartment complex, which is in foreclosure, to the Allerton Apartments, an affordable housing property that’s undergoing major renovations.
“The first step is make the streets nicer, cleaner, prettier, safer and more attractive to people to wander around,” Hassall said. “And then start to think about the activations for the Greyhound.”
Playhouse Square’s approach is being shaped by its conversations with Streetsense, a consulting firm that crafted a broader retail strategy for downtown Cleveland in 2023. That plan included recommendations for investments in landscaping, public spaces and signs to help people get around — along with pop-up shops and events to give visitors more reasons to stay.
Based on Streetsense's analyses and the tricky downtown retail landscape, Hassall doesn’t think shopping is a likely use for the Greyhound building.
But he’s heard plenty of suggestions, from a small Target store to a pharmacy or — as Heinen’s prepares to close its outpost at the old Cleveland Trust Co. rotunda a few blocks away — a grocery store. After all, the roughly 36,000-square-foot terminal has an open main floor, sits on approximately 2 acres and is surrounded by parking lots, including city-owned land.
“One of my team said, ‘well, we need a space downtown that’s column-free with parking where you can put a supermarket. Oh, we have a bus station!’” Hassall said. “So it’s not out of the question. But it’s not in our thoughts immediately.”
On the Chester side of the building, over the entrance, the second floor is filled with small rooms where bus drivers slept. Hassall imagines gutting that space and carving out an upstairs lobby or bar.
There’s also a basement, filled with rooms that whisper potential.
“I think some cigar lounges or something. Who knows?” he said.
Whatever happens, the station’s history — and Greyhound’s role in Cleveland — will be part of the story. Playhouse Square is committed to preserving the building, an example of transit-inspired Streamline Moderne architecture. Hassall has no interest in tacking a tower onto it or otherwise messing with a good thing.
“It’s a little bit grubby and hasn’t been maybe that well cared for, but it hasn’t been screwed around with, either,” he said.
The building, which opened in the late 1940s, was dreamed up by William Strudwick Arrasmith, who designed dozens of Greyhound stations east of the Mississippi River.
Cleveland’s terminal gained a berth on the National Register of Historic Places in 1999. That designation doesn’t protect the building, but it could open doors to historic tax credits to help preserve the structure.
In 2020, the company behind Greyhound started selling off stations, ultimately separating the bus business from the real estate. An East Coast real estate firm bought the Cleveland building in late 2022 and explored a redevelopment project before opting to sell the property to Playhouse Square.
Greyhound, which had been weighing a move for years, left downtown in February for a new bus terminal in Brook Park. That building, which is much smaller, sits on land leased from the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority at the agency's Brookpark Road Rapid station.
The bus company’s downtown legacy lives on, though, in the signs and logos scattered throughout the old station.
In the lot out back, a 1940s Greyhound bus sits in one of the angled parking spots. Robert Edwards, a local historian and preservationist, plans to turn the bus into an interactive, mobile museum that helps tell the story of the Great Migration of Black Americans from the South to Cleveland and other cities.
Greyhound played a key part in bringing people here and, ultimately, reshaping the city.
“We have to find somewhere that there’ll be a museum, which supports the bus, that can tell their stories,” Hassall said of those travelers. “I don’t know where that will be, but it’ll be somewhere on this site.”
Michelle Jarboe is the business growth and development reporter at News 5 Cleveland. Follow her on X @MJarboe or email her at Michelle.Jarboe@wews.com.
