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Any regular reader of this thread knew what to expect years ago.

We get nowhere if developers are above the law. Law is law.

Can't get chicken or eggs. It's noon! Business doesn't work like that at all. Markets don't just come running to you when it's most convenient on your end. You have to be there for them, at the time of their choosing, not yours. You do what you need to do to get the job done. This is why we fail. We choose not to get the job done, then we blame the market. In other cities, and at other restaurants where I've worked, the slow shifts are rotated so that nobody gets stuck making zero tips. BUT YOU DO NOT CLOSE. You serve meals when meals are served. You get the job done. Once a customer is alienated they are probably gone forever. If you don't wanna help them when they need it-- and you're the one asking for their repeat patronage-- why should they come back and wait an hour for dinner, at a time when everything favors you? Long term survival is more important than immediate gain. Long term survival in business is only possible by cultivating trust and reliance in your customer base.

This is why you hear me go off so much about "outdoorsy" developments... I think everything downtown should be alive and hopping 12 months/year. Anything set up as an outdoor attraction is not only useless but TO BE AVOIDED during our long windy winters. I don't want any part of downtown to hibernate, or to give people a chilly feeling from looking at it. This is also why I like it when we build with warm-colored stone... and why I hate when we propose downtown office buildings that look like ice cubes. Wrong idea!

I agree with tedolph. But keep in mind that MMPI itself has no interest in hooking up to any train station. I'm just hoping Cuyahoga County 2.0 will force the issue early in 2011.

I can actually get with Eagle Fan's point here... as long as it's assumed that Avon will one day, by necessity, also be an ultra-high density cluster. Hahaha! Keep running!

Not having seen anything, the site plan and style sound great to me... I was pretty worried when they released the "interim" version that only had 2 buildings on it.

Apparently, Midtown Cleveland will be our shame and embarassment for decades to come. And it all could be prevented if we had officials who took their jobs seriously. People need to be removed from office when crap like this happens... and by "crap like this" I'm referring to three entirely separate destructive projects that are all going up at once.

Well, the WFL should go to east along the lakeshore. But that's neither here nor there. I like the natatorium/tennis idea. I can't say that downtown has a lack of sports facilities... or even a lack of gyms, seems like there's tons of gyms... but this could at least bring some foot traffic to the area. The sales tax was enacted for this specific purpose and I'm not sure they could use it as general revenue. But maybe. The fact that it didn't go to a vote might give them more leeway here. Still, we'll have a different county govt soon, and I'd bet they'll wanna use the bond money to end the tax sooner. But maybe not. Good news either way.

Nobody said different, but I've lived in other cities and the number of rarely-open restaurants here is on the high side. When it happens en masse like this, and people have inexplicable experiences, they might sour on the idea of eating downtown period. Besides, forget lunch... I haven't even mentioned all the places that are closed for dinner, which is a bigger problem development-wise and makes even less sense. Come on down! :wave: But only at a certain time! :wave: :| they say

Quite so. I just find it humorous that we're so intent on historically preserving something that itself was considered an affront to the city's history. Not by everyone, of course, but there was indeed a public controversy along these lines. For example, the magnificent Case Block, aka old city hall, was torn down for Burham's library. And it wasn't even that old at the time. Also humorous to me is our need to preserve a lake vista that was never meant to be there, per the Group Plan. Maybe I'm that philistine who looks at a painting of a red dot and fails to realize that the dot represents Harry Truman and the blank canvas around it represents both the tragedy and the fellowship of mortal man. So be it. In my view, a vacant lot represents opportunity rather than completion. And what we're talking about here is a vacant lot that gets mowed. I might even suggest, given its central location and its chilling effect on street activity, that the mall is one of the reasons those parking lots aren't developed yet.

Re: hotels, apparently these are not "perfectly good" for all desired uses. My understanding from upthread is that we don't have enough CONTIGUOUS hi-end rooms to accomodate the kind of bookings we want. These large groups simply can't come here, because regardless of how many open rooms we have total, we don't have one single place that's big enough. Re: grand spaces, it wasn't always like this. Burnham's "group plan" was controversial from its conception, because it violates the true original plan for downtown... which was to have maximum density revolve around the comparative openness of Public Square. We literally ripped down the our central urban core... which had flouished for over a century... and we replaced it with a new century of sterility and isolation. For reasons already discussed, that hasn't worked out very well. How can this "group plan" be so much more historical and worthy of preservation than the 1796 plan? I'm suggesting we refocus on the 1796 plan, the one Burnham basically trashed. And if these barren lawns still contained fountains and people eating lunch, my view of their success would probably improve.

I'm not sure we're accounting for the amount of dinner business that is permanently chased away by refusing to open for lunch. Think about the impressions being created, as illustrated above. Businesses run unprofitable product lines and services all the time... it's often the only way to maintain customers for their profit-centers. Small cars are one major example. Therefore, if you can't afford to stay open during hours from which you don't directly profit, then you went into business with insufficient capital reserves. Your lack of capital reserves changes nothing about clear and obvious expectancies in the market... like being open during normal hours, regardless of whether each hour is individually profitable.

No offense intended... but my granular cake-making term for the day is "vibrant." Nothing about a city, a streetscape, a color, or a culture is ever "vibrant" and it's been used way too many times in these contexts to still have the desired impact.

It is not wise to make dismissive assumptions about other people's backgrounds. I was in the restaurant business for almost as long as R&R was... all types of restaurants in all types of settings... and I've never ever heard of a place being open 3 hours a day. Never. Never heard of any such thing till I got to Cleveland. And this is why we can't fix anything around here. As soon as a problem is identified, this massive status-quo electromagnet kicks on to assure you the problem is all in your dumb little head. Even though restaurants really do work normal hours everywhere else-- it doesn't matter. All that matters is that we WILL NOT change anything around here. Correction-- any change must recieve 35 stamps of approval from the very people and groups that have already run the city into the ground. I don't care. Restaurants need to be open for meals, because that's what people do when they live in a society. There is no counterpoint. Some of this stuff isn't half as complicated as it's made out to be.

We all know how much cooks and waiters are paid. It's hard to believe any restaurant can justify being closed for entire meals. There's not that much marginal cost involved in being open (you pay on rent and fixtures regardless), but you permanently lose business by putting people through experiences like R&R's today. Refusing to be open during normal hours is destructive to downtown, destructive to the city, and wasteful of the time and resources so many have poured into revitalization efforts. Sorry. Sore spot.

I've had this happen with multiple downtown restaurants. It's even worse near CSU. Never seen anything like it. Detroit looks so much more abandoned in terms of buildings... but the restaurants there are somehohw able to keep normal hours. This is something we just plain need to fix. We are falling short of clear and obvious national standards. People in America work more than 3 hours a day. Restaurants in America are open for meals, at least two of them, and stores in America are open well into the evening. And don't give me this "chicken and egg" stuff again. You can't expect some "vibrant" urban neighborhood to spring up amongst basic services that are only open 3 hours a day. If you can only afford to have the doors open 3 hours a day, don't blame the neighborhood for your lack of customer base. "This place needs ten thousand more people!" No it doesn't, you need to work all day and do it consistently. Business may be slow for a while, but people need to have faith that you will be there when they need you... only then do they become regulars. You obviously didn't have enough capital to open a business in the first place, if you can't justify keeping it open during normal hours. This is a FAIL, and seeing them everywhere discolors the impressions that suburbanites and out of towners take away when they visit downtown.

PA would make a great casino venue, that's perfect. But there's no way Gilbert moves the casino out of his own little corner. I'm really surprised that so many people are so intent on preserving the mall and auditorium. To me, the dead zone they create far outweighs any historic or architectural value, even though I'm a fiend for stuff like that. It's just such a large and impenetrable dead zone.

I think that picture is of Public Hall. That's where the Obama event was and probably the recent RRHOF show too. But there is also a smaller more ornate venue in there too, isn't there? Someone above said there's actually 4 venues in that building. All the same, it's about time we builded something new there. Historical preservation is very important... but if a line must be drawn, I would draw it based on the structure's future potential. Most commercial, residential, and mixed-use buildings would easily pass this test. Single-purpose structures would have a more difficult time of it, especially if they consume important real estate for which a coherent plan exists. I can't say we have a coherent plan yet for the site of PA. But if we're going to build a fancy hotel to go with the MM/CC, that is exactly where I'd put it.

^ Seems plain as day. I hope we see more articles and studies like this. Eventually people will start thinking about it.

Not sure. I'll try to post updates as I hear them.

There is to be a student body vote regarding football. The question is whether to raise the general fee by a few bucks each semester. A friend of mine is spearheading this effort.

I have been inside. The place managed to be dreary during an Obama rally. This is different from PHS. Those buildings interact with the street at all hours of the day. PA is obsolete for its intended purpose, and it's not set up for any alternative or secondary uses in the way the PHS buildings are. No ground level retail or restaurant space, no offices above... just an entire block of the city's core rendered lifeless. Even if it's used occasionally for shows, it's still a lifeless monolith the rest of the time. Is that true of HoB? No. PHS? No. CSU convo center? OK, kind of. But that's not in the middle of downtown. The fact that it's adjacent to the similarly lifeless mall is no help. That is the deadest area of downtown, and it will continue as such until something is built there that we can actually use. MM/CC and NCTC would be steps in that direction. But will either of those developments put people on the mall or put people in and around PA? No. And if PA were regularly used for shows, it would only take business away from other downtown venues. I say it's time to move on from the mall plan. How many centuries of evidence do we need to realize that hollowing out our downtown was a bad idea? Let's have people get off the train at NCTC, or emerge from a convention at MM/CC, and find themselves clearly in the middle of our downtown, right where the action is-- instead we've got barren grassland, deserted buildings that cover entire blocks, and no people.

Fair enough, but more importantly: Congrats to Hootenany for having the "Comment of the Day" over on the PD site's 3-C thread!

Most young people, yes. That's something people do in their 20s and it tails off after that. Mainly because people then have families with kids. "Crashing" is also a little less appropriate for a mid-week business trip. And day trips among the 3C's for business are pretty common. But they're highly impractical with the travel times we're hearing about for this startup service, and that will take away a ton of the market. I see this being used a lot for weekend excursions, and during the week by people who work from computer and largely make their own schedules. I don't see a whole lot more market for it, other than cannibalizing Grayhound's market, which is allright by me.