CLEVELAND — A local developer is tackling one of Downtown Cleveland’s biggest eyesores, with plans to turn the Rockefeller Building into roughly 275 apartments.
The K&D Group bought the vacant property Tuesday, paying $5.13 million to an out-of-state lender who ended up with the building after a previous redevelopment effort failed.
Now K&D is getting ready to tear down the long-empty Rockefeller parking garage and clean out the 17-story office building, which has become a magnet for trespassers and thieves.
“It’s … gonna be a labor of love to bring it back to life,” said Doug Price, K&D’s CEO, during a recent interview outside the building at West Sixth Street and Superior Avenue.
The property, just west of the Sherwin-Williams Co.’s glassy new headquarters, has a riches-to-rags story.
Built in 1905 by industrialist John D. Rockefeller, the building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Just a few years ago, it was a functioning — though tired — office building, home to law firms, a barber shop and other tenants.
Now the once-grand lobby is filled with broken glass and debris. The power’s off. The elevator shafts are yawning chasms. Vandals cut the cables and destroyed the mechanical equipment upstairs, said Bob Fridrich, the president of Geis Construction.
“They just threw things down the shafts, I assume. And then hauled it out,” he said, while carefully leading News 5 on a tour of the property. “It’s crazy to think, the amount of metal and things that came out of this building.”
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The push to secure the building and add lights and cameras will start right away.
Then construction, based on plans developed by Geis, will take place in phases. The entire project is likely to cost $100 million and take three to five years to pull off, Price said.
“We’ll need every tool in the toolbox,” he said of pulling together a mix of public and private financing. “And probably some that maybe haven’t even been invented yet.”
First, K&D plans to temporarily close a pitted parking lot off West Sixth while razing the old garage. The expanded parking lot will reopen with about 170 to 190 spaces.
Eventually, K&D hopes to build a new, 500-space parking garage on the back portion of the site. The garage will offer public parking. It will also include a rooftop deck with a swimming pool and other amenities for tenants at K&D’s Downtown apartment buildings, Price said.
“This area is, we believe, very under-parked,” he said, noting that Sherwin-Williams eliminated about 1,100 public parking spaces by building an office tower, employee-only garage and entrance pavilion on longtime surface lots off Public Square.
At the Rockefeller Building, K&D plans to use a $7.3 million state brownfield grant to help with interior demolition, asbestos abatement and clean-up. The Ohio Department of Development awarded that grant to the Cuyahoga Land Bank in December 2024, based on a funding request from a previous property owner. But the money was never spent.
Once it’s cleared out, the building will sit for a while — mothballed — while K&D pulls together financing for the apartments.
The project will need federal and state tax credits for historic preservation, Price said. He’s also had early conversations with city officials about seeking residential property-tax abatement and tax-increment financing, to make the numbers work.
“With today’s costs … these projects are extremely difficult to do,” he said.
On April 21, Mayor Justin Bibb and the Rockefeller Foundation announced plans to hold a national policy gathering in Cleveland in June. The event is part of the foundation’s Big Bets for America series. Price hopes the building will catch the philanthropic group’s attention.
“We’d love for them to be involved in this,” he said of the foundation, created in New York in 1913 and seeded with $100 million in early gifts from John D. Rockefeller.
On the building’s roof, just above the Rockefeller signs, there’s graffiti everywhere.
Price can see it from K&D’s offices on the 36th floor of nearby Terminal Tower.
At this point, he said, the building is a brick shell. K&D bought it from BridgeInvest, a Florida-based lender that took control of the troubled property last year.
A previous ownership group, led by real estate investors Kenny Wolfe and Agostino Pintus, paid $13.35 million for the Rockefeller Building in 2020, according to public records.
They talked up their plans for more than 400 apartments, two floors of offices and first-floor retail. And they got permission to tear down the old parking garage. But nothing happened.
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By April 2024, Wolfe and Pintus put the property — empty, with boarded-up windows — up for sale. K&D pursued it but ultimately wasn’t willing to pay what the sellers wanted.
Last summer, as the lender takeover loomed, the property went back on the market through the Cushman & Wakefield-Cresco real estate brokerage. Bids were due in the fall.
“This is more than a building. It’s a chance to shape the next chapter of Downtown Cleveland,” Rico Pietro, a principal with Cresco, said in a news release at the time.
Price wasn’t necessarily planning to take on another project. K&D, which has turned a procession of old commercial buildings into housing, is wrapping up a residential revamp of the former United Church of Christ headquarters at 700 Prospect Ave.
Downtown apartment occupancy slipped last year as new projects opened, flooding the market with hundreds of units. It’s going to take a few years for tenants to fill them. That means developers are being more cautious and moving slowly on the next wave of deals.
But in the end, the chance to take on the Rockefeller Building — and clean up a mess — was too enticing.
“This just couldn’t be let stand like this,” Price said, noting that K&D paid cash for the property and is able to be patient.
Now he has a message for the people who keep breaking in, leaving the once-stately building in a condition that would have Rockefeller rolling in his grave at Lakeview Cemetery.
“Those days are gonna be over shortly,” Price said. “The police are watching, and we’re gonna have cameras all around. So if they do, they’ll be caught.”
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.
