A demolition application has been filed for the Herold Building at 310 Prospect Ave., a four-story structure listed on the National Register of Historic Places that has sat largely vacant for decades in downtown Cleveland. C&J Contractors Inc. submitted the application on October 30, with demolition estimated to cost $410,858, according to the filing details in the dossier of facts tied to this report.
The building sits on a 0.2-acre site now owned by J-Dek Investments Ltd., a Solon-based company, rather than Stark Enterprises, which had owned the parcel outright through an affiliate called Herold Building, LLC, as NEOtrans previously reported. The news was first detailed by Cleveland Magazine, which published the report through a content-sharing agreement with NEOtrans writer Ken Prendergast. A separate permit is required to cut the Herold away from the former Record Rendezvous building at 300 Prospect, since the structures are physically connected.
A Building With a Long and Contested History
The Herold's construction date is disputed in the historical record. One account from NEOtrans says the building was constructed in 1906 and expanded in 1908 to 300 Prospect by Oscar and A.B. Herold, while a separate NEOtrans account citing Cuyahoga County records puts the construction year at 1900 and the building's size at 15,720 square feet. The Herold brothers also operated a barber supply store on Public Square, and the building later housed the American Federation of Labor headquarters and the Pilsener Brewing Co., according to the same NEOtrans account. Over the decades it also held The Clock Restaurant and Downtown Eddie's.
Kurtz Furniture acquired the Herold in 1920 and modernized its facade with structural glass panels in 1948, per the dossier's sourcing, before closing its downtown store in the 1970s. The upper floors have remained largely vacant for decades, and the city of Cleveland condemned the building in 2010 — a status that has hung over the property ever since.
Stark's Ownership, Pledges, and a Stalled Court Fight
Stark Enterprises acquired two groups of downtown properties from the Los Angeles-based L&R Group of Companies in 2014, paying $26 million. One of those groups included a 2.33-acre parking area at West 9th Street and St. Clair Avenue, which Stark sold this past July; the other encompassed 2.3 acres including the future nuCLEus site and the Prospect Avenue properties. Before that sale, L&R Group had sought demolition of the vacant, condemned Herold Building, but Cleveland denied the request. L&R appealed the denial to Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court, then withdrew the case after Stark acquired the building and pledged to renovate it.
That pledge ran into resistance. In 2019, Stark requested approval to raze the Herold before the Downtown-Flats Design Review Advisory Committee, proposing a grassy lot in its place — a plan the committee rejected. An earlier request that year was tabled after neither Stark nor demolition contractor B&B Wrecking provided the city with a required post-demolition site plan, Councilman Kerry McCormack noted at the time, per the NEOtrans account.
Stark vice president Rebecca Molyneaux said it would cost $6 million just to address code violations and lift the Herold's condemnation, and the company did not apply for available historic tax credits on the property, according to the same NEOtrans reporting. LLCs owning the Prospect properties were later transferred to J-Dek Investments, and Stark and J-Dek had previously owned both the Rock Block properties and 310 and 320 Prospect together through 2022.
Office Market Still Struggling to Fill Space
The renewed demolition push comes as downtown Cleveland's office market remains under pressure. The market recorded 677,768 square feet of negative net absorption in the third quarter of 2026, the fifth negative quarter in the past six, according to a Newmark market report. Citywide office vacancy rose to 25.2% that quarter — described in the report as the highest rate recorded in recent history — while central business district vacancy climbed to 26.4%, driven in part by Sherwin-Williams' vacated 900,000-square-foot former headquarters. The average asking rent dipped to $21.79 per square foot, down 36 cents from the prior quarter.
Rico Pietro, a principal at Cushman & Wakefield | Cresco in Independence who has marketed the Stark and J-Dek properties to end users for nearly a decade, said new construction is challenging under current market conditions, especially downtown, and that construction costs have doubled over the past decade. Pietro has not responded, nor has J-Dek president Elliott Jacobs, to questions about the site's future from NEOtrans. Pietro has suggested an interim parking use makes sense at the site until market conditions improve.
A Pattern Playing Out Across Downtown
The Herold is not the only aging downtown structure in the demolition pipeline. A short distance away, the 143-year-old Gilman Building at 1350 W. 3rd St. faces a demolition bid tied to a mixed-use development on Sherwin-Williams' North Block property, according to Cleveland Magazine. That proposal would bring an office building over ground-floor retail and underground parking, along with a hotel and residential building, but the demolition application still awaits review by the Landmarks Commission, where approval is not certain. City and county records cited in that report show the Gilman is structurally in good condition; Welty acquired the building in 2021 for $3,375,000.
Not far from the Herold, the Walter G. Whitlatch Building at 1910 Carnegie Ave. — built in 1963 and acquired by the Ohio Department of Transportation in June 2026 — also had a demolition permit submitted this past Monday, tied to the Inner Belt Highway central interchange redesign. Together, the filings underscore how much of downtown Cleveland's older building stock is now caught between preservation and the economics of an office market still searching for footing.
