The City of Cleveland celebrated the grand reopening of the newly renovated Clark Neighborhood Resource and Recreation Center at 5706 Clark Avenue, unveiling a $6.65 million overhaul that keeps the building's 1910 bath house intact while modernizing nearly everything around it. The Clark-Fulton neighborhood hub now includes a gym, pool, fitness rooms, an art room, community spaces and a community lab, alongside a new elevator and a fully accessible interior.
According to City of Cleveland - City Hall, the renovation preserved the historic bath house structure even as crews added the modern accessibility features and expanded amenity spaces. The post marking the reopening laid out the scope of the work, from the pool and fitness rooms to the new community lab, framing the project as both a preservation effort and a modernization push for the century-old building.
The renovation did not happen overnight. Project plans for the Clark Recreation Center went before the Cleveland Planning Commission, which approved them at a Friday meeting, according to the Cleveland Business Journal. The city's parks and recreation capital-projects listing separately describes the Clark Recreation Center as slated for a full renovation and minor addition, alongside similar planned work at the Central Recreation Center.
A Mosaic Built From Neighbors' Own Words
Inside the refreshed building, visitors will find “The Little Moments,” a public art installation by artist Shelly Svonavec. The piece was commissioned by the City of Cleveland Public Art Program and, per Svona Studio, was created with 3,500 handmade tiles.
The installation is made up of 20 mosaic components, each one titled using submissions from the community describing their own “little moments of joy,” Svona Studio notes. Embedded within the tiles are names of loved ones, cherished memories, core values and culturally relevant motifs contributed by residents. The studio's account also states that the project engaged the Clark-Fulton community through integrated arts programming as the tiles came together.
Part Of A Broader Recreation Plan For The Neighborhood
The Clark reopening lands within a larger citywide push outlined in Cleveland's 2025 Parks and Recreation masterplan, which called for finishing ongoing renovations at both the Clark and Central recreation centers as part of its first phase, according to cleveland.com. A later phase of that same plan, covering years six through ten, proposed building an entirely new regional recreation center in the Clark-Fulton neighborhood.
That masterplan, however, was explicitly presented as a guide rather than a locked-in commitment, the outlet reported, quoting the plan's own language that “the document is a guide and isn't a set in stone plan.” Whether the proposed regional center in Clark-Fulton ultimately gets built remains an open question tied to that longer-term planning process, separate from the completed renovation now reopening its doors at 5706 Clark Avenue.
