A mammoth piece of Cleveland history is up for grabs — if you've got $3.5 million handy.
The former Richman Brothers Co. complex on East 55th Street hit the market at the end of October after a decade of unrealized redevelopment plans spanning everything from indoor fish farming to mixed-income housing.
At 638,000 square feet, the onetime garment factory is a behemoth — one that has challenged potential developers, ensnared global owners and captured the imagination of planners during nearly three decades of vacancy.
Built in 1915, the building served as the headquarters, manufacturing and distribution hub for a venerable men's clothier. The Richman Brothers Co. put down roots in Cleveland in 1879 and expanded from wholesaling into retail and direct mail.
The company — known for progressive policies including paid vacations, sick benefits and childbirth benefits — once employed more than 2,500 workers on East 55th, a short walk south of Superior Avenue. By 1945, Richman's original, E-shaped factory had grown to the size of 11 football fields.
F.W. Woolworth Co. bought the company in 1969 and closed the Cleveland plant, and the brand's remaining stores, in 1992. Since then, the headquarters complex has languished in a neighborhood hard hit by population loss, foreclosures and blight.
The current owner, a company helmed by immigrant entrepreneur Derek Ng, acquired the property in 2009.
Early on, Ng promoted his vision for a mixed-use makeover of the plant. He pitched Chinese investors on Cleveland through a series of online videos. In news stories, he talked about trying to raise funds through the federal EB-5 visa program, which offers U.S. residency to foreign investors who put money into job-creating projects.
But Ng's plans never panned out. He declined to comment for this article.
A listing for the 6-acre site popped up online Oct. 29 through the Newmark real estate brokerage. Terry Coyne, a Newmark vice chairman, said Ng decided to put the complex up for sale after sustaining a back injury and being urged by his wife, a doctor, to slow down.
So far, Coyne and colleague Richard Sheehan have fielded inquiries from manufacturers and apartment developers, including an out-of-state company whose deals involve low-income housing tax credits. The building, with roughly 2 acres that once served as parking, also might be a good candidate for government uses, Coyne said.
"It would be a great location to move county and city offices from downtown," he said, noting ongoing discussions about the future of Cuyahoga County's aging Justice Center complex on Ontario Street.
Taking on such an enormous building, in a downtrodden stretch of the Goodrich-Kirtland Park neighborhood, would be no small task. The old factory, just over a mile from Lake Erie, anchors a forgotten block flanked by churches, fast food restaurants and discount retail.
Across East 55th, the Cleveland Metropolitan School District's yellow-brick Willson school building has been moldering, vacant and vandalized, for years.
Cleveland's Board of Education is scheduled to vote Tuesday, Nov. 17, on offering the property for sale to charter schools. If there aren't any takers, the district could appeal to a broader pool of potential buyers. An August appraisal limited its scope to the land, valued at $175,000, indicating that the former school likely isn't salvageable.
By contrast, Ng has managed to keep the Richman building largely secure, with chains and padlocks on the front doors and perimeter fencing.
Still, there are signs of break-ins: graffiti on the occasional wall, debris in the overgrown courtyards.
On the fifth floor, where Key Tower is visible through broken windowpanes, water stains some of the walls and pools around the base of thick support columns. Light streams into the space, where seamstresses and tailors once cut fabric and pieced together trousers, vests and coats.
Public records don't show what Ng paid for the property 11 years ago.
His $3.5 million asking price is raising eyebrows, though, particularly in the middle of a pandemic that's upending parts of the real estate industry and prompting some developers and lenders to pull back.
The Cuyahoga County Fiscal Office estimates the value of the real estate at $451,000.
A restoration project easily could cost more than $60 million. Demolition would be a multimillion-dollar endeavor — and a controversial one, since the building is protected as a city landmark and has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 2012.
That national register listing makes the complex eligible for federal and state tax credits for historic preservation. The site also sits just inside the boundaries of an Opportunity Zone, a federally designated area that offers tax deferment and potential tax breaks to investors.
At least two developers have taken quiet runs at Richman in recent years.
Cleveland Neighborhood Progress had a memorandum of understanding with Ng and worked through preliminary planning and analysis for a project, said Linda Warren, the nonprofit group's senior vice president of placemaking and president of New Village Corp., its real estate subsidiary.
Those talks involved low-income and market-rate housing, a charter school, nonprofit offices and other, creative uses. But the discussions stalled about two years ago, Warren said, when another, unidentified suitor popped up.
"We were imagining it was a company," she said. "I just might be naïve, but I really thought I could see some large company moving into that space and building it out. ... The top of that building, you can see the lake. It's just exquisite. And the views of downtown, we thought it had some potential."
That mysterious buyer was Carnegie Management & Development Corp., a Westlake-based developer that tied up the site for a large, national tenant. But the plan was for demolition and new construction, not rehabilitation.
Dr. Rustom Khouri, Carnegie's president and CEO, confirmed that he had a contract to buy Richman. That deal dissolved this year, he said, when the tenant's timeline changed. Carnegie isn't likely to reconsider a purchase.
"The most effective way to get value out of that property is to create an adaptive reuse of the existing facility," said Khouri, who focuses on ground-up projects. "If you are able to do that, then you have good value there."
Warren said the timing isn't right for Cleveland Neighborhood Progress to jump back in. She hopes a preservation-minded buyer will emerge. Razing such a significant remnant of the city's industrial past would be a tragedy, she said.
"To me, it's one of those projects where, if you lose it, you lose some of the architectural history of a city," Warren said. "You change the complexion of a place."
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Richman Brothers Co. factory, a long-vacant Cleveland landmark, hits the market - Crain's Cleveland Business
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