Cleveland Public Power and Playhouse Square: Partnering to improve the community

Playhouse Square and Cleveland Video

Public Power Supports a Thriving Downtown District

In the heart of downtown Cleveland, the Playhouse Square stands as a cultural beacon and tourist destination, reflecting both the city’s rich history and its ongoing transformation.

Home to the largest theater district outside of New York City, Playhouse Square — which has 12 performance spaces — welcomes more than 1 million visitors each year. In addition to its historic theaters, the district is home to a number of apartment buildings, office buildings, retail locations, parking decks, and many businesses and restaurants. What many don’t see behind the marquees is the strong relationship helping to drive the district forward. Playhouse Square is the city’s first special improvement district (SID) and is a shining example of how successful this model can be.

In Cleveland, an SID is a neighborhood or district where property owners come together and pay an additional assessment for the purposes of funding public improvements and services that benefit the district. The SID serves to support the growth and development of a business district through services that enhance the area’s vibrancy, improve its safety and cleanliness, and attract investment. This includes things like lighting, sidewalks, landscaping, and more — meaning that the district depends on the City of Cleveland and Cleveland Public Power (CPP) to do their part in improving the community.

“Part of advancing a dynamic district like Playhouse Square is partnership, and having a partner that’s aligned like Cleveland Public Power,” said Nathan Kelly, President of Real Estate for Playhouse Square. “We have to make sure that we’re coordinating things around the fact that we have 1.3 million visitors coming in. With CPP, I know that I have a partner that is going to be part of making us look great and making the city look great, and that’s very important to all the things we do, big and small.”

In the 120 years since its founding, CPP’s mission has remained the same: to deliver safe, reliable electricity to Cleveland residents and businesses, all for the betterment of the community. In Playhouse Square, that mission is visible in real time, where the district and CPP regularly collaborate on major projects.

Over the years, CPP has worked to expand, upgrade and reroute power in the district, ensuring the continued delivery of safe, reliable power in the area. The utility also works to maintain streetlighting, responds to potential supply issues and outages, and more.

“We rely on CPP to provide guidance on power supply and the most efficient way to deliver against new sustainability efforts that we may be considering,” said Carl Dettlebach, Facilities Manager for Playhouse Square. “Also, in other places, where we need reliable power for our theaters — if we’re doing a “Lion King” or an “Aladdin,” we need to know that, should we have a catastrophic power outage, a transformer fails, that they can be there within 24 hours to turn that around.”

The sort of electric work required in the district is as much about preserving the past as it is about powering the present. Playhouse Square’s five historic theaters are more than 100 years old, as are the buildings’ power vaults. Upgrading and integrating that sort of equipment into a modern electric distribution system requires a special level of care and skill that not every utility has.

According to Dettlebach, CPP often sends engineers to coordinate directly with his team, collaborating to upgrade electric systems in a way that maintains electric service without derailing performances in the theaters. Together they’ve modernized vault equipment and built substation redundancy, timing outage windows to line up with show calendars.

For CPP, these projects are worth the extra effort knowing that the district and its theaters ultimately provide a greater, intangible benefit to the community.

“One of the great things about working at CPP, and in public power in general, is that much of the time, we all share a similar motivation and similar drive to make sure our community succeeds and thrives, and that is what brings us together more than anything else,” said Ammon Danielson, CPP Commissioner and AMP Board of Trustees member. “I think one of the best things about public power is that motive — that you’re part of the community, you serve the community, and that’s the focus of what we do every day.”

Watch the video about the relationship between Cleveland Public Power and Playhouse Square above.

About the Campaign

Throughout 2026, AMP plans to feature AMP Member and the benefits of public power by spotlighting the relationship between municipal electric utilities and their communities through the Public Power Is Community Focused multimedia campaign. The campaign will produce a series of videos, stories, social media posts and graphics aimed at raising awareness of the value and impact of public power. The campaign will highlight community benefits, such as reliability, local control and reinvestment by showing real stories of how public power supports education, businesses and community groups.