Weston’s TJ Asher Featured in Crain’s Article Highlighting Dick Jacobs’ Vison for Public Square

Crains Cleveland Business | Dec. 8, 2025
By Dan Shingler   
Link to original article here

Dick Jacobs had at least a couple of unfulfilled dreams in the late 1980s and throughout the ‘90s. One of them, at least, just came true.

Jacobs hoped to bring a World Series title home to what was then Jacobs Field with his family’s recent purchase of the then-Cleveland Indians. And he dreamed of building a modern, glitzy office tower at Public Square for what was then Ameritrust, which was one of the nation’s leading banks before it swirled around the financial drain and ended up as part of what was then Society, now KeyCorp.

Jacobs, a giant among local developers 30 years ago, went 0-for-2 on those, at least while he was alive. 

Jacobs was so convinced he was right, he prepared the ground for what was to come.

“That was his dream — he even tore down buildings to make way for that,” said CBRE Senior Vice President Warren Blazy. 

Now Jacobs’ vision is proving to have been prophetic. 

Cleveland did need a shiny new skyscraper housing a major local headquarters, and Public Square was the place to put it.

A prophetic vision decades ahead of its time

His dream has come true in the form of Sherwin-Williams’ glittering new Downtown headquarters, now filling up with thousands of employees. 

“He certainly wanted to have a major Downtown development there and wanted Public Square to be the focal point,” said Hanna Commercial Real Estate president R.M. (Mac) Biggar, whose uncle, James Biggar, was a prominent businessman, economic developer and good friend of Dick Jacobs, who died in 2009. 

It just took time and a few steps for the dream to become a reality.

Andi Udris was there to see the first steps. He’s perhaps best known to younger Clevelanders as the owner of Hofbräuhaus Cleveland, a popular Downtown microbrewery and restaurant. But in the late ‘80s, when Jacobs first began working on the Ameritrust project, Udris was Cleveland’s Economic Development Director under then-mayor George Voinovich. 

“Jacobs actually put together the deal based on the rent he would get from Ameritrust. I think he went out and got most of the properties on tentative contracts; He didn’t close on them at first, but eventually he did,” Udris recalled. 

The city was fully on board, too, even granting Jacobs permission to build an underground parking garage that would help serve his proposed new tower on city-owned property. That’s now the garage that is beneath the WWII memorial next to Key Tower. 

Jacobs ended up spending millions on land and demolition — in 1989, Jacobs told the City Club of Cleveland that he’d invested about $50 million in the property — only to lose the tenant that would make Ameritrust Tower work financially. 

“Jacobs ended up holding the bag on the land,” Udris said. 

His interest wasn’t unique or new. For at least a century, that plot on the northwest side of Public Square had been the focus of real estate developers, according to Cleveland Historical. In 1798, it sold for $30. Fifteen years later, it sold again, this time for $200. Over the years, it was home to offices, hotels, restaurants, a bank and a drugstore. 

Once Jacobs owned it and his dream of Ameritrust’s tower died, the land largely sat fallow, with little development. Scraped clean of the old Greyhound bus station and former retail stores from the 1800s that occupied it for a century, it mostly became more parking lots that Cleveland didn’t need, Udris said, and remained that way for decades. 

During that time, much of it came to be owned by the Asher Family and its Cleveland development firm, Weston.

T.J. Asher, Weston’s president and head of acquisitions and development, said his family purchased land from about half a dozen owners in the area over the years, eventually amassing a parcel about seven acres in size in the heart of Downtown. 

“It was that whole block,” Asher said. “It was West 6th to West 3rd and St. Clair to Superior.”

The Ashers were eyeing a Downtown Cleveland turnaround in the 1990s, and in the 2000s, they were watching it become populated with new residents as the low-hanging fruit of easily convertible buildings along W. 9th Street in the Warehouse District were turned into apartments. 

They envisioned their own Downtown development on those seven acres, which included a portion of the land Jacobs had assembled for his tower 20 years earlier. They hoped to build a massive, high-end mixed-use development, with bars, restaurants, upscale retailers and more than 700 new apartments, Asher said.

“It just looked like an opportunity was there. So, we met with the various owners and started assembling the lots, which took quite a bit of work,” Asher said. “We thought we could do a development ourselves, and we thought we could do a splashy live-work-play kind of development.” 

But it was not to be. Weston found that, at least at the time, Downtown Cleveland would not support the high residential rents necessary to build and sustain such a development. They were essentially hoping to build New York-level apartments but were constrained by the budgets of Cleveland renters. 

“We were having trouble with the proforma. It was difficult to make sense of it,” Asher said. “We couldn’t justify the (development) cost based on rents.”

Weston hung on to the land, though.

‘It was kind of a secret, but not a well-kept secret’

Sherwin-Williams, meanwhile, began looking for a place to build its new headquarters, a project that eventually promised to bring 4,000 workers to Public Square and its R&D facility in Brecksville, representing an investment of more than $600 million.

News of Sherwin’s project sparked conversations between Weston and the paint and chemical manufacturer and its brokers. Sherwin’s new headquarters, two buildings which straddle West 3rd Street along Superior Avenue, would have just the sort of impact Weston had hoped its land could have.

“We talked to a lot of people, and we heard about Sherwin-Williams,” Asher said. “It was kind of a secret, but not a well-kept secret because we knew.”

But it was no sure thing. Sherwin-Williams also had a duty to its shareholders and considered other locations.

“As part of the exploratory process, Sherwin-Williams conducted a national search and considered sites in several other states,” said Vice President for Global Corporate Communications Julie Young via email.

But, in the end, Cleveland and Brecksville, the site of Sherwin-Williams’ new R&D center, won out, which was fine with the company, which was established in Cleveland in 1866.

“While the final sites were not targeted specifically, Sherwin-Williams did have a desire to continue investing in Cleveland and Northeast Ohio, building upon our close to 160-year legacy as one of the region’s top employers and drivers of economic activity,” Young wrote.

The sale took place in March 2020, just as the pandemic was hitting, Asher recalled. Sherwin-Williams purchased Weston’s land, along with a smaller parcel that Jacobs’ firm still owned, for just less than $50 million. Asher said his company did well on its investment in the property but declined to specify how much it made.

Fortunately for Downtown Cleveland, Sherwin-Williams wasn’t going to let something like a pandemic stop it from going forward. It moved ahead with development of the 36-story tower that is now a key element of the city’s skyline and represents hope for a return of daytime foot traffic to the city’s core. It’s also a giant, with 1.6 million square feet of space.

For the most part, the project has gone well. There have been a few issues along the way, perhaps most notably when some steel had to be replaced after installation because it lacked sufficient fireproof coating. The building’s opening was rescheduled from March, and Sherwin-Williams didn’t start moving people in until October.

But few can say the result has been less than a beautiful building.

Impact on a scale of 1 to 10? ‘It’s like a 20.’

Now, many are looking to the Sherwin headquarters not only to enhance the skyline but also to revive Downtown at the ground level. 

The city’s center is still less populated during the day than it was before the pandemic. Its backers and business owners hope that Sherwin’s project will not only bring the company’s own workers to Public Square but also spur other businesses to bring their employees back Downtown. 

The Downtown business community has been waiting years for a development like the new headquarters to be built, said Michael Deemer, president and CEO of Downtown Cleveland, Inc., speaking in October just as Sherwin was moving the first employees into its new tower.

“Many years!” Deemer said. “It’s very, very exciting. This has been a long time coming. In some ways, it’s hard to believe that moving time is actually here.”

Asked to rate the impact he expects the new building and its occupants to have on Downtown on a scale of one to 10, Deemer said the scale didn’t work.

“It’s like a 20,” Deemer said. “It was a huge win for Cleveland when Sherwin-Williams committed to keeping its global headquarters in Downtown Cleveland. It was a marquis day when ground was broken, and now that we have employees moving in, it’s incredibly exciting for the city and Downtown in particular.”

Time will tell just how big an impact the company will have Downtown. Deemer hopes that, by bringing its workers back to the office five days a week as it’s said it’s doing, Sherwin-Williams will encourage other employers to do the same. And Sherwin’s workers by themselves will have a significant impact, he predicts. 

“Bringing 3,000 people into Downtown Cleveland, right on Public Square in the heart of the city, is going to have an energizing effect,” Deemer said. “The fact that next year we’re going to have those 3,000 workers in the office five days a week only adds to that effect.”