Peter Rubin, The Coral Company

Coral Company president and developer Peter Rubin is customizing Cleveland's neighborhoods with his brand of real estate development. Coral owns and develops numerous residential properties (The Hamlets of Rocky River, Courtyards at Severance), a million sf of retail properties (Brooklyn Center, Lakewood City Center), and various mixed-use properties (Cedar Center Plaza, Shaker Square). Transformation is his business, and industry leaders in the field of urban and suburban development have sought out this intrepid entrepreneur for his versatile insights and inspiration. Next week, the film “Come Away Home,” will have a sneak preview premiere and party to benefit Bellefaire JCB (where Rubin serves as President of the Board) on Thu 5/19 at 7PM at Shaker Square Cinemas; for info call Doug Furth at 440-519-1625. Cool Cleveland spoke with Peter Rubin about philanthrophy and arts in the community, how it affects business and economic development, and why Coral Company purchased Shaker Square.

Cool Cleveland: You’re a developer and you are the incoming President of Board for the Cleveland Opera. Where did you develop that passion?

Peter Rubin: When I was a kid I grew up in New York. My mother had a subscription to the Met [Metropolitan Opera] in New York City. I grew up just outside of New York City. So I was 7 or 8 year old and I had the most miserable experience because not only did I have to get dressed up, but also I had to sit through a three-or four-hour opera. In those days if when you were 7 or 8 you had to sit still. I hated opera but found myself gravitating back to it because it is a complete art form. It’s got orchestral symphonic music, it has choreography, it has staging, it has acting and it has singing. Probably, in the end, it’s about the most passionate parts of life-love and death.

What about your involvement with Bellefaire Children’s Mental Health?
I’ve been involved with Bellefaire for nearly 15 years and served the last three years as the President of the Board. If you want to be involved with a social service or not for profit organization that does good. Bellefaire takes care of 9,000 kids and their families every year who have some kind of emotional or mental stress in their life. It’s really sad because kids really have very few advocates within the system. An agency like Bellfaire just works miracles year in and year out. Besides being cutting edge, we started the first school and boarding academy in Ohio for children who suffer from autism, which is the fastest growing mental health disease in the country. It’s epidemic in proportion. It's just a tragic disease for kids and their families who have to suffer through it. We are involved in a joint venture with Harvard School of Medicine in devising a new protocol for helping to treat kids with autism. It is just another one of those remarkable successes that Bellefaire has been involved with.

[Seeing the tape recorder]. Can I sing a song too?

Yes. What we can do is take this and turn it into a little .wav file and put it right on the web.
I am performing in a show this summer at the Cleveland Playhouse.

Really?
Yeah, for kicks. The Lyric Opera Cleveland presentation of She Loves Me which is an old 1940’s Broadway musical that was the basis for the movie You’ve Got Mail…the long distance love affair thing. I will be playing a non-singing role, fortunately for the audience. It’s the speaking role of the detective.

Really? That’s good.
I always say that doctors should have to go through the health care system if you really want to understand what medicine is like in this country. You need to be a patient. If you are going to be a supporter of the arts you need to perform.

What is the connection between supporting the arts, having a thriving arts community, and business and economic development in your mind?

I lived in Cleveland for 26 years. What I have observed as someone who has come to love Cleveland as his home, is that Cleveland was built on two pillars. One was the pillar of industry and the other was the pillar of arts and philanthropy. We are in this transition from a manufacturing pillar to a more intellectual industrial pillar. On the arts side we are in transition as well. This community doesn’t survive without arts. This community doesn’t recruit the brightest people from around the country without the arts. The reason people come to Cleveland is because they know about our arts community; it’s a huge force of economic growth. Every business should support it.

Why did Coral Company buy Shaker Square?
It’s a dream come true. When I moved to Cleveland when I got out of school 26 years ago I lived walking distance from the square. It’s a place I went to shop and hang out. Never dreamed that I’d get a chance to own it. In some ways it’s unfortunate that I got the opportunity to because it has had its setbacks. It’s a city-Shaker Square is it‘s own city; one of the largest cities in Ohio and that asset is the town center, right in middle of it. It’s got everything you want - density, diversity, transportation. It’s a real estate asset that everybody else is trying to create. Plus, we love a challenge.

That is the flip side of it. Why do you feel or how do you feel that you are going to make money there?
People say we are either very smart or very stupid.

Which is it? It will probably take at least five years for us to answer that question. We’re going to make money. Just do the basics, whatever your business is. Measure the demographics, determine what the customer for that shopping center wants, and give it to them. The reception we’ve gotten so far to both our concept and the execution has been overwhelmingly positive. When Dave’s store opens we will get out first really powerful indication of whether we’re going in the right direction or not.

When will that happen?
August.

So what do they want?
They want Shaker Square to serve two parts of their lives, they want it to have a night and day personality. Have you heard? We’ve taken on this tag line for Shaker Square Night and Day. During the day it’s the neighborhood shopping center, whether it’s socializing at the coffee shop that’ll be there, doing your grocery shopping, or picking up some things for the house. For the nighttime personality, they want an entertainment district, a place to go and have fun. Between the restaurant, the cinema, and what we’re going to do with the public spaces, we’re going to turn them into a professional and amateur performance - almost an outdoor gallery of people. That’s a new phrase I hadn’t thought of before.

What are your plans for the entertainment there that you can talk about?

We see the square as having a performance side. We want to have a place where there are professionals performing; a legitimate performance space, some kind of amphitheatre like performance space, where anyone from blues bands to gospel choirs to dance troupes to Red can play. People really want to come and see performances on the weekends, but the flip side of that personality is a place where amateurs perform. There’s a hobby we all subscribe to - people watching. Everybody loves to do it. The human existence comes in so many shapes, sizes and colors it’s wonderful. So, if we give people a place to just watch each other and interact, they‘ll come. As a performance space both professional and amateur.

How do you plan to expand your residential properties?
We’re going to continue to look for the urban opportunity. As our residential business grows we get the occasional temptation of moving further away from the city, but we think that the best opportunity for us is to continue to chase that demographic that is now wanting to move back to the city and stick closer to the urban amenities. We have seen that population growing. The biggest economic entity we have in this region is University Circle. The folks who were recruited to Cleveland to work at University Circle are coming from another city. They want to live in an urban environment. They want to live near where they work. They want the advantages of Little Italy, the art museum, the botanical gardens and they want the restaurants. They don’t want to have to jump in their cars every time they do it.

When we founded Cool Cleveland, what we kind of thought was just a niche now continues to grow.
Work on the niche to a sub-market and hopefully if we all do it right it will become a legitimate full-blown market.

What do you see the as the future of mixed-use things like Shaker Square, Cedar Center and the Main on Lee? What’s your vision for those?

I think the potential in Cleveland is vast because we have so little of it right now. When Cleveland grew up architecturally and used rival cities there wasn’t a lot of mixed use. Zoning was for mixed neighborhoods where you might have had the Shaker Heights and Superiors neighborhoods where factories got built and houses got built across the street. But, there weren’t a lot of mixed uses in any one building. I think there is a lot of opportunity for those, particularly the mixes that incorporate some piece of retail. We are increasingly dependant on our food consumption outside the home. Everybody wants to live near some place where you can go out to eat. As the pace of life increases people look for more convenience. In a sense convenience has become the value in our retail business and our residential. We’re not just selling space, lifestyle, and value. We are selling convenience. That is part of the urban experience.

So, if you do this right you get a little halo over your head.
How appropriate!

Interview and photos by Thomas Mulready (:divend:)