Cleveland, Ohio
Ohio City Hotel, Tribute Portfolio
A mass-timber boutique hotel aims to give Cleveland's Ohio City neighborhood its first hotel bed
Announced · TBC
Ohio City Hotel, a planned 129-room, seven-storey Tribute Portfolio boutique hotel at Lorain Avenue and West 26th Street, would give Cleveland's Ohio City neighborhood its first hotel bed. Developer Dan Whalen's Places Development is using mass-timber construction for the roughly $55 million project, but as of a January 2026 financing extension, construction had not yet started and no firm opening date had been set.
The essentials
- Group
- Marriott (Tribute Portfolio); developed by Places Development (Dan Whalen) through affiliate 2600 Lorain LLC
- Opening
- TBC
- Rooms & suites
- 129 rooms
- Segment
- Boutique/Upscale
- Designer
- NC
- Entry rate
- NC
The place
The hotel is planned for a surface parking lot at the northwest corner of Lorain Avenue and West 26th Street in Ohio City, on Cleveland's near west side, facing Market Avenue toward the Great Lakes Brewing Company and the West Side Market, which is itself midway through a $70-million-plus renovation. The site is owned by the nonprofit Ohio City Incorporated, which put it out to a developer request for proposals in 2022.
The concept
Developer Dan Whalen, also behind the $150 million Intro project a few blocks away, is building a seven-storey, roughly $55 million hotel using mass-timber construction above a reinforced-concrete first floor — a choice he says can cut a building's ongoing heating and cooling emissions by up to 40 percent compared with conventional steel-and-concrete construction. Whalen has pitched the project as filling a real gap: by his account there is no full-service hotel between downtown Cleveland and the airport, or on I-90's north side until Crocker Park. The design uses all-brick construction with a granite base and dark bronze windows, plus Hunter Green glazed brick on the ground floor as a deliberate nod to the West Side Market's own glazed materials. To avoid devoting first-floor space to cars, Whalen struck deals to use neighbouring lots for evening parking, leaving the hotel with just nine of its own spaces and freeing up the ground floor for active retail frontage instead — a choice city planners praised as more in keeping with the surrounding streetscape.
Dining & wellness
Plans include a first-floor restaurant that Whalen intends to own and operate himself, a ground-level coffee shop, roughly 4,500 square feet of second-level event space, and a rooftop restaurant and bar overlooking downtown.
