Work is officially underway to transform Cleveland’s former National ACME Plant into a site primed for economic growth and new jobs.
The $11 million cleanup will take about six months to complete, Cuyahoga Land Bank President President Ricardo Leon said.
"The landbank will work with our folks who are boots on the ground to remove over 27 thousand tons — 27 thousand tons — of asbestos-laden, illegally-dumped debris and trash, both in the buildings and outside of the buildings," he said. "Then we're going to come back in and we're going to demolish about 330 thousand square feet worth of buildings."
The cleanup is being funded in part by a $7.5 million state grant for brownfield remediation with the remainder coming from the city.
The team will also remediate contaminated soil on the property as part of the cleanup, according to a news release.
"Ultimately, at the end of this process, hopefully in about the next six months, this site will be a clean site that'll be ready for the future redevelopment," Leon said.
By preparing the site for redevelopment, the city will be able to market it to companies that will help reestablish it as a symbol of economic growth in Cleveland, Mayor Justin Bibb said.
"We made sure that our largest allocation of funds was focused on making sure that in Cleveland's urban core, we had sites ready to go to attract good jobs," he said. "So, today is not just about a brand new site for good jobs to our city. It's a symbol of hope, a symbol of opportunity and a symbol of progress."
At it's peak, the 15-acre site in the city's Forest Hills neighborhood was one of the largest manufacturers of machine tools in the country.
"I saw what these plants once were," Ward 8 Councilmember Mike Polensek said. "I saw the men and women who would walk down this street carrying their lunch pails, the thousands of people employed here at this site. This was part of the arsenal of democracy."
By the 1950s, amid a changing global economy, business at the plant began to dwindle significantly, said Fred Nance, board chair of the city's Site Readiness for Good Jobs Fund, leading to significant job loss and economic disinvestment in the neighborhood.
"Like many other cities in the Great Lakes or the Northern region, this was a seismic economic shift that disrupted and moved jobs and opportunities out of our community," he said. "The result over time was devastating with the loss of tens of thousands of good paying jobs. We had significant population decline, growing poverty and deep disinvestment in our communities."
The Site Readiness Fund, which is a nonprofit that Mayor Bibb started in 2023 to address sites in the city that need to be remediated, also announced plans Thursday to remediate the former Republic Steel plant, an additional 22 acres adjacent to the National Acme site. That would create a total of 37 acres of developable land once fully remediated.
"Land is just one piece of the story here," Site Readiness Fund Managing Director Brad Whitehead said. "We're trying to think about placemaking. And so this isn't just about reimagining sites as parcels on a map, but it's a place that people belong to."
