DÉCOR
FE TURE
Lighting up
Playhouse Square
Ohio’s tallest residential building takes a bow
Story by Carlo Wolff • Photography by Amanda Koehn
hen you enter The Lumen at E. 17th Street and Euclid Avenue you step into an atmosphere designed to make you feel larger – and, perhaps, richer – than life. Part of that derives from the luminous, silver-colored upholstery on the sleek lobby furniture. Part, too, stems from the giant mosaic of Selene behind check-in.
Framed in a red more akin to scarlet, the Greek goddess of moonlight in the tall, silver lobby consists of 22,400 tiles created in Spain. Selene’s image took about a week to install. Selene looms large in a very big, paradoxically graceful building. According to Matt McClung, senior community manager for Greystar, the company managing The Lumen, the 34-story, glass-walled edifice in downtown Cleveland’s Playhouse Square is Ohio’s tallest residential structure. It’s also the first ground-up apartment building constructed in Cleveland in 40 years, according to a news release from Playhouse Square, the nonprofit that owns The Lumen. At nearly 400 feet, Cleveland’s newest skyscraper dominates its one-acre lot and is far more dramatic than the parking lot it supersedes. The Lumen’s glittering palette, underlined by
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Summer 2021
those vivid “theater red” accents, also references the giant GE Chandelier beaming over Playhouse Square. The developer chose “lumen” as the building’s name “to reflect the energy surrounding Playhouse Square” and the importance of light in theater, according to the Playhouse Square website. Groundbreaking for the project took place in April 2018. Putting together the financing took quite some time, and construction wasn’t over until fall of 2020. A $55 million construction loan, $50 million in tax-exempt bonds, a $1 million Cuyahoga County loan and $5 million in the tax-increment financing that has helped so many downtown Cleveland projects figure in The Lumen’s finance stack. Despite a challenging gestation, The Lumen is doing well, particularly in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, McClung says. Occupancy stood at 44% as of mid-May, and more than 75% of the apartments in the gleaming, 318-unit structure have been leased.
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