A proposal to restore the original main building of Park Synagogue in Cleveland Heights, a masterpiece of midcentury modern design by German Jewish architect Eric Mendelsohn, is shaping up as one of the most outstanding historic preservation projects in recent memory in Northeast Ohio.
The question is whether political dysfunction in Cleveland Heights, where embattled Mayor Kahlil Seren will face a recall election on Sept. 9, could harm the project or even derail it.
That shouldn’t be allowed to happen. The Park initiative could enrich cultural life, boost the local economy and bring positive international attention to Cleveland Heights if the mayor and city council can work together at an admittedly difficult moment.
Success would also vindicate those who have championed the preservation of the Mendelsohn building, famous for its prowlike chapel and immense dome, a design that combines dynamism, an embrace of nature and a desire to mediate between heaven and earth.
Park Synagogue embodies the rise of 20th-century avant-garde design, the visionary leadership of the Park congregation in the 1940s and 50s, and the survival of international Jewry after the Nazi Holocaust.
Saving the Mendelsohn building will add to regional victories in historic preservation, including the revivals of Playhouse Square and the Warehouse District in Cleveland. The alternative — losing the opportunity presented by the project — should be unthinkable.
Birth of an idea
The future of the Mendelsohn building went up for grabs four years ago. That’s when the synagogue’s Conservative congregation, now centered at a campus in Pepper Pike east of Interstate 271, decided to sell it and the surrounding 28-acre property at 3300 Mayfield Road. The cost of maintenance was unsustainable.
Fortunately, synagogue leaders soon decided to partner with Sustainable Community Associates, a boutique real estate development firm specializing in neighborhood and community revitalization, to come up with an innovative solution.
Since graduating from Oberlin College in the early 2000s, SCA principals Naomi Sabel, Josh Rosen and Ben Ezinga have completed eight new building projects and renovations, mostly in Cleveland, with offices, retail spaces and hundreds of residential units, all worth $145 million.
Their work is notable for its high-quality design and sensitivity to community needs, including for affordable workforce housing. They also represent what can happen when students graduating from local colleges and universities stick around and grow the economy.
After extensive consultation with congregants, arts organizations and city residents, the SCA team decided to turn the 75,000-square-foot Mendelsohn complex into the centerpiece of what they’re calling Park Arts.
The project will include 40,000 square feet of studio and practice space for multiple local arts nonprofits. Another 10,000 square feet is reserved for community organizations such as Colorful Minds, which serves artists with developmental differences.
Lastly, 25,000 square feet will house Oberlin College’s first off-campus satellite program. Starting in June 2027, the Mendelsohn classroom wing will host fifth-year Oberlin students in a new five-year program offering a combined bachelor of arts and bachelor of fine arts degree.
So far, 30 students have been accepted into the first class, but the program could grow to 50. Students will have access to private studios, rehearsal spaces and theater and production facilities for writing, film, dance, music and the visual arts.
Julia Christensen, professor and director of the BA-BFA program, and a nationally respected artist and author, said the program will weave traditional studies with hands-on artistic practice and community engagement. Students will intern with Cleveland-area cultural organizations, which may encourage some to stay in the region after graduation, perhaps following the example of the SCA developers.
As part of the first phase of work, SCA will build 44 townhomes on the property, which could appeal to senior residents eager to downsize and live in a stimulating parklike environment that includes frequent cultural programming. The new construction is designed to harmonize with and defer to the Mendelsohn building.
A daycare onsite will add to the multigenerational vibe SCA seeks to create. In a future phase, the developers want to add 150 more residential units, for a total of 194. The project is intended to echo the lively community atmosphere Park congregants remember and want to see revived from earlier decades.
A new nonprofit called Friends of Mendelsohn, including members of the Park congregation, now owns the synagogue building and eight acres in the center of the property. It will collaborate with SCA on the project, which owns the parcels north and south of the main building. The Park congregation retains the right in perpetuity to use the synagogue on high holidays.
Money and permits
The developers hope to start construction early next year to open Park Arts and meet their obligations to Oberlin College in 2027. They are close to completing nearly $51 million in financing they need to start work on Park Arts and another $22 million for the Phase 1 housing.
Financing for the townhomes is conventional, but the capital stack for Park Arts includes $22 million in hard-to-get state and federal Historic Preservation Tax Credits, federal and state New Markets Tax Credits, and federal Investment Tax Credits for geothermal heating and cooling wells. Another $10 million is coming from philanthropic sources, including $5 million from the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Foundation.
Along with technical and design approvals needed for a building permit, the SCA developers are seeking $2 million from Cleveland Heights, roughly 2.7% of a total projected investment of $73 million.
Half of the $2 million would be a grant that pays for public trails on the property, linking it to adjacent residential streets. The rest is a loan repayable over 40 years to help restore the Mendelsohn building.
Eric Zamft, the Cleveland Heights planning director, and Brian Anderson, the assistant director of economic development, said they see no major obstacles for the project. Final design review and planning meetings are scheduled through mid-September.
But the $2 million outlay, a significant amount in a city with a $105 million budget, isn’t yet assured. And it will be debated at a fraught moment.
Seren, the city’s first elected mayor after voters chose to instill a strong mayor form of government, has faced criticism over the past year over claims that he and his wife, Natalie McDaniel, created a hostile work environment at City Hall. His four-year term ends in December.
Seren failed to turn in enough signatures to qualify for re-election and then failed in his attempt to veto city council legislation authorizing his recall vote in September. Council, meanwhile, has passed legislation to limit mayoral powers, including the use of city social media accounts and email for personal or political messages.
The good news is that Seren and members of council have said in recent interviews that they understand the importance of the Park project and the need to collaborate.
Council President Tony Cuda said that Seren will introduce legislation advocating the $2 million contribution to Park Arts for a first reading at council’s Aug. 4 meeting. Cuda said he supports the project, but that council needs to perform due diligence. That’s totally reasonable.
But Seren, who has received financial details from the developers, acknowledges he hasn’t yet provided all the information to council or the public.
“We have shared some information about the potential economic impact and the capital stack for this project with council in private session,’’ he said in an email, adding, “I expect to provide more information’’ when the legislation is introduced.
Potential consequences of denial
The developers say that without the $2 million from the city, they would need to raise the amount quickly this fall from other sources before deadlines to sell the tax credits to investors. Missing those deadlines could mean losing out on the credits, Sabel said.
Raising the $2 million could be tough if donors perceive that Cleveland Heights, which stands to gain handsomely from the project, won’t invest in it, Rosen and Sabel said.
Having a branch of Oberlin College in a city with no other institution of higher education would provide intangible benefits. In addition, estimates prepared for SCA indicate that the project over 30 years will generate $244,000 per year in income taxes, a 536% return over the three decades on the city’s $2 million investment. The estimates don’t include real estate taxes, which are abated for the first 10 years, Sabel said. As a nonprofit, Park Synagogue paid no property taxes.
Going ahead without the $2 million would mean cutting budgets and diminishing quality. The trails could be added later, but that would mean ripping up landscaping that had already been finished, adding unnecessary cost. That makes no sense. The Mendelsohn building also deserves optimal restoration, which the $1 million from Cleveland Heights, aside from the $1 million for trails, could help ensure.
Why care?
The story of the Mendelsohn building shows why architecture matters. Great buildings connect living generations to history and a sense of continuity in the future. They evoke wonder and pride, and the impulse to preserve and reuse.
Aware that losing the Mendelsohn building would be a mark of shame, leaders at Park Synagogue including Susie Ratner, the congregation’s president during the debate on the building’s future, decided to emulate the previous example set by the Reform congregation of The Temple-Tifereth Israel. In 2015, the Temple enabled Case Western Reserve University in 2015 to renovate its historic building on Ansel Road in Cleveland as a new academic center for the arts. The Temple retains the use of the facility on high holidays for 99 years.
The difference between the synagogue buildings — and it’s an important one — is that the Temple, designed by Boston architect Charles Greco, embodies the prewar tradition of designing Jewish houses of worship based on historical precedents, including Byzantine and Romanesque architecture.
The Park building designed by Mendelsohn (1887-1953) represents a totally new approach based on the modernist style he helped create in Germany in the 1920s. Mendelsohn’s offices, factories and department stores introduced a fluid sense of action and movement that paralleled contemporary Expressionist painting and anticipated the Streamline Moderne style.
After the Nazi rise to power in 1933, Mendelsohn fled to England and later Palestine, where he designed the home of Chaim Weizmann, Israel’s first president. After emigrating to the U.S. in 1942, Mendelsohn wanted to bring his way of thinking to Jewish sacred architecture.
Culturally conservative clients in Cleveland had previously snubbed innovative architectural geniuses active in the Great Lakes, including Frank Lloyd Wright and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in Chicago and Eliel and Eero Saarinen in Detroit. Mendelsohn became the first major exception.
Big-name architects who did get hired in Cleveland after the 1950s often did their second-best work here. But again, Mendelsohn was an exception. Historians regard Park Synagogue as the best of the four synagogues he designed across the U.S. before his death.
Historical echoes
The Park Synagogue story is full of historical echoes. Businessmen and philanthropists Leonard and Max Ratner, members of the congregation, partnered with its senior Rabbi, Armond Cohen, to hire Mendelsohn.
Today, developer Ron Ratner, Leonard Ratner’s nephew, serves on the board of the Friends of Mendelsohn along with St. Louis developer Richard Baron. Baron is an Oberlin graduate who in 1986 won praise for restoring and redeveloping Mendelsohn’s first U.S. building, B’nai Amoona Synagogue, as the nonprofit Center of Creative Arts, an important cultural center in St. Louis.
When the SCA trio graduated from Oberlin in the early 2000s, they reached out to Baron for advice. Baron became their mentor and hosted them on a trip to see the B’nai Amoona project before they launched their first development in Oberlin, an apartment, office and retail complex on East College Street.
Now, more than 20 years later, the SCA developers are emulating Baron’s earlier work on a Mendelsohn building in a very big way, and with his continued involvement.
“It’s a crazy story,’’ Rosen said.
Maybe it’s not so crazy. What would be nuts is seeing the Park project stumble at the finish line amid political strife in Cleveland Heights.
Let’s hope that doesn’t happen.
