ryanfrazier

Design Review Committee has approved: https://www.cleveland.com/entertainment/2023/05/rock-hall-wins-design-review-commendation-with-caveats-for-evolving-100m-expansion-plans.html

Nitpicking: that rendering of the rooftop looks off to me, vis-a-vis 5th/3rd Tower in the background. Like the rendering was oriented too far counter-clockwise on the map. The City Club's eastern wall on the right side of the picture should be pointing to the right/east of 3/5 Tower. Am I crazy? (This is not an important issue).

Also on the Pickard Chilton website, from what I see they have a page about Eaton Center which was completed in Beachwood, and they have pages about some non-completed buildings, but I don't see a page about SW tower for some reason.

I think it's a way to satisfy the ventilation requirements for covering up the train tracks. Also maybe an entrance to the proposed transit center. But the rendering is still conceptual so if this gets built it'll probably look a lot different.

https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/airport-runway-names-shift-magnetic-field

Are there any drawings of the proposed interior of the unbuilt train station from the Group Plan? I've never seen any.

The last thing we need is more valuable lakefront space being taken up by is football structures used a fraction of the year.

I don't understand what this means. When the government wants to take land for a public purpose, like in this case the park, the only thing for the court to decide is the fair market value. There's nothing else for the government to prove, no case to make.

Brent Larkin claims that a domed stadium is "no longer being considered." https://www.cleveland.com/opinion/2023/03/hold-onto-your-wallets-taxpayers-the-browns-owners-are-about-to-come-knocking-brent-larkin.html

I agree with your first paragraph. Getting the stadium off the lakefront increases the likelihood of development. Right now the options for building involve squeezing into little spaces around the stadium. As to the issue of cool old warehouses, I hope we can save the ones that remain in the city, but the E. 13th-18th area proposed for the stadium doesn't have many of them. Its mostly single-story buildings and surface parking lots. I think this land is so lightly used that a stadium would be a big improvement. The post office area is more of a blank slate but really isolated.

I generally agree with your point that modern football stadiums cost a lot more than the revenue they generate, and that they subsidize the costs of a private business. I do wonder, however, if the value of the lakefront land that would be open for development mitigates some of that financial loss. Here we have a unique situation where the city has limited lakefront land currently used for public access or development. If the stadium took the place of the low-density buildings and parking lots on the near-east side, while valuable land on the current site is developed, there might actually a net-positive effect. Now, net-positive may not mean in a strictly financial sense. A billion dollar stadium, plus hundreds of millions in land bridge costs would be a lot of investment to recoup. But some of that cost would be recovered by building a mixed use neighborhood on the current stadium site. And it would be net-positive in a more touchy-feely sense. We'd have a more lively lakefront and the respective locations would be better used to their maximum possibilities; just better allocation of land use overall. The existing lakefront assets would get more foot traffic and be better connected to downtown.

Building a stadium at E. 13-18th would be a much better spot than eating up so much valuable lakefront land. The big challenge I see, however, is ensuring the area around a new stadium doesn’t become a sea of surface parking lots.

What a collection! It really documents a time of post-industrial transition. So many impressive buildings demolished.

What closed off major downtown streets are you referring to? DC or Cle? I'm not aware of that happening in either city. In DC the only street I'm aware of being closed was Beach Drive inside Rock Creek Park, which is not a major downtown street. In Cle, the Superior project maintains vehicle lanes. Nothings getting closed off.

A truck might have to make one or two extra turns to get to their destination, adding about 60 seconds to their trip. The idea that the burden of this minor inconvenience to truck drivers warrants cancelling the entire project is absurd. It's not like we're walling off the driveways of every business on Superior. They still have truck access. A buffered center lane cycle track is a great improvement for everyone. Bikers don't have to worry about cars coming out of driveways or parked cars dooring them. And motorists get bikes off the roadway, out of their way.

Can someone point me to the legislative language that prohibits the bike lanes? I went to the legislature's page here: https://www.legislature.ohio.gov/legislation/135/hb23 It has a link to the PDF of the bill "as introduced": https://search-prod.lis.state.oh.us/solarapi/v1/general_assembly_135/bills/hb23/IN/00/hb23_00_IN?format=pdf I can't find the language in there. Is there a more updated version of the bill? I'm not familiar with how the legislature's website is organized.

I think looking at some of the examples you cited is instructive. Take Columbia Presbyterian: Now clearly the Clinic is not going to start building in this gothic revival style. But the building meets the street in a much more lively, interactive manner. The massing of the building is also broken up in a pleasant way. Although this other view shows that Presbyterian manages to out-skywalk the Clinic, which I didn't think was possible. Looking at Cedars Sinai in LA, your mileage may vary as to the aesthetics of the glass curtain wall compared to the Clinic's recent designs, but the building is more urban in terms of meeting the street. The clinic buildings recently have had suburban style setbacks. I think the best comparison for recent Clinic designs is not other cities' hospitals, but the Pelli-designed Clinic buildings. Yes, some of them like Cole had suburban setbacks, but in my opinion they were cited better and were better looking than recent designs. Some of this is a difference in aesthetic preferences that people just aren't going to agree on, but other aspects like how the buildings meet the sidewalk are more objective ways to kill sidewalk traffic in a neighborhood.

The investment in the city is great, but architecturally this building is just one massive block.

Great development! Now have the city acquire (by eminent domain if necessary) the riverfront Lafarge property for a public park and you've got the best urban neighborhood in the Midwest!

Save some room for the Cuyahoga Valley Scenic Railroad!

Thanks!

And here's the interior: From this book: https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.32526480?searchText=sterling+welch&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3Dsterling%2Bwelch%26scope%3DeyJpZCI6ICIxMDAzOTAxNzEiLCAicGFnZU5hbWUiOiAiQ2xldmVsYW5kIEhpc3RvcnkgQm9va3MgYW5kIERvY3VtZW50cyIsICJwYWdlVXJsIjogIi9zaXRlL2NwbC9jbGV2ZWxhbmQtaGlzdG9yeS8iLCAidHlwZSI6ICJjb2xsZWN0aW9uIiwgInBvcnRhbE5hbWUiOiAiQ2xldmVsYW5kIFB1YmxpYyBMaWJyYXJ5IiwgInBvcnRhbFVybCI6ICIvc2l0ZS9jcGwvIn0%3D&ab_segments=0%2FSYC-6646_basic_search%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3Adabc319bd1765fa2c3a1694e904795df&seq=48#metadata_info_tab_contents

I think I figured it out. A Sanborn 1896 map lists this location as Sterling Welch Carpets. Sterling, Welch & Co. led me to this book digitized by the Cleveland Public Library, "Famous old Euclid Avenue of Cleveland, vol. 2": https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.32526499?searchText=sterling+welch&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3Dsterling%2Bwelch%26scope%3DeyJpZCI6ICIxMDAzOTAxNzEiLCAicGFnZU5hbWUiOiAiQ2xldmVsYW5kIEhpc3RvcnkgQm9va3MgYW5kIERvY3VtZW50cyIsICJwYWdlVXJsIjogIi9zaXRlL2NwbC9jbGV2ZWxhbmQtaGlzdG9yeS8iLCAidHlwZSI6ICJjb2xsZWN0aW9uIiwgInBvcnRhbE5hbWUiOiAiQ2xldmVsYW5kIFB1YmxpYyBMaWJyYXJ5IiwgInBvcnRhbFVybCI6ICIvc2l0ZS9jcGwvIn0%3D&ab_segments=0%2FSYC-6646_basic_search%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3Adabc319bd1765fa2c3a1694e904795df&seq=62#metadata_info_tab_contents It has a 3 page biography of Fred Sterling, explaining that in 1874 the carpet business "moved from Superior Street to Euclid Avenue into what had been an immense ice and roller rink, where they sold carpets, curtains and draperies. It was in this building that the famous Kermis was held as well as many high school commencements." So apparently the big vaulted building in the video was built as a ice/roller rink, then taken over by a carpet company. I don't know what the "famous Kermis" is in the above quote, other than that a kermis is "a summer fair held in towns and villages in the Netherlands." Sterling Welch & Co. would go on to be the Sterling-Linder department store, and eventually moved down Euclid Avenue.

I am also intrigued and confused by this. The earliest map I could find was 1886 Sanborn Fire Insurance https://cplorg.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p4014coll24/id/876/rec/1 Maybe its this "Carpet Ware Room" in the pic I'm attaching (north is to the left) and the series of arches is a decorative element on its roof? The perspective in the picture from the video is confusing to me - I can't tell how far in the background the arcade is.

This is interesting. I can't think of other examples of adaptive reuse of a building like this elsewhere in the country by a police department or similar entity. So many great old buildings have been torn down in this town, its good to see an innovative reuse.