News

Twenty-eight Cleveland Institute of Art upperclassmen will move into freshly renovated apartments at the end of the summer thanks to a partnership between the college and a local developer.

On June 14, Berusch Development Partners LLC purchased the 39,000-square-foot building at Euclid Avenue and E. 115th Street – directly across the street from CIA’s Joseph McCullough Center for the Visual Arts – from Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) for use as housing for CIA students.

Berusch will have the first 14 units fully renovated in time to house 28 students this coming fall. The remaining 20 units will be ready for fall 2014 when the building will house 77 CIA students. A CIA Student Life staff member will live in the building, which will have a student lounge, bike racks and Wi-Fi. One ground-level retail space will be leased to a local French bakery; a second retail space in the building has not yet been leased.

“This provides an amazing opportunity for our upper-class students to be close to campus and have a really neat housing option that will help build community within the student body,” said Matthew Smith, CIA’s director of student life and housing. “It’s independent living with a safety net, because it’s under the auspices of CIA.”

Smith said the demand for on-campus housing has increased in recent years and he is delighted to be able to offer Euclid 115, as the building is called.

CIA currently operates a split campus, with some departments and functions housed in its George Gund Building on East Boulevard, and the remainder in the McCullough building, a renovated Model T Ford factory. The college will be unifying its campus on Euclid by constructing a new George Gund building immediately west of the McCullough building starting later this summer. CIA is selling its East Boulevard building to CWRU and the Cleveland Museum of Art and expects to unify all operations on Euclid by the fall of 2015.

“With our enrollment growing, we are very pleased to be able to offer upper-level CIA students quality housing that is so conveniently located,” said CIA President and CEO Grafton Nunes. CIA freshmen are now housed in a residence hall owned by CWRU. Starting in 2014, freshmen will be housed in Uptown II, a retail and residential complex being developed by MRN Ltd. and under construction at the corner of Euclid Avenue and Ford Drive.

Until May, the Euclid 115 building was home to Maximum Accessible Housing of Ohio (MAHO). MAHO provides and promotes accessible housing for people with physical mobility disabilities. The tenants of its Euclid Avenue building moved last month into Cotman Vistas, a 36-unit, four-story apartment building on an adjacent parcel on 115th Street.

Above: CIA’s McCullough building, on the right, and Euclid 115, on the left, loom in the background as students (from left) Nora Corcoran, Sequoia Bostick, Kedan James, and Angela Daley enjoy an al fresco lunch at Uptown.