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Great call! I keep walking by that and I never check it out. Maybe now's the time.

Agreed. Let's get one.

I don't think there are any plans for a protection racket... just more mayem. Coventry needs to make sure its festivals are well-guarded. Otherwise they'll go the way of 185th. At least Cleveland Heights has the police personnel available to get it done. Collinwood tried charging $2 a head for private security... but all that did was tell people "this ain't your kinda festival." CHPD needs to be omnipresent, and make sure anyone causing a ruckus is immediately hauled away.

It really really does sound like "protecting" that view will be a chief priority for years to come. They even want to put NCTC behind City Hall for this reason, instead of jumping on the opportunity to, as Paul put it, truly connect downtown to the lakefront. The powers that be are simply enamored with these mall views, be it from the ballroom or from the mall surface. As long as these views are given priority, nothing will ever be built in the "front and center" portion of downtown.

There's no self-pity going on here, only pity for the fools who wasted Cleveland's federal money. The point is that we should already be several years into that planning process with this project. The article stated that planning money was given to us 4 years ago, and we let half of it evaporate by failing to start planning until just now. Nobody is arguing the federal timeline. This issue here is Cleveland leadership's approach to that timeline.

Sweet! Although this passage from the article raises questions: "Four years ago, the city was awarded $718,900 in federal funds by the Federal Transit Administration to plan an intermodal facility, Brown said. But the money sat unused because all the talk of lakefront development or a new convention center never led to any concrete plans... Half of the federal earmark funds, which are administered by RTA, expired two years ago and the other half expires June 30, which prompted the RTA board on Tuesday to give the money to Cleveland. The city will provide a 20 percent match, so about $432,000 will be available to prepare a plan and preliminary design." So let me get this straight... the feds awarded us $718k, but RTA and the city watched half of it evaporate through inaction? Seriously? The justification given is that other plans were uncertain 4 years ago. So what? It's not like a multimodal transit center would be useless if MM/CC or FEB didn't happen. In fact, it might singlehandedly spur the kind of development it was waiting on. Why did we waste all that money? I hope the article is mistaken on this point. If it isn't, I'm thoroughly disgusted. We need every break we can get. We can't allow gross incompetence to destroy our opportunities, to wipe out federal grants in the six-figure range.

For what it's worth, the Carew Tower's observation deck in Cincinnati is entirely outdoor, with a chest high wall being the only barrier Ah ha! So it is choice and choice alone that keeps ours closed.

Who is "everybody"? I'm not. It only takes one highly-placed person to be gung-ho about BRT. Since we have one, our planning and our federal funding requests are awash with BRT... despite the fact that nobody else is gung-ho about it. If it makes you feel any better, the current Clifton project isn't really BRT, it's just a general re-do of the road with new shelters. My question is why do we keep tearing up and re-doing what we already have, instead of trying to move forward? You wanna reduce traffic? Don't put obstacles in the road! Just increase transit services. Then we have two good options instead of none, and we don't keep expanding the amount of untouchable public "greenspace" we can't maintain. RTA should be building train tracks, not dead trees and bollards.

Great thoughts, clvlndr. I would have it go all the way through Lakewood to West Clifton, maybe even across to downtown River. I'm sure the fact that it's only one line, with a lot of freight traffic, is an obstacle. Could those be re-routed while a 2-line elevated replacement is built? We'll never know if we don't try... and right now it appears we won't, because RTA's capital project priorities are mostly bus-oriented. Sure we're fixing up some older stations on the existing Rapid network, and even moving one of them, but major functional expansions seem a million years away. I think that timetable could be accelerated a great deal, if we had some vision and desire in play at RTA. As long as our transit agency is philosophically opposed to rail expansions we're guaranteed not to see any.

Wow... Columbus slowed down I guess. I had once thought they'd be pushing a million, or at least eclipse Detroit in 2010.

It was the Columbus Road bridge that started the ruckus... it allowed trade to enter Cleveland directly from the south, no longer needing to go thru Ohio City first. So they burnt the bridge down, cannons, etc.

If it's a warehouse you've gotta have truck access, and it's often in the rear. I don't expect trouble there. I just hope it will have multiple stories in the front and no lawn buffer.

I'm not sure Italians were the only people running illegal booze back in the day... I think it was a fairly popular activity.

This is a sticky wicket here. I like the plan, but I really hope they don't have to tear up the (recently renovated?) Allen to accomplish it. For the moment I'm cautiously optimistic.

Nobody is suggesting that we cease promotional efforts, or cease having a CVB. But I am suggesting that we try different approaches. Vastly different. What I suggested specifically is that Positively Cleveland should bring in some new blood and show that they deserve to keep the funding stream, by demonstrating the ability to move in another direction. Everybody involved with "Cleveland+" needs to be reevaluated at the very least. I'm sorry... but Akron is not Cleveland's greatest asset, not in a million years. And this is public money we're paying them.

That all sounds great. But how does it mesh with the idea that downtown routes are also being consolidated at STJ transit center near CSU? If we were building one single transit center, I'd say WHD is a great place to put it, because of its relative proximity to the rail nexus at Tower City. Although... Public Square still works better for that purpose because it's directly adjact to the rail nexus, rather than a few blocks away. Public Square can never not be directly adjacent to the city's rail nexus, not until Tower City is torn down. So there's an extent to which it will never totally make sense to divert the bus system from there. It's not like the buses currently go there because they hate greenspace. They go there because it's rational to do so. Maybe this bipolar transit center plan is equally rational, but I'm not seeing it. Can anyone explain how it would work? Not a rhetorical question.

I'd really like to know more of the logisitical plan behind these transit centers before we spend any more money on them. I mean, we're cutting bus routes left and right, and we never seem to have a dime to investigate any rail expansions. Yet we have grants from all directions to spend on more and more bus infrastructure. Caution, pedestrians... bus is costly... bus... is costly.

Long story short, you can't trust a vistation number that comes from an agency tasked with creating visitation. We have no idea what methods were used to arrive at 14 million. They might as well have said 1.21 jigga-zillion.

Generally I agree with w28th that CSU has too much open space as it is... but I think the idea of the plaza is to create a new crossroad of frontages in the middle of this block. One of the few instances where I'd say we might gain something from losing a building. If we can continue filling in the other empty spaces along Euclid, as with University Lofts, I don't think we'll miss it much at all.

I just saw it in person today. It's waaaay back from the street, fully behind the parking tunnel. It isn't along the side of the 668 building. It's practically mid-block. That said, it was seeing a lot of use this afternoon.

Thats the problem they've limited their reach! There needs to be an international component and big city metro campaigns. I'm all for that, but first let's tweak the message a bit. Come to Cleveland! We've got... Youngstown!

Nice to see that patio area in action.

Trouble is, the issue for pedestrians is different than the issue for bikers. Pedestrians really do need a direct path because walking across Abbey then doubling back makes the trip take a whole lot longer. In many cases, too long. It's curious to me why this wasn't framed more as a pedestrian issue.

A friend told me it got that name because its twisty streets & valleys made it a good place to "duck" police pursuit during prohibition. I have no idea where he got this or if it's true.

Fully agree that the function is important and the effort must continue. I'm just thinking of all the unemployed marketing majors in this area who deserve a shot. If the bed tax is in flux right now, performance and change are fair issues to raise.