CLEVELAND, Ohio - The fake Christmas trees and party decorations, from the storied social club's last big hurrah, are filmed with dust. Ceiling tiles, damp and crumbling, litter the floor. When the club's members left, they abandoned flip-flops in their lockers, bowling balls upstairs, lunch menus and schematics for renovations that never happened.

Since the century-old Cleveland Athletic Club closed in late 2007, the club's eponymous building has languished on Euclid Avenue. The swimming pool is dry, but there's plenty of water elsewhere: Filming the glass over pictures on the walls, soaking through paint, causing the gym's wooden floor to rise and ripple.

"I believe these buildings somehow have some energy or life to them when there are people in them," said Don Taylor of Welty Building Co. "And when they're empty, it's almost like they die. They just very quickly start to deteriorate."

Taylor, president and chief executive officer of Akron-based Welty, is part of a broad team of investors, developers and contractors planning to restore the old Cleveland Athletic Club Building to some of its onetime grandeur. On Wednesday, the state announced a $5 million preservation tax-credit award for the project, a $52.3 million investment in one of the last blighted strips of Euclid downtown.

Now lender-owned, the 15-story building is set to become 177 apartments.

The ballroom, dining room and bar on the seventh floor will host events. The swimming pool will reopen, as an amenity for renters. The squash courts will hold dwellings. And the gym, with a 30-foot ceiling, will house three-level, townhouse-style residences.

With the tax credits in hand, a new plan and a clean slate after a foreclosure, it appears that something actually might happen at 1118-1148 Euclid Ave.

"We're persistent," said Michael Zukerman of Whitestone Realty Capital, a New York company whose partners are investors in the project. "We stayed in touch. Everybody pulled together. Everybody did their share. We're in New York, but most of the work was being done in Cleveland by a lot of the Cleveland people."

Waring Investments, Inc., a New Jersey lender on the property, bid $3.3 million for the building at a sheriff's sale in March. Property records show that a Waring affiliate took possession of the property in May.

A copy of the project's tax-credit application, obtained by The Plain Dealer, shows that Waring owner and principal David Spector intends to stay in the deal. But the ownership will be restructured within the next 30 days, said Zukerman, whose group will be the largest stakeholder.

The other players include local investor Ned Weingart, who has been trying to redevelop the building since at least 2009; the DiGeronimo family of Precision Environmental, based in Independence; Welty; masonry-restoration contractor Steve Coon; and investors from New York, Chicago and New Orleans.

The team's tax-credit application includes a completion date of December 2017, but Zukerman is predicting a more aggressive schedule. This week, he said demolition and property clean-up should start in February or March, and renters could move in by mid-2017.

The developers hope to charge $2 per square foot - that's $1,600 a month for an 800-square-foot apartment, for example - for the units, which will range from "micro" one-bedroom spaces to three bedrooms.

Many aesthetic features of the athletic club's original space will stay. But the 15th-floor bowling alley will go. So will the locker rooms, where members' names still adorn the lockers and open doors reveal clothes and abandoned toiletries. A small workout room will replace the gym and other fitness facilities.

The Cleveland Athletic Club formed in 1908 and originally occupied space further west on Euclid, near East Sixth Street. The club moved to its longtime home in 1911, after leasing the air rights above a shorter building and adding to the project.

According to a club history, the organization sponsored the city's first indoor track meet in the 1920s and hosted the national swimming championships. Johnny Weissmuller, a competitive swimmer and the actor who played Tarzan in the 1930s and '40s, set a world record for the 150-yard backstroke in the club's pool.

The club struggled during the Depression, rollicked during the '50s and '60s and then slumped as Cleveland residents and companies flocked to the suburbs. By 1997, the club was insolvent, down to 511 members from a high of nearly 3,000.

Renovation projects helped the athletic club limp along for another decade. But in late 2007, club leaders said they would shut the facility's doors on New Year's Eve, due to what the organization's president called a "calamity of errors."

Eli Mann, a Cleveland Heights investor, had purchased the building a few months earlier. He talked about a redevelopment project, with apartments, retail, offices and a downsized club planned, and won state preservation tax credits. But nothing concrete materialized, aside from years of litigation, a bankruptcy and an eventual foreclosure.

In 2013, a hospitality company announced that the building would become a Crowne Plaza hotel, with apartments upstairs. By that time, Zukerman was involved, working with Weingart. But they couldn't finance the deal.

They owned the building for nine months last year, but gave it back to Mann in October to satisfy short-term seller financing. Then Mann lost the property through a foreclosure and sheriff's sale initiated by Cuyahoga County, due to unpaid real estate taxes. That's when Waring, the original lender, stepped in.

By then, tired of waiting, the state had clawed back the original preservation tax credits - which were awarded but never distributed, since the building wasn't restored. Any new owner or developer, officials said, would have to reapply.

After all those snarls, it's not surprising that onlookers might be skeptical.

"That's a building that has been laying dormant for so long - and you saw the problem," said Tom Yablonsky, executive director of the nonprofit Historic Gateway Neighborhood Corp. "The original applicant, long, long ago, didn't have the capacity to do a deal."

This week, Weingart and Zukerman greeted news of the new tax-credit award with enthusiasm and insisted that their team is ready to get started.

They plan to use federal historic tax credits and a low-interest clean-up loan from the Ohio Water Development Authority to round out bank financing and investor equity. They're also expecting property-tax abatement, which the city routinely grants for residential projects.

"It has been a long haul," said Richard Sheehan of the NGKF real estate brokerage, who is representing both the property owner and the investors. "Getting the tax credits is gonna make it happen."

The athletic club won't reappear, but the institution's logo still graces the old elevator doors. Former members call to inquire about their bowling trophies and memorabilia. Weingart said the developers might hold an auction early next year to sell off furniture, workout equipment and other items that have survived the rot, mold, freezes and thaws of the last eight years.

"Some of the stuff that is still there is amazing," Zukerman said. "Amazing."