The Hilton Cleveland Downtown Hotel is a skyscraperon the corner of Ontario Street and Lakeside Avenue along The Mall in downtown Cleveland, Ohio, United States. It opened in 2016, has 600 rooms and stands 32 stories in height. It is one of four Hilton properties in downtown Cleveland, the other three being Hilton Garden Inn, the DoubleTree Hotel Cleveland, and Hampton Inn. The building was constructed under a partnership between the city of Cleveland and Cuyahoga County for the purposes of attracting larger conventions to the city of Cleveland. The agreement was entered into under the first chief executive of Cuyahoga County, Ed FitzGerald's administration and the three-term Cleveland mayor Frank G. Jackson. The hotel is the tallest and largest in the city. Previously, the largest hotel in the city was the Renaissance Cleveland Hotel which has 500 rooms. This is the first major hotel constructed in the city since the building of the Marriott at Key Center in 1991 at a height of 320 feet with 385 rooms. The new Hilton is managed by Teri Agosta..
Impetus for hotel
Following the completion of the new Global Center for Health Innovation and spurred by a tax over run that was raised by the county to construct that facility, the first chief executive of Cuyahoga County, Ed FitzGerald spearheaded the notion that the county needed to mount a hotel project to meet demand for bigger conventions that would overlook Cleveland simply because it no longer had a large enough hotel to accommodate over 500 guests at a time in one location. This was due to the fact that back in the 1990s, the Stouffer's company renovated the 1000 room Hotel Cleveland at Public Square down to just 500 rooms. Not many Clevelanders knew this, but tourist groups and convention planners certainly did. This had become something of a liability to the tourism of Cuyahoga County and Cleveland was no longer even being considered as a viable convention town. It was acknowledged that the Hilton Hotel project was instrumental in landing the 2016 Republican National Convention.
The lead architect on the project was the Atlanta firm of Cooper Carry. The project is LEED certified and has an extensive use of glass to create three slender modern towers jutting up from a four-story concrete pedestal base. It contains a main and junior ballroom. The hotel is an homage to the visionary civic minded Daniel Burnham Cleveland Group Plan that was instituted in 1903, as per this fact the hotel's new bar is called the Burnham. The skyscraper was erected by the New York City firm Turner Construction.
