ryanfrazier

My main beef with the renovation is: why only extend the lease for seven years? A $140m renovation should add more than 7 years to the life of the arena. Was there a give and take on this number? Did any elected official push for a longer lease? I haven't heard anything about that. Otherwise, isn't Gilbert just going to ask for more money in 2034 when the lease is up?

Kent State's architecture college wins the Brick in Architecture Award: http://www.archdaily.com/877519/2017-brick-in-architecture-award-winners-announced http://www.gobrick.com/Photo-Galleries/2017-Brick-in-Architecture-Awards/AlbumID/131004-507

Looks awesome! I like seeing the Healthline stop at the bottom of the picture. That building will have some great views - and are those some balconies from which to see them?

Probably the Diamond Shamrock chemical plant that was on Fairport Nursery Road. http://www.rsworld.com/snix66/diamond.html

Throwing up a 5 or 6 story building on a prominent spot Downtown would be a big mistake and not one that could be corrected for a long time. There are only a handful of truly central vacant lots capable of a large scale transformative project and we should take advantage of them. A 5 or 6 story building would be great if going up on some random lot on the fringe of Downtown, but in this location that's not dense enough. I understand what you are saying, and I am no means dug into my position, but it just seems that cities are built bit-by-bit rather than by transformative projects, and that the transformative projects end up being the flops. I'd rather have all the vacant land covered with shorter buildings than one superstructure and a bunch of other parking lots - look at DC, or any European city. Really I just want to be able to walk down the street and have an unbroken string of city. Obviously that doesn't take account of the cost of the land etc. Maybe Stark will learn from lessons at the Beacon and start on a parking structure (with ground-level retail) that can support a future tower? With a location next to ballpark/arena, plus new apartments going in AT&T, parking will at least start making him some money back quickly. The economics do not work for construction of a parking structure by itself. Parking is expensive to build and doesn't pay the return on investment to warrant building it without rentable floor space above it. The Beacon construction only makes sense because a previous developer built the parking structure, went bankrupt, then Stark was able to buy it for cheap.

Regarding the NE Ohio airport idea (although these factors probably apply to SE Ohio as well): 1. There would be benefits to a regional airport (more international flights, a hub), but they are not worth the cost. Instead of paying $5-10 bil for a new airport and infrastructure to get to it, you could probably spend $500 mil on Hopkins to make some major improvements. And as stated above, if you're trying to improve rail, there are much cheaper and more direct ways to spend just a fraction of this money. 2. A regional airport would be a huge magnet for sprawl in Geauga and Portage counties. Putting a regional airport in Ravenna would suck development out of the main cities of Cleveland, Youngstown, and Akron. This is especially true in a region with low to no growth. It would not inspire much new development, just move around existing employers to less dense areas. This is not the type of development that is cost efficient, nor should we be promoting it.

Spreading office space across multiple buildings not only would fill in parking craters, but also allow more frontage for street-level retail and restaurant uses. This would make for a livelier city than concentrating development in one building.

Real progress on a movie based on the Cleveland Torso Murders: http://www.avclub.com/article/paul-greengrass-direct-eliot-ness-biopic-based-gra-252801

There's only a tiny triangle of river on the far right of the image. If you're referring to the light patch directly to the right of the Terminal Tower complex as the river, that's actually dirt from the construction. Its land on which the railroad tracks would sit, which is now parking.

Focusing on the 2% drop in occupancy is a glass-half-empty way of reading that article and the statistics. It says the daily rate went up to $135.81, up $9 per night in the Cleveland/Independence market, and part of a long term trend upward from $98.85 per night in 2010. This reflects increased demand for rooms. It also says the number of rooms jumped 11% in 2016; that means that even with a dip in occupancy rates, the actual number of room-nights still went up significantly in 2016. That being said, there is work to do in order to keep demand at 2016 levels and higher.

Yesterday the website ArchDaily (one of my favorite ways to waste time) posted an entry about this house in Little Italy designed by Robert Maschke architects: http://www.archdaily.com/802759/little-big-house-robert-maschke-architects The ArchDaily site profiles a wide variety of projects from all around the world, so its nice for an individual house in Cleveland to get some exposure.

That is a great video. My only question is: who is it for? Who is the audience? Echoing MyTwoSense's comment, is there a media campaign this is part of? This video itself is obviously not tv commercial length, so is there a shorter one that's being put out there? Living in the DC area, I see ads everyday for Columbus targeted at millennials (see this article: http://www.bizjournals.com/washington/news/2015/03/30/they-want-us-to-move-where-columbus-istrying-to.html) So I hope the Downtown Cleveland Alliance has a marketing campaign outside of Cleveland to spread this positive message, because there's a lot of good news to spread. Looking at their website, I didn't see anything about outreach to other areas.

Any pics of progress would be appreciated!

There are a few reasons why the two situations don't seem comparable. First, the facilities needed for a jail and courtrooms are uniquely suited to governmental uses. They are not structures that private businesses would want to rent out farther down the line, unlike the office space in the county headquarters building, which can easily be converted. A private developer only got involved in building office space for the county because there was a solid tenant lined up, and then once the county's lease is up the owner can either re-sign the county, or lease it to someone else. The same flexibility is not possible with jails and courtrooms, there are no other tenants for these facilities. Second, jail and courtroom facilities are a lot more expensive per square foot than regular office space due to security needs. Thus, a private investor is not going to want to put up these higher costs.

I'm not opposed to tearing the JC down. In fact, I would rather they tear it down. But I'm not opposed to them rebuilding it in the same place, eliminating what you were talking about. Maybe they can do a deal similar to how they did county headquarters, where they don't own the building and just lease it from a developer. Could save a lot of money in terms of recurring costs that way. They can also build a new justice center to have at least some retail (light restaurants, etc) so that it contributes to the neighborhood around it. There's a lot of things that could be done if we're creative I don't know how they could physically rebuild the Justice Center in the same space. All the inmates and courtrooms would have to go somewhere during construction. The facilities needed to house them are completely unique, so you couldn't just rent out unused office space and put inmates or courtrooms in it. It seems that if any major changes are going to happen to the JC, a new facility would have to be constructed elsewhere.

As Michelle's article notes, the garage was built by another company and bought for pennies on the dollar out of bankruptcy. That's what makes this new construction cost effective. The same cost savings would not be had by Stark building a Nucleus garage then building on top of it later (unless Stark's plan is to go bankrupt, be forced to sell the garage for cheap, and have a different developer build on top of it). So I doubt the same dynamic would apply to Nucleus.

On Thursday, NPR's national broadcast All Things Considered aired a piece by WCPN about the work being done on the Celebrezze building: http://www.npr.org/2016/06/02/480487322/u-s-agency-tries-radical-rehab-technique-on-aging-government-buildings They don't talk about cost or schedule overruns but they do talk to architect Pieter van Dijk among others.

Here’s my daydream idea for expanding Cleveland’s Rapid: extend the Waterfront Line down the Pennsylvania Railroad line that bisects Midtown going southeast and connect back to the existing light rail west of Buckeye-Woodhill Station. This plan would obviously cost a lot of money at a time when there’s little political support for paying for transit in Ohio. But if this forum is a place to spitball theoretical ideas, this one appears to be feasible, and in one way it’s cost-efficient in that it utilizes an existing right-of-way. The underlying premise of this plan is that the old Pennsylvania Railroad line (currently controlled by Norfolk Southern to my knowledge) has space for four tracks but only uses the inner two. If my understanding of this is incorrect then the whole plan becomes a lot less feasible, but it looks like there is a right-of-way for two rail tracks that runs through the east side of town. For example, the rail bridge over Euclid and E. 55th seems to clearly show freight traffic on the inner two lanes with abandoned space for tracks on either side: This provides an opportunity for rapid transit tracks to be put in these unused parts. Having such right-of-way available in the middle of a city is a rare opportunity. The benefits of this plan over other possible expansions are: - The right-of-way is largely in place. This can be hard to come by in built up areas and more expensive to acquire, particularly when eminent domain is so out of fashion. This should be cheaper than some ideas to loop the Waterfront Line into downtown. - This plan provides a greater purpose for the Waterfront Line. That line currently suffers from very low ridership because it doesn’t really go anywhere. Which gets to a related point… - This plan increases the value of the existing network. Instead of simply adding an extension farther out to plug into the system, this plan adds new stops while making existing stops more useful. This plan makes the system more of a network. Currently the rail system is a hub-and-spoke system that is largely one-dimensional: it takes you downtown then back out. (Yes, I know this is a simplification, but for most riders it’s true). - This plan accesses areas that are already urban in density and mixed-usage, namely Asiatown. Creating a transit link to Asiatown would be a big boost to the restaurants and residences in area. Midtown is also benefited. - This plan provides an alternative access route to downtown from the east side. Currently if maintenance work shuts down part of the line heading downtown it completely cuts off access by train and riders have to switch to buses. This creates a useful redundancy that riders could use if a maintenance problem arises. It also provides an alternate route that could be faster for some riders, depending on their destination. This plan for a New Blue Line calls for new stations at: Superior in Asiatown, Euclid & E. 55th in Midtown, Central & E. 67th, and a new station at E.79th that can connect to the existing Red Line Station there. The exact placement of stations could differ but these seem to be well-spaced. Station platforms can be built on the outside of the tracks. I think using the Blue Line name for this route into the city is the most clear and simple naming convention. If Blue Line riders want to go downtown via this route they can stay on the line; if they want to take the existing route they can transfer to the Green Line. The name Waterfront Line would be eliminated. Here are the challenges and major costs I see for this plan: - Constructing a flyover at the end of the Waterfront Line. To connect the existing Waterfront tracks to the right-of-way, a bridge would have to be constructed to take them over existing tracks. My doodle of how this would work is below (view is from the north to the south, with bright colors used for clarity’s sake; the existing end-of-the line South Harbor Station is on the right edge of the picture). - Connecting the south end of this extension back into the existing light rail. This would require a similar flyover. - Installing the tracks and catenary in a tight space. But these things are fairly conventional engineering tasks that can be done. As with anything, the big issue is money. But if this were something the community chose to do, it would be a great improvement to the transit system.

For more info on the old Union Depot, this article is informative: http://clevelandhistorical.org/items/show/335#.Vq4i4lL3Hwk And this brief YouTube clip from channel 5 shows its demolition in 1959 (you can see Municipal Stadium in the background of the beginning): Two more links: https://ech.case.edu/cgi/article.pl?id=UD http://images.ulib.csuohio.edu/cdm/search/field/subjec/searchterm/Union%20Depot/mode/exact

KJP, that's a good illustration of how a new Justice Center could fit on that spot, even with the expanded Salvation Army. Cleburger, looking at your Google Map link of attorneys, it doesn't look like they are especially clustered around the current Justice Center, it looks like they are distributed around the CBD. A couple of results on your map are even across the river, so proximity to the Justice Center doesn't seem that important. Besides, E. 14th Street is not some far flung, unreachable place. Not to be redundant, but back in October this was my reasoning for this site: The best outcome for the city as a whole is for the Justice Center to be placed on a site that is less-desirable to private investment so that private owners can build in the more desirable locations and generate tax revenue. The Jacobs lot on Public Square has the potential to generate high rents, and hopefully will soon. It would be a mistake to use that marquee property for a jail. The E. 14th site is less likely to attract private development because it is next to the Salvation Army.

My wife and I went to Cleveland last weekend to see the Monet exhibit and stayed at the Tudor Arms Doubletree. From our 11th story room we had a good view of three different construction projects at the clinic: a massive parking garage, the new cancer center, and (off in the distance on the right) the medical school building:

Here's my suggestion for a relocated courthouse/jail complex: On East 14th between Prospect and Carnegie. While this site would be good for apartments or other uses due to its proximity to Playhouse Square and other attractions, it is next to the expanding Salvation Army center, which may scare away residential investors. An institutional/governmental development there wouldn't have the same concerns. The parking lots there are a sub-optimal use for that land and it is unlikely someone else will build on it. Furthermore the site is still somewhat transit friendly, being a block from the Healthline and not far from the Tubbs Jones Transit Center.

If we're talking about highway improvements, I know this would be a budget-buster, but putting some of the Shoreway underground would be a dream for making access to the lakefront more pedestrian friendly. Replacing the Main Avenue Bridge with a tunnel would also open up valuable real estate in the Warehouse District and Flats.

Two levels, enclosed on bottom and open on top could incorporate both components while being less gerbil tube-esque. I don't think there are any easy answers to making this look good and it is a design challenge. But sometimes good design rises to a challenge, let's hope that's the case here.

I was just making an observation of the size of Cleveland's hotel market versus others, namely the seven cities described in the NY Times article. As Cleveland competes for events with other cities in the country, it can be helpful to understand how it stacks up. The unfortunately reality is that the hotel market is an order of magnitude smaller than those cities, although this is a situation that is improving.