Medical mart a concept worth pursuing

By BRIAN TUCKER
6:00 am, January 9, 2006

It may not come to pass, but the notion that a “medical mart,” created around the concept of the huge (and hugely successful) Merchandise Mart in Chicago, might be developed in Cleveland as part of a new convention center, is exciting.

The fact that Dr. Toby Cosgrove, president of the Cleveland Clinic, supports the idea helps give the concept credence. And Forest City Enterprises co-chairman Albert Ratner says his company had a desire to pursue such a project years ago and then decided against it.

It seems the factor giving the medical mart idea new traction is Cleveland’s long-stalled hopes for a new convention center. If a medical mart is located near the convention center, it would help immensely in terms of booking physician groups and other organizations allied to the health care industry. And if it’s located inside the same structure, it could make the financing easier for the entire project because it would open the concept to private developers.

Such a combined facility not only would make sense here because of the renown of the Clinic and University Hospitals Health System, but also could create even more impetus for Case Western Reserve University’s planned West Quad project, a health care/education-related economic redevelopment of the old Mt. Sinai Medical Center site.

An official with Merchandise Mart Properties Inc. confirmed that such an idea had been floated, but stressed in a story in The Plain Dealer that talks with city officials were “nothing more than a conversation.”

I hope Mayor Frank Jackson and his team are putting a full-court press on this, and that the Convention Facilities Authority, which is studying the two proposed sites for a new center, is equally engaged. A project like this would be key to getting the kind of public support long absent from the convention center idea.