Map Boy

I get it, but my problem is with "fixing" this block, which is one of the most charming in the city, by cutting down 40 year-old trees and replacing them with saplings. Maybe in 20 years this place will look the way it should, but in the meantime, we're trading some hella good streetscape for a few freakin parking spaces. By the way, the sidewalk on this block is already super wide and has two rows of trees itself, what will become of this? Oh, and by the way, we're paying for this!

soon... I'm really quite excited about the Corner Alley. I'm thinking about having a wedding eve party there! Plus, who doesn't love bowling in the winter? It'll be ready just in time!

double dumb...triple dumb...what in the hell is wrong with these people?

wow... you know, it's funny that with all the movie business based in LA, I've never really seen a movie that gives me a good sense of what the place feels like. Maybe Wassup Rockers? I don't know...

I was pleased to find this today on the City Planning Commission's website: http://planning.city.cleveland.oh.us/cwp/otherLinks.htm Basically, it's part of a much improved 2020 Citywide Plan site and this particular page features links to other plans within the city, from Tyler Village to the Rocky River Drive Master Plan. Very nice! When I have more time, I'm going to go through the thing and check out the ones I'm not familiar with...

Ok, I can get down with that. Still, the question remains: what is the progress of Volpe's streetscape plan?

Update from the City's website: City of Cleveland, Cudell Improvement, and WIRE-Net launch demolition of the Trinity Building at 9203 Detroit Avenue October 26, 2006 – This afternoon, Mayor Frank G. Jackson and City Councilman Jay Westbrook (Ward 18), alongside Cudell Improvement, Inc., WIRE-Net, businesses, residents and stakeholders in the Cudell community launched demolition of the Trinity Building at 9203 Detroit Avenue. Representatives from the Cuyahoga County Department of Development, the Ohio Department of Development, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency were also on hand to give remarks before a bulldozer plowed into the 170,000 square foot, brick building. “When the business left and the jobs left, the neighborhood was left with a symbol of neglect,” said Mayor Jackson. “By tearing it down we are saying that we will not tolerate blight, unpaid property taxes, and illegal dumping and that we are committed to improving the quality of life in our neighborhoods.” More at http://www.city.cleveland.oh.us/CityofCleveland/Home/PressRelease/prdetail?id=400

^The #1 reason why I post!

Yes, I'm quoting myself, but I figured I needed to refresh people's memories on this subject from 6 pages back. I walked down E. 12th today and found backhoes digging in the median between Chester & Superior...the one that appears intact above. They weren't taking out the trees yet, but I wonder if that's what they're moving towards. Again, this really pisses me off. Particularly on this block, which could be a model block for other high-rise blocks in the city, in my opinion. Oh, and apparently there are "construction update" photos on the Zaremba website. Nothing too exciting, but we should be able to keep up with progress this way!

From the 11/14/06 Lima News: Council approves CIC to handle sale of land at former Glass Block property in St. Marys BY BOB BLAKE - Nov. 14, 2006 ST. MARYS — The bricks of the former Glass Block building are slowly disappearing from its former site along Spring Street and with cleanup entering its final weeks, St. Marys City Council on Monday approved a plan to market the site. Councilors approved legislation to have the city’s Community Improvement Corp. serve as the city’s real estate agent for the sale of the city-owned property. Monday’s approval represents the latest in a series of developments this year for the property. Legislation to demolish the Glass Block building along Spring Street and the eastern and central sections of the Cotton Mill buildings along High Street was passed earlier this summer. The Cotton Mill buildings stood vacant for more than a dozen years and the Glass Block building was vacant since a November 2004 fire damaged the roof and third floor of the structure. MORE: http://www.limanews.com/story.php?IDnum=32163

It is fabulous! We met with the local chapter of IDSA (Industrial Designers Society of America) yesterday at CIA and got some good feedback from young designers. Apparently, Ohio has more chapters than any other state in the US. On the downside, Rubbermaid is leaving town... Ned Hill was able to turn this into a potential opportunity, though, by indicating that some staff will certainly stay behind and could start their own businesses. We could see more product innovation and entrepreneurship as a result...sorta ironic!

p.s: maybe this thread could be merged with this one? http://www.urbanohio.com/forum2/index.php?topic=6079.msg139314#msg139314

Pupils ‘inked’ to new Allen East school Lima News, 11/1/06 Hundreds of Allen East schools pupils saw a glimpse of their new school Tuesday. The pupils visited the new gymnasium and signed their names on the concrete before the wooden floor is installed. Some used spray paint, and others used markers. Some wrote down nicknames, and others added jersey numbers. "Here’s to many memories at AE," Kelsey Heise wrote. The 179,797-square-foot school will be completed March 20 and will house prekindergarten through 12th grade.

From the APA (American Planning Association) Advocate: Transit Ballot Measures Continue Popularity with Voters $43-PLUS BILLION FOR TRANSPORTATION APPROVED BY VOTERS On Election Day 2006, voters approved more than $40 billion in new transportation-related investments. Voters in 13 states approved 23 of 33 transportation ballot measures, including seven statewide initiatives. Last Tuesday's elections continue the growing trends of securing additional transportation funding at the ballot box and strong voter support for these measures. With this year's results, voters have approved more than $100 billion for transportation since 2000. In 2006, voters in states and communities across the nation have authorized more than $43 billion for transportation projects. Approximately 70 percent of transportation measures have been approved. Among the winners on November 7 were A $37.3 billion statewide infrastructure bond in California; A 30-year, 0.5-cent sales tax renewal in Orange County, California, estimated at $11.86 billion; A Minnesota constitutional amendment that dedicates vehicle sales taxes and related fees to transportation; New 0.25-cent sales taxes in Utah and Salt Lake counties in Utah to speed implementation of transit projects; A new property tax in Seattle for transit, trails, safety, bike/pedestrian, and infrastructure repair projects; Property tax increases for expanded bus service in Holland and Kalamazoo in Michigan.

Well, that's another question...what solid business doesn't have a contingency plan for something like this? If he'd planned well over the years, cut staff in the short-term and waited it out, he could've probably expected a nice windfall when the thing was all through. Again, I state that I know nothing about this guy's business, but it does seem to me that he's just looking for a scapegoat... There's also the possibility that he's being pushed out by the property owner more than by the ECTP. I'm sure they're raising rents and they have bigger plans for that block, so I'd assume the pressure was on...

Amen to that! Have you brought this up with anyone about making it happen?

Not sure if my reaction to this is more upset that the business feels it's being squeezed out or upset that they're crying foul as a political statement. I got the feeling this place was on the way out, with or without the ECTP, but I honestly don't know much about their business. I would think that the influx of construction workers would offset some of the decrease in normal lunchtime traffic, but again, what do I know? Well, I know that I've never been inside because the place kinda scared me! Road work spells closing for Euclid Avenue eatery Wednesday, November 15, 2006 Leila Atassi Plain Dealer Columnist ........

Vastly improved site... I'm also surprised to see that Teresa's has Chicken & Jo Jo's on the menu! I thought that was a Pacific Northwest thing. So, they've been doing some work on the northeast corner of Prospect & E. 4th. Will this be one of the new restaurants or are they just prepping it for marketing?

You know doctors? Who'da thunk it?

The most predictable poll since 2005's "Is light rail awesome?" [yes or no]

Wow, the silence is deadly down here on Old River Road. What's poppin with this project these days? I've heard nothing about the legal proceedings... However, word on the streets is that the development is now showing buildings on Shaia's property. What type/size is not clear, though. Apparently, the response to FEB from the office market has been strong, with a fairly large portion coming from outside of the existing Downtown market and the region. Plans still include anchor tenants in a bookstore, cinema, gym, and grocer, and talks of a school are being floated as well. Otherwise, the neighborhood commercial retail tenant is the target. Anyone have more news?

“We were way ahead,” he said. “For Cleveland not to have a prominent position in this industry would be incredible since it had such a significant role in development of the technology.” Seriously!

I just loved this article from last Month's Metropolis Magazine. I guess you can categorize me as one of the many city planners who are "in love with Dr. Richard Joeseph Jackson." [my bolds & italics] Our Ailing Communities Public-health advocate Richard Jackson argues that the way we build cities and neighborhoods is the source of many chronic diseases. Posted October 11, 2006 There are few things more delicious professionally than finding a well-­credentialed expert from another field—perhaps one that is better trusted than one’s own, such as medicine—who has dedicated his life’s work to proving everything you’ve been arguing for years. That’s why so many city planners are in love with Dr. Richard Joseph Jackson, whose latest book—Urban Sprawl and Public Health, coauthored with Howard Frumkin and Lawrence Frank—is being giddily passed around at conferences like a box of Teuscher chocolate truffles (you know, the dark ones with the powder coating). The message of the book is simple: our car-dependent suburban environment is killing us. Planners, most notably the New Urbanists, have been saying this for decades, but Jackson’s got the statistics. And the charts. And the tables. In his book and in lectures nationwide, Jackson demonstrates—technically, like a doctor—how sprawl is at least partially responsible for a full range of American diseases, from asthma to diabetes, from hypertension to depression. The reason that we spend one dollar out of six on health care is very preventable, and yet we claim some of the worst health statistics in the developed world. Trained as a pediatrician, Jackson has spent more than 25 years in public health, most notably as the director of the National Center for Environmental Health, at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and recently as Governor Schwarzenegger’s state public health advisor. Jeff Speck, a city planner and the director of design at the National Endowment for the Arts, caught him at his desk at the University of California Berkeley to discuss our built environment. ** Let me start with a quote from your book. You say, “The modern America of obesity, inactivity, depression, and loss of community has not ‘happened’ to us. We legislated, subsidized, and planned it this way.” When did you first start to make the connection between the design of our national landscape and the health of our citizens? In July 1999 the head of the CDC invited his dozen directors to the central office to work on a paper about the ten leading diseases of the twenty-first century. I’m driving over there, and as always I’m thinking about pesticides, herbicides, cancer, and birth-defect clusters—you name it. I’m late, stuck in traffic on Buford Highway, voted one of the ten worst streets in North America. It’s a seven-lane road surrounded by garden apartments, mainly for poor immigrants, with no sidewalks and two miles between traffic lights. It’s 95 degrees out, 95 percent humidity. I see a woman on the right shoulder, struggling along, and she reminds me of my mother. She’s in her seventies, with reddish hair and bent over with osteoporosis. She has a shopping bag in each hand and is really struggling. Carless in the car zone… This woman stayed in my mind during the whole discussion we were having about the future of public health. Afterward I e-mailed Howie Frumkin and said, “If that poor woman had collapsed from heat stroke, we docs would have written the cause of death as heat stroke and not lack of trees and public transportation, poor urban form, and heat-island effects. If she had been killed by a truck going by, the cause of death would have been ‘motor-vehicle trauma,’ and not lack of sidewalks and transit, poor urban ­planning, and failed political leadership.” That was the “aha!” moment for me. Here I was focusing on remote disease risks when the biggest risks that people faced were coming from the built environment. You’ve developed almost a cult following for your speeches. Who is your best audience? Planners really get this, but so does the public-health community. I’m speaking to the UCSF medical center—“Grand Rounds,” it’s called. There will be 150 doctors young and old sitting there, and usually they hear about the latest drug or surgery. I’m going to start out by saying, “Here’s the patient you just saw today. He’s 40 years old, he’s 20 pounds overweight, his blood pressure is too high, his cholesterol is too high. He’s depressed and he has erectile dysfunction.” Then I’m going to say, “You’ve all taken care of this patient. Here are the seven drugs you use, and they cost $400 a month. Now I’m going to give you another way of treating your patient, which is that you, the doctor, need to be much more active politically and socially about creating communities that allow people to meet their life needs without sitting in a car three hours a day.” A lot of your research is focused on children, who seem to suffer inordinately from sprawl. You mention that while 60 percent of children walked to school in 1973, now only 13 percent do. It’s shocking. There is a big effort to turn that around. California—as strapped as we are for educational funds—is now spending more than a billion dollars a year on school buses to do what kids’ legs used to be able to do. You discuss, in a very encouraging way, how walking is really the best exercise. It’s the one exercise we can do at virtually every age. It breaks my heart when I see people pushing four-year-olds in those three-wheeled strollers. I know that parents want to get things done, but that child needs to walk. The same is true of the elderly. It seems that what has been eliminated from our new suburban communities is the useful walk: the one that serves a purpose because it gets us somewhere we need to be. It’s only possible with mixed-use zoning. When you’re getting things done, you don’t even notice that you’re walking. The other thing that I would emphasize alongside fitness is public safety. Bringing public safety into the tent is very important. You are known for asking your audiences, “In what kind of community are you most likely to end up in a pool of blood?”—which compares statistics from the suburbs with the roughest inner city. I was the guest editor for a built-environment issue of the American Journal of Public Health (September 2003). One of the articles asked who is more likely to die violently. Is it the commuter driving long distances from a pretty suburb or the person walking short distances in an urban area? That study caused quite a stir in the planning community. If you add crime and car crashes together, you’re 20 percent more likely to die in the suburbs. It has been asserted that I’m too negative when I describe this situation, and it’s true that we doctors tend to focus on pathology. But we know the treatment for these problems. We know how to build communities with central commons surrounded by civic buildings, with sidewalks, parks, and transport, with kids and old folks being able to get back and forth to their daily destinations. I think we are at the right moment to reinvent American communities back to what they were at their absolute best. One of the things I most enjoy about your work is that it reintroduces to planning the original motivation of public health—which has largely been missing for a century—but it turns this impulse on its head. The very first city planners increased life spans through an act of separation, by moving households away from those dark satanic mills. Now you and your colleagues are saying that the greatest danger is not the factories but the separation itself. It certainly is a good idea to not have our children living next to tanneries and slaughterhouses. That said, there is really no reason we shouldn’t be close to retail and accountants’ offices and all the rest. The fact is that we do know how to build healthy communities. We just have to make it happen. And there’s the rub. Here at the Arts Endowment, we sponsor institutes for mayors and governors that promote good urban design and smart growth. The goal is to inspire top-down leadership on design issues. That’s certainly needed. But speaking of art, we are really talking about a cultural shift, and it is art that is so important when you want to change a culture. We doctors can talk pathology and disease forever, but what really causes change is when art—the narrative, the music, and the things that add value and joy to our lives—is directed in a way that is congruent with what’s healthier for us. That’s where we need to be going.

The Cleveland Museum of Natural History is also having a once in a lifetime exhibit called A T-Rex Named Sue. There's tons of historic wonderment in that place (probably some pottery) and you could do a lot worse than museum hopping during one of her two days in town. If you need some booze when you're done, check out the Barking Spider for a warm-up and maybe hit up Sergio's (already mentioned) or That Place for lunch. You can also take a short hike up Mayfield to really get your eat on in Little Italy. While you're there, check out some galleries or the shops in the Murray Hill Schoolhouse. This is all transit accessible, of course. Which means that you can start your day in Tremont (see below) and hit the West Side Market and Great Lakes and hop on the Red Line to get your culture on! I'm also a big fan of Lucky's brunch in Tremont. It's the place to be for all the cool kids! But Tremont is even more fun at night. You can do late-night eats any day at Lava Lounge or hit Ty Fun for a supper time feast. I'm not even mentioning Downtown... you can handle that yourself!

Thanks for the updates! I've been moving too fast these days to slow down and take notice...