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It could work, but not the southern model. If we went hardcore pro-business for a while, in terms of budget-slashing and regulatory clean-up, it might accomplish something good. But one of the other things it might accomplish is short-circuiting the urban movement. Of course some business interests are pro-urban and pro-transit and what not, but many aren't. Or maybe they aren't yet convinced it's favorable to them. Either way, politics places pro-business with anti-urban and that isn't going to change soon, unfortunately.

Sounds about perfect. I'm excited about putting something major on West Superior, which got shorted under Stark's plan.

I'm ambivalent on the location. All things considered the lakefront is a better spot, but Nautica is in an established entertainment district-- and a specific area of it that needed something besides more strippers.

I'm disppointed with Strickland, but it would take an epiphany on Kasich's part for me to support him. We have problems that tax cuts can't solve. Ohio's business taxes were completely rewritten under Taft and the changes are still coming into effect. Let's give that plan a chance before we rewrite the code again.

The Nautica parking lot is big enough for whales to mate there. Building this out in stages, starting with the 55k, seems like a good way to go. Another benchmark is the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga, which is 130,000 sq.ft. Their 2002 expansion alone was more than 55,000 sq. ft., added to the 130,000 from the original building. So the Nautica one would be on the small side. But what's its competition in this area? None that I know of. Chicago is far.

Awesome! This is the best news day we've had in some time.

That just made my day!

Something like this: The city maintenence union wouldn't clean up the square, or not without overtime or something. I don't remember. So the city paid the Downtown Cleveland Alliance to do it. The union then sued, claiming the city had no right to have any work done if they weren't doing it-- and the union won.

I'm going to the Midtown Inc annual banquet tomorrow, where the keynote speaker will be Mr. Falanga of MMPI. I may or may not get to ask questions. Is there anything anyone would like me to ask him?

All the better that all this stuff goes down by the Clinic, rather than on Euclid. The crime lab should be on Cedar too, since the coroner's office is already there.

I didn't mean to suggest it was a public group. I was referring to the funding sources listed in the article. Thank you for clarifying. Getting something like this financed and built is very complex, and National Church Residences has apparently mastered the process. Good work by all involved.

Done, and it was easy. Gonna take a while to really make a dent though. I will continue to pull weeds from public square each weekday. This ship's not going down with me on it. When I'm done, at least the bottom of this fountain will make the grade.

That indicates with certainty that anyone living near a corner where a bus turns will continue to have noise problems. Not cool. Very cool of Joe C to get back to you so quickly though. Also, what is the benefit of serenading the inside of the bus? The driver knows he/she is turning and the passengers don't care.

That is a legitimate concern, and I bet the guys picketing the Cadillac Ranch would rat us out right away. How dare you clean and weed the square! Weeds are Stage 2 of the problem anyway. Stage 1 is the fountain doesn't even work. That we do need the city to fix. Regardless, theguv is right and I will pull at least one weed out of it on my way out this evening.

Agreed, that is the most attractive public housing I've ever seen. If we can do that for homeless people, I know we can do it for young singles who want to live in the city.

Well, I guess he'd be getting a smaller settlement... if he were still alive.

NE quadrant fountain update: The water has been turned off again, and weeds have sprung up among the basin bricks with characteristic efficiency. What an embarrassment.

I tend to believe DUI laws are getting out of control, but I agree that this sentence is way too light. Way too light. I'd prefer the ones who kill people get nailed to the wall, while the .081 people busted at quasi-constitutional DUI checkpoints be treated a little more reasonably.

That's out of their jurisdiction.

Palijandro7, I wasn't implying that segregationist planning was THE reason Cleveland went downhill. The situation here was not entirely unique. However, the bisection of the city by a "race river" for so many years does explain why the east side has such a large concentration of rough neighborhood-- something people continue to hold against Cleveland to this day. That physical feature made segregation particularly easy and effective here. Also, I know tensions were high everywhere in the 60s, but full-scale riots in major cities were not a nationwide epidemic. Cleveland and Detroit are the most infamous for it, along wth Chicago and LA. These four, I think if you surveyed 100 people, are more associated with race war than other major cities in the US. Stokes:Cleveland::Obama:America... I wouldn't call it proof of widespread tolerance in either case. More importantly-- it took probably hundreds of individual bad decisions to get Cleveland to where it is. Segregation is only one aspect. My central theme was that choices, not circumstances, led to all this wreckage. I would hesitate to blame Cleveland for overreliance on industry, when the same is true in some way for virtually every city in the US. The difference is that the industries of this particular region are the ones the nation decided to trash. Cleveland cannot be blamed for that one, nor can Detroit or Youngstown or anyone local. These too are choices but they're made at the national level.

I think the whole point is that these hotels are already attached, and that this attachment will be enhanced as part of the project. I agree though that we need a more impressive one. The arrangement will seem incomplete without it. I like that we have several hotels in old buildings, but we do need one new flagship. And that Crown Plaza is not an attractive building at all. We should probably just keep the tunnel, take that down, and build something more fitting there. We've knocked down more impressive structures than that in the last month alone. And I don't want to build our new flagship hotel next to the jail, where they abruptly release people with no "bus fare." Absolutely not. That would be one of those self-defeating decisions again. I've been talking this over with people in health care purchasing, and most have doubts about the medical mart angle. For example, one person in nursing homes said that for their purchasing, there's already a full service outlet in Milwaukee run by a distributor. It seems to work like we're thinking this will. It's a showroom that people fly in to look at. On the good side, we'll have a more complete package to offer visitors. I still strongly agree that our project should be tied in with a new train station, as well as a move for the county offices. That building makes everything around it uglier. If we're going to dig up the whole mall anyway, let's be done with it. All of these are immediate needs. I can't think of a better stimulus package for downtown.

Guess who still makes steel? Cleveland does. And I mean real steel, made from scratch. All that steel from down south is rubbish. Pittsburgh, meanwhile, wants to be a higher-tech Columbus. Gittin' there, but going broke in the process despite all it has going for it. I hope what happened here never happens to them. No good can come of it. The best thing Cleveland can be is post-this, whatever we want to call it. The dark ages. Then we can move on to the next thing. It does look like everyone under the sun is going for the bio angle... that has to be clear to everyone by now. I mean, do we really think we're being inventive here? Come on. This post isn't about that. We're always looking for the next big thing, all these struggling cities, trying to buy people back in, when the simple solution might be to put some clean clothes on and wash our hair. Maybe all these bad decisions are what people ran from to build the suburbs. When they stop, and the approach materially changes, the exodus can reverse... spurred along by common sense, fuel panic, and positive trends in urbanism that are already underway. But the carnage of the old cities has to stop. People like Pittsburgh because it's still there. That's the reason. And the thing about those pretty mountains is: twenty minutes later, you hate them. Right about the time you smell your transmission, or you get messed up at yet another triangle. That's why Zeus decided to make Chicago and Cleveland bigger than Pittsburgh. They make more sense as cities. There should be twice as much urban awesomeness in Cleveland as in Pittsburgh, given the size, and the port, and yes, the relative flatness. There was and there can be again.

I love America, even if it does dumb things, and the same goes for Cleveland. I offer comparisons only to help it get where it's going... a place where, frankly, many comparable cities already are. I don't believe our problems are all that unique. Unfortunately our degree of self-loathing is a little odd. I'm part of that as much as anyone else. Positive motion will generate positive thoughts. If we keep our eyes on the ball, we can solve that mean ol' retail imbalance, and we can rebuild our neighborhood cores. We've beaten every great empire the world has thrown at us. I believe we can undo urban sprawl.

That's hilarious. I was about to say he meant something else, but I wouldn't be surprised if he and others like him honestly thought bribery was legal here under home rule.

I'll take poor condition over gone. I grant that Pittsburgh may historically be more homogeneous than Cleveland. I also grant that mountains make for tough freeway construction. But I would still rank intentional restraint on demolition and urban retail availablility above those factors in terms of differences in sprawl. Does anyone in Pittsburgh offer the Monroeville Mall as a reason to not have any retail in downtown or Oakland? Or as a tacit justification for levelling an entire neighborhood retail district? I'm sure it's less saturated with suburban retail than Greater Cleveland is, but that's kind of my point. These were all conscious human decisions, not mathematical laws or acts of God. They're no more permanent than any other human decisions, and we do not have to live with them for one minute more than we choose to. We don't need mountains to stop tearing down our building stock, and we don't need mountains to justify redeveloping vacant areas with street life in mind. Chicago doesn't have mountains and that's never seemed to hold them back. Greater Pittsburgh-- I think they officially call it "Pittsburgh and its Countryside," which is far more charming than saying Cleveland+ [some other unappreciated cities]-- could have allowed five times as many malls and strip plazas as they needed. But they didn't, and we did. They could have given over their neighborhoods to Urban Renewal. But they didn't, and we did. They could have torn down most of their multistory structures and tuned major commercial steets into endless vacant lots. But guess who did that, and who didn't? These decisions cannot be blamed on plate tectonics. Nobody's standing behind us wearing a shirt that says "FLAT LAND" holding a gun to our head. People I know from far-out Pittsburgh exurbs always say they're from Pittsburgh, while people from suburbs of the other two cities in question specify some sort of Heights of Park or Village, even if that info means nothing to their audience. Our sprawl problems, just like Detroit's, come from within.