CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Jerome Schmelzer was a child in 1948 when his father bought the eight-story Finance Building in downtown Cleveland. In the mid-1990s, Schmelzer and his brother, Lawrence, acquired three neighboring buildings and remade them, playing off a massive public investment in pro sports facilities in the city's Gateway District.

On Wednesday, the Schmelzer brothers sold their downtown holdings.

The $5.25 million sale of the Pointe at Gateway, to a local doctor, ended more than six decades of family control between Prospect Avenue and Huron Road. The transfer marks another hand-off of high-profile property in an increasingly busy downtown. New ownership might bring fresh investments and ground-floor tenants to the Pointe, a wedge-shaped cluster of historic buildings filled with condominiums, offices, restaurants and retail space.

The Flatiron Building, on Prospect Avenue, points across East Ninth Street toward the Osborn Building in October 1963. The Schmelzer brothers bought and redeveloped the building in the mid-1990s as part of a project called The Pointe at Gateway. They sold that project this week.

"We've gone through thick and thin here, and it was a long, arduous process," Jerry Schmelzer said, reflecting on the $12 million Pointe project and its health during the past 20 years.

"We're not giving up on real estate. We still own other buildings. ... I'm 76 years old, and there comes a time when you just want to take it easier."

The Pointe deal comes amid renewed interest in Gateway and heightened enthusiasm about downtown's resurgence.

The long-empty Ameritrust complex on East Ninth Street reopened this year, anchored by a hotel, apartments and Cuyahoga County's new government headquarters. Investors are snapping up smaller buildings, some unoccupied for decades. And developer Bob Stark is talking up ambitious plans for new construction, including high-rise apartments and offices, just north of Quicken Loans Arena.

That's the type of development civic leaders envisioned 20 years ago, when they pumped taxpayer cash into a new ballpark for the Cleveland Indians and a downtown arena for the Cavaliers. At the time, Mayor Michael White asked Schmelzer to buy up dilapidated properties around the Finance Building and prove that public spending would beget private investment.

The result was a preservation project that remade old offices and dingy storefronts with 42 apartments and restaurants including the Winking Lizard and the short-lived, but wildly popular, Diamondback Brewery. Today, all but five of those apartments upstairs have been sold as condominiums. Last summer, a nonprofit called City Year Cleveland moved into the pie-slice-style Flatiron Building at the east end of the complex, facing East Ninth.

But the former brewery, since home to a series of restaurants that flopped, is empty. That space, roughly 26,000 square feet, could be diced into more bite-sized bays for restaurants under the new owner's plans.

A view of the Flatiron Building, the eastern anchor of the future Pointe at Gateway complex, in 1978. The billboard occupies the eastern face of the Finance Building, which the Schmelzer family has owned since the 1940s.

"Diamondback Brewery was extremely profitable early, and I think it was the highest grossing restaurant downtown -- or one of the highest," said Tom Yablonsky, executive director of the Historic Gateway Neighborhood Corp., a nonprofit group.

"It was a boom, and then it busted. The building has great potential for being re-worked as a retail location, with possibly smaller places than have been in there historically. ... The beauty or curse of these buildings is that they have both a Huron and a Prospect address. Do you keep that throughway? Or cut it up?"

Real estate records identify the buyer as a company tied to Dr. Kailash Kedia, a Cleveland urologist. Another company tied to Kedia recently paid $5 million for a Garfield Heights office building called One Infinity Corporate Centre. Kedia did not respond to a request for comment about his recent real estate acquisitions.

Rico Pietro, a local real estate broker who represented the buyer, wouldn't talk about Kedia. But he was willing to discuss possible redevelopment plans.

"I think our idea is to potentially look at separating the [former brewery] space, maybe carving it up for two or three or four occupiers rather than just one mega-restaurant," said Pietro, a principal with Cushman & Wakefield/Cresco Real Estate in Independence. "We're also investigating adding a rooftop patio to the building as part of the redevelopment that's happening in the neighborhood."

Bob Garber, another Cresco principal, represented the Schmelzer brothers in the sale -- though the Pointe never officially hit the market. Instead, the deal came together behind the scenes, in a convergence of the right players, timing and price.

A vantage point from the top of the Osborn Building on East Ninth Street offers a westward view of Huron Road and Prospect Avenue in late 1949, the year after the Schmelzer family bought the Finance Building.

The $5.25 million sale price covers the non-condo portions of the Finance Building, once called the Belmont Building; the Flatiron Building, which houses the Winking Lizard and City Year; the Koller Bros. Co. building, named after a longtime hardware store; and the Bill Taylor Hat Co. building. The property also includes one of downtown's largest billboards, which looks over the intersection of Huron, Prospect and East Ninth.

Though Jerry Schmelzer no longer controls the Pointe, he doesn't plan to leave downtown. He has a short-term lease on his offices, in the basement of the Finance Building, and continues to work with the Downtown Cleveland Alliance, a nonprofit that represents property owners.

Now he has a full-circle story to tell -- one that starts with his immigrant father's dry-cleaning business and real estate investments in the 1930s and '40s, follows Prospect Avenue through redevelopments and recessions and ends on a hopeful note, with new money flowing in to a prime corner of downtown.

"We haven't lost money," Schmelzer said. "We've made a modest profit. But how shall I put it? If we had taken that money and invested it in government bonds that paid 1.5 percent or something, we probably would have done better than making this investment."

He added: "I don't regret it. ... I think this property will only get better. This neighborhood's only going to get better. I know the buyer will reap the benefits, and I'm happy about that."