blinker12

I'm hopeful this will be reorchestrated. It seems our people are working behind the scenes on changing the plan.

How silly.

I wonder when the actual groundbreaking will be? Yesterday the lots were all full of happy parkers, as if nothing were going to happen.

Yes.

Detroit-Shoreway CDO has begun marketing the artists' lofts in the old Lou's Furniture building. They are being called "Near West Lofts." Income restrictions apply; you can't be a full-time student or make more than I think $28,000/year (for a single person). Here are a couple interior photos; the units are quite beautiful and the upper floors have views of the lake! All units have their own washer and dryer. Also, Gypsy Beans & Baking is looking sharp. They've got their new windows in featuring a nice, old-timey logo.

While I agree to an extent, there is some wonderful Victorian and early 20th-century housing in Near West Side neighborhoods like Ohio City, Detroit-Shoreway and Edgewater... it just happens to be mostly wood-frame. On the East Side, Glenville has exquisite 1900-1920s houses and apartment buildings, though many are dilapidated; and Shaker Square has dense 1920s apartment buildings. Let's also not forget our wealth of old warehouse buildings, ripe for redevelopment into loft apartments. In short, the housing stock would be much more appealing to East Coasters than what you'd find in a newer city like Phoenix or maybe even Minneapolis. I also think that culturally, East Coasters would feel more at home in Cleveland than in many other Midwestern cities, considering Cleveland's Democratic politics (67% for Kerry in Cuyahoga County in 2004), world-class arts and educational resources (which you already mentioned) and strong transit system.

Thanks for posting that. I saw it in the paper but forgot to post it here. It's great news of course!

The bowling alley is having a VIP event Nov. 25, so it should be complete by then. I walked by today and noticed the alleys themselves have been installed, along with most of the drywall and some lighting. They're making fast progress in there.

Green City Blue Lake had good coverage of the Stark forum: Stark speaks about Pesht Bob Stark, the self-titled "poet developer" who created a more elegant Lifestyle Center at Crocker Park, is bringing together his grand plan for a $1 billion urban, mixed-use development that starts in Cleveland’s Warehouse District and extends to the Lakefront. “This is the Creative Urban Neighborhood,” Stark told an audience at Levin College on October 17. “I’m tired of suburbia. I’ve done my time. I want something that challenges me creatively, and I want to do it now.” http://www.gcbl.org/planning/warehouse-district/bob-starks-vision-for-the-warehouse-district/stark-speaks-about-pesht

From the Web site of Joel Makower, consultant on sustainable business and clean technology, who recently visited town. I saw this on Green City Blue Lake (gcbl.org). Cleveland Rocks (Really) I've just returned from a whirlwind visit to Cleveland and I'm pleased to report that it's a burgeoning hotbed of sustainable business activity. That's right: Cleveland. Cleveland, Ohio. The erstwhile "Mistake by the Lake." The occasion was a speech I gave at Cleveland's Museum of Natural History, sponsored by Entrepreneurs for Sustainability, or E4S, one of the more remarkable green-business groups I've seen anywhere. Founded by Holly Harlan -- an indefatigable woman whose energy is exceeded only by her ideas -- it serves as a model for how business people can come together to learn, share their knowledge, and turn it into action inside their companies. Harland started E4S in 2000, she told me, "to save manufacturing in northeast Ohio," the heart of the Rust Belt. "Manufacturing is my love," says Harlan, an engineer who previously worked for GE and John Deere. At the time, she had recently heard Amory Lovins talk about turning waste into new feedstocks and products, and thought the notion represented an opportunity to resuscitate northeast Ohio's ailing job base. The group started out with a few dozen members, who attended monthly programs and networking events. Now, the group claims a membership list of 3,500 people, up more than 50% from just one year ago. The event at which I spoke was E4S's 57th monthly "Third Tuesday" event. (Most events are held at the local brew pub, itself sporting a straw-bale wall.) Please understand: This is no consortium of treehuggers. During a seemingly nonstop series of meetings and events I attended over a 24-hour period, I met with a wide assortment of what, for lack of a better descriptor, I'd call "regular folks" concerned and committed to sustainability and the potential benefits it offers their companies and community. For example, there's Bill Oatey, vice chairman of Oatey Company, a 90-year-old family business that makes rough plumbing fixtures -- pipes and the like -- as well as cements and solvents used by plumbers. Oatey cleaned up a brownfield to build a 250,000-square-foot distribution facility that achieved a LEED Silver rating. He has worked to develop less-toxic solvents and adhesives, some of which he donates to water projects in Central America. There's Michael Dungan, vice president of sales at Business Interiors and Environments, a 30-year-old contract furnishing company with offices in Cleveland and Akron, which embarked on a journey several years ago to envision, and become, a "sustainable organization." It's clear that Dungan takes great pride in the spirit of learning, sharing, and modeling sustainability practices that he has helped to foster among BIE's employees. I met E4S members representing local hospitals, museums, colleges and universities, a handful of bigger companies like AT&T, Eaton, and Shorebank, and dozens of proprietors of small, local businesses, such as architect Bill Doty, principal at Doty & Miller, who has been doing some form of green design and architecture for nearly 30 years. Harlan and her team have created some exemplary programs. During my visit, I attended a meeting of one of E4S's "Sustainability Implementation" groups, a peer-based learning program that helps participants reduce costs, discover new revenue streams, motivate employees, "and create a healthier environment both inside and outside your facility's walls," as one brochure puts it. The group uses whole-systems design strategy to teach the principles of sustainability; how to apply those principles in facilities, processes, products, and markets; how to develop a sustainability implementation plan; and how to engage employees along the way. This is what local green-business groups should be about: raising consciousness, sharing knowledge, improving everyone's performance. In other words, demonstrating the hard-core business value of being a cleaner, greener operation. With more than a little humbleness, Harlan at one point asked me for some perspective -- how E4S compared to other similar programs around the country. "How," she asked, "are we doing?" Well, Holly, let's see. You've got 3,500 businesspeople from northeast Ohio engaged in and learning about the business value of sustainability. They're taking courses, showing up at events, implementing changes, and measuring their progress. I'd say you're doing pretty darn well. Indeed: The rest of us could learn a lot about sustainable business from Cleveland. http://makower.typepad.com/joel_makower/2006/10/when_it_comes_t.html

^That is correct MGD. The "missing link" between SYC and where the path current ends at Harvard Road is 3/4 of a mile, and funding was secured pretty recently (details in the towpath thread). It is a huge deal! Edit: Ah, here we go, I found the info. From an Oct. 7, 2006 Beacon Journal article posted by grasscat: The Ohio & Erie Canal Towpath Trail has received two financial boosts toward expansion. Metro Parks, Serving Summit County, will get $250,000 to build a section of the trail in southern Summit County, and Cuyahoga County Engineer Robert Klaiber is to receive $425,000 for a section at the southern edge of Cleveland. Both grants came from the final round of Clean Ohio Trail Funds. ... The grant will fund construction of three-fourths of a mile of trail from Lower Harvard Avenue north into the Flats area of Cleveland, [Tim Donovan of Cleveland's Ohio Canal Corridor] said. That extension will connect with an additional one mile of trail at Steelyard Commons being built by a private developer, First Interstate, he said. The trail must be extended six miles through the Flats area before it will end at Cleveland's planned Canal Basin Park. That extension will likely cost $44 million. To date, about $25 million has been pledged.

Steelyard Commons center is taking shape Thursday, October 19, 2006 By Ken Prendergast Brooklyn Sun Journal Weather permitting, two 150-foot-tall lighted sign towers were scheduled to be erected this week at the Steelyard Commons retail center. The two sign towers are as tall as 15-story buildings and, once lit, will appear as beacons along Interstate 71 and the Jennings Freeway. One word will appear vertically on both sign towers _ Steelyard. They will be lit with red lights and serve as the official welcome signs at the north and south ends of the complex, one of the largest open-air retail centers ever built in Cuyahoga County. Read More...

Kids, I said it doesn't affect other people's health as directly. The very act of lighting up a cigarette in others' presence forces them to breathe toxic fumes. Not quite the same situation as drinking.

Dead as a doornail.

Pope, rest assured that all the concerns you raise were considered in minute detail by the people who crafted the tax proposal. And they decided a cigarette tax was 1) likely to pass and 2) would provide a reliable stream of funding, with predictable ebbs and flows. Hence, we've got a cigarette tax on the ballot. Oh, and drinking alcohol does not affect the health of others, at least not as directly as smoking does. So the two aren't really comparable.

No successful city in the world is expanding their downtown highway network. Let's get with the times.

I thought it beared repeating.

Oh, Stark also mentioned the reason he pulled out of the University Circle project is because it wasn't ambitious enough in scale.

Yup, great news. I'm still hoping the whole rotten plan gets chucked. One negative aspect of this delay is that it will cause a few unrenovated warehouse buildings along the Innerbelt to remain in limbo even longer. (Cimperman has said he gets calls every week from interested developers but they get scared off by the potential takes -- and who can blame them.) The only part I ever liked about this plan was capping the overpasses.

^^Oh, what a huge relief! Yay Beck Center for doing the right thing.

Yeah, the two things I took away from the forum were: 1. Stark seems to want the city to make infrastructure improvements before he'll begin. He nodded approvingly when Fong reported that Toronto's waterfront development got off the ground only after $1.5 billion in public money (city, province, national) was committed. That was a bit surprising to me, as I don't see the area around Stark's Phase I, in particular, to be in particularly bad shape, and I expect the Port Authority to take care of most infrastructure improvements on their land. 2. The mention of Federated department stores saying they would get involved with the right tenant mix, which was exciting. I came away with the same impression as Wimwar that even Phase I is farther off than we had hoped. Maybe I'm wrong and Stark was just being cautious. The questions were, overall, horrendous. Some real loonies came out of the woodwork, including a woman who claimed to have "known the Stark family for 30 years" and launched into an nonsensical monologue about Crocker Park as Stark shook his head in confusion.

What the heck is the Style Lounge of Premium Denim? A club or a jeans store?

I stumbled on this piece, written shortly after the 2004 election, while doing research on the Project for Public Spaces website. What a great love letter to Cleveland written, of course, by someone who doesn't live here! Town Square by Jay Walljasper November 2004 A Tale of Two Cities: Las Vegas is America's fastest growing city; Cleveland is called the mistake by the lake. What's wrong with this picture? It all came down to Cleveland. After 18 months of heated combat, countless millions of dollars, and 24-hour-a-day media attention, the presidential election was decided in this town on the shores of Lake Erie. And I sincerely hope that when it was all over--after the last ballot, cast by someone standing in line for five hours, had been counted--the packs of reporters and camera crews who descended on the place took a good look around. Because Cleveland is a surprising, interesting city that shows us a lot about what's gone wrong in urban America and offers some glimpses of what we can do to make things better. Wandering around town for a few days, I was surprised how much there was to love about Cleveland. http://www.pps.org/info/newsletter/november2004/november2004_town_square

Here are a couple photos from yesterday, the last day of this year's Citirama. Overall, the houses were very similar in style to those built last year in Glenville. They fit in well with the surrounding neighborhood. Looking out over the site; new houses are at the edge with downtown in the distance. The edge of the old neighborhood on the eastern side of the site. Ze Hospital. Hospital again. Ze new houses. Inside the house that was my favorite, by Civic Builders of Tremont. The new (house at far left) transitions into the old on E. 111th St. A rehab of an old house was going on while we were there. Typical Cleveland "four square" apartment building, on E. 111th. Another view of the new houses on the east side of the street. This is the view from the balcony of one of the townhouses at the east end of the site. You can see downtown, of course, with the lake to the right. New houses at the east end of the site fronting on MLK Boulevard, with old-school Cleveland at the end of the block on E. 116th. St. Luke's is to the right. The Rapid station is a block to the south.

Wow! Now there's a city that's doing it right.