jamiec

Hot dog!! Maybe my dream of dating Kate Hudson will be fufilled yet! edit: ALSO, maybe this is what we can do with the old convention center if we build a new one somewhere else. Seems like a good trade off to me!

That design is ugly and is not worthy of Columbus, imho.

#3 was the only one I thought was sort of attractive, although that graphic in the PD is of such bad quality, you can't tell. Enclosing the existing building in glass sounds like a cool idea, though. I was walking around today, and I looked at it, and I thought it could be attractive if they cleaned it up. It looks to be covered in soot or something. Is that it's original color, that coal black? Unfortunately, it sounds like the commishes have a hard-on for knocking the whole place done. What they'd put up in it's place would be ever worse. That design from the Detroit-based firm is freaking heinous. Put that in Strongsville, not downtown!

Well, I'm pretty square, so I it's possible I went to the most bumpin' school in Ohio and not even known it. It's possible =)

I graduated and liked Kent State, but it ain't one of the better party schools, in my opinion. The only one acceptable to me would be OSU.

^^ Well, I've got first dibs on the Key Tower then, unless they figure a way to relocate that too.

I never said they were, but they are nowhere near as bad as you all are describing them.

WELL, I studied for a semester at Bostun University, and while I loved the city, the actual university was nothing to brag about. Their facalities were not as good as Kent State, where I went to school. I'm public school from birth. Represent!

I cant' believe I'm the only one not down on Ohio universities here.

"Also, just to clear things up: Ohio only has five public schools NOT considered rock bottom, fourth-tier trash. Should that really surprise anyone given the lack of education funding in this state?" You can't be serious.

Malcolm Gladwell wrote an essay about this somewhat recently: At the heart of the American obsession with the Ivy League is the belief that schools like Harvard provide the social and intellectual equivalent of Marine Corps basic training—that being taught by all those brilliant professors and meeting all those other motivated students and getting a degree with that powerful name on it will confer advantages that no local state university can provide. Fuelling the treatment-effect idea are studies showing that if you take two students with the same S.A.T. scores and grades, one of whom goes to a school like Harvard and one of whom goes to a less selective college, the Ivy Leaguer will make far more money ten or twenty years down the road. The extraordinary emphasis the Ivy League places on admissions policies, though, makes it seem more like a modelling agency than like the Marine Corps, and, sure enough, the studies based on those two apparently equivalent students turn out to be flawed. How do we know that two students who have the same S.A.T. scores and grades really are equivalent? It’s quite possible that the student who goes to Harvard is more ambitious and energetic and personable than the student who wasn’t let in, and that those same intangibles are what account for his better career success. To assess the effect of the Ivies, it makes more sense to compare the student who got into a top school with the student who got into that same school but chose to go to a less selective one. Three years ago, the economists Alan Krueger and Stacy Dale published just such a study. And they found that when you compare apples and apples the income bonus from selective schools disappears. “As a hypothetical example, take the University of Pennsylvania and Penn State, which are two schools a lot of students choose between,” Krueger said. “One is Ivy, one is a state school. Penn is much more highly selective. If you compare the students who go to those two schools, the ones who go to Penn have higher incomes. But let’s look at those who got into both types of schools, some of whom chose Penn and some of whom chose Penn State. Within that set it doesn’t seem to matter whether you go to the more selective school. Now, you would think that the more ambitious student is the one who would choose to go to Penn, and the ones choosing to go to Penn State might be a little less confident in their abilities or have a little lower family income, and both of those factors would point to people doing worse later on. But they don’t.” http://www.newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/articles/051010crat_atlarge

^^ I was just exaggerating. All I'm saying is, you get what you put into your education.

Read this story in the Dispatch: http://www.dispatch.com/business-story.php?story=dispatch/2006/08/20/20060820-F1-00.html A few gems: Columbus architect Stephen S. Schwartz called Easton the city’s new downtown. "It’s where we go out to dinner, it’s where we take walks, it’s where we shop," he said. "Easton is really a crown jewel for the city of Columbus," said Morris, a partner with Asset Strategies Group, a Westerville firm that helps retailers negotiate leases. "People don’t come from Dayton to go to Polaris. They come from Dayton to go to Easton." Strange because I would have thought German Village or the Short North or the Arena District would have been the city's crown jewels. I'm out of touch, I suppose..

I wasn't talking about Case; I was talking about those weenie schools in New England that no one has ever heard of. My cousin went to one!

Just remember "Froggy eats pigs ass." Isn't that the saying sprayed on that building? I <3 that place. If they knock it down, I'm going to write letters.

^^^ HEY! I went to Kent State, and I got a great education. I know I'd get a good education at OU or OSU, too. Probably have more fun at OSU, though, I assume. Don't forget Oberlin, too. The perfect school if you want to one day become an indie-rock cult hero or magazine editor in NYC. edit: IMO, those rankings are as out of wack as the Forbes city listings. You get what you put into your education. A degree from Ohio State is going to mean a lot more than some of those prissy liberal arts schools because everyone knows OSU.

easy there champ, you're comparing to a metro more than twice the size, and who continualy ranks in the top five of per capita expenditures. ^^ I know all this. Detroit is a big city with a lot of rich people. I lived/worked there. I rolled into Troy in my Honda as a brand-new Lambo blew by. I've hung out in Birmingham. I still think the comparison is valid. I'm not saying Cleveland should have the same amount of stores as Detroit, but come on, Cleveland can support at least some of the unique options that city has. We have rich people, too. And this isn't my point, anyway. What Detroit has is irrelevant. My thing is, Cleveland should support local businesses.

This is EXACTLY what I'm talking about above. This is disheartening, really. Nobody works together. 4:31 p.m. Friday Coffeehouses have been artistic and literary hangouts ever since writer Samuel Johnson haunted the coffee shops of 18th-century London. The Cleveland Museum of Art drew on that tradition Friday when it announced an agreement with Starbucks, the giant, Seattle-based purveyor of specialty coffees, to display posters of artworks and to hold educational programs at 10 Starbucks stores across Greater Cleveland. More at cleveland.com http://www.cleveland.com/weblogs/entertainment/index.ssf?/mtlogs/cleve_entertainment/archives/2006_08.html#173666 Museum's deal with Starbucks irks local vendors

The Cleveland area has horrible retail options, even compared to a city like Detroit. The shopping this guy probably enjoys would be in SoHo in NYC or Newbury Street in Boston -- places with high-tier retailers that approach shopping as an experience more than just a transaction. Crocker Park and Beachwood probably offer the best "mall" stores around here, but when you put them in perspective nationally, those stores are a dime a dozen. Take Rocky River's new little development: It's basically a carbon copy store-wise of what they put in Hudson. This is incredibly unimaginative. Crocker Park has H&M -- but now Beachwood is getting one. Soon that'll be just like the Gap. As these big retailers expand, every new store reduces their uniqueness and turns their products into a commodity. From a business perspective, you can bitch all you want about Gucci not opening a store in Northeast Ohio, but I just can't believe they are holding out because of stereotypes. I imagine they place their stores in areas that have certain demographics. For example, the Cleveland area may have an acceptable demographic on the whole, but what if it is so spread out, are they are afraid to come into the market? Just for the sake of arguement, let's say they have 100 potential customers each in Rocky River, Chagrin Falls, Solon, Westlake and Medina. They can't put the store in one of these cities because the market won't support it, but if they put it in downtown Cleveland, will anyone frequent it? I have no idea. To me, this goes back to Tower City. In the 1990s when I was younger, that was THE mall around here. It was a major event in my family when we visited because it had stores that are unavailable in other places, and it was in an incredibly unique location. Where did things go wrong? I hope people have learned some valuable lessons about this market from that experience. The issue I'm wondering about Northeast Ohio is, do the people here REALLY want these high-tier, unique and often LOCAL retailers? In bigger cities we always compare ourselves to (Chicago, NYC), their most visited shopping locations usually are not anchored by the Gap. They are unique boutiques and shops and stores that have created a shopping environment that is attractive to the big corporate stores, which move in and proceed to ruin the neighborhood. I'm wandering all over the place right now, but I am coming to my fundamental gripe with Cleveland. We can have nearly anything we want by looking to our own people instead of looking for some big eye in the sky to fix everything all the time. It's almost like, if a person studies fashion design at Virginia Marti or Kent State, they have to move to NYC and hit it big before they can sell their stuff in their hometown. Fundamentally, there is no reason why Cleveland can't support its own people, but in the end people choose not to. We vote with our dollars, and each one spent in Beachwood is another reason why an aspiring clothing designer isn't opening an exciting shop in Ohio City or downtown.

This is such a no-brainer; get to work and start laying down tracks!!!

I don't know about Hollywood, but a lot of TV/movie folks film in Wilmington, NC -- a few WB shows film there in fact. Cleveland could easily get some of that action as we are an urban area, and movie/TV types seem to prefer urban places in their programs.

This PD story drove me nuts, not because of its content but because of its tenor. It was like the writer couldn't get enough of it. It was like he was enjoying the news with the slow, delight of a guy slicking warm butter and jelly on a bagel. The Beacon did this on Sunday when they ran a big story about how the job situation in Ohio is lousy. On Crains' Web site they even had the poll question "Is Northeast Ohio a dying region?" What the hell?! First of all, did anyone honestly think we could stop decades of population shrinkage in something like six years? That's insane and really unfair. I'm no social scientist, but I imagine the year Cuyahoga County ADDS 6 people will be a time for celebration. We should be trying to slow the bleeding, not thinking one speech is going to create Los Angeles-like growth. There's no reason for that to change yet. We haven't fixed any of our problems. Population 500,000+? Maybe when I'm old. The thing I don't get about this doom and gloom reporting is an overall context of how business and marketing work. If you have a business and all of the sudden you loose a couple huge customers, it doesn't mean you're dead. It means you have reinvent your company, rethink what you do and keep plugging away until you get some traction. Cleveland needs some real leadership, and I don't mean one white knight, but a lot of people and they won't be asking "are we rotting away" questions.

Well, I drove by this morning, and they had a little billboard up on the street with a picture and details. First time I've seen that, I believe. The picture looks really cool!

It's open? I want to go check it out! I'll admit, I like that place mostly because I find a wall of plain t-shirts in a zillion different colors fascinating. I wouldn't compare them to the retailers mentioned above, though. The "made in America" thing is almost a gimmick that links up, slightly incoherently, with its highly sexualized advertising and hipster customer base. I'm hoping this does attract more hipster merchants to Coventry, however. I went there a couple months ago, and it was looking pretty dull. They need more unique stuff over there to bolster the existing stores with history over there. edit: I will cede to you that their current designs are pretty wack. I walked into an AA in the East Village two years ago, and it seemed like a novel idea. Maybe it's losing its cool as it spreads all over the place. I'm not really a fan of American Eagle or Aeropostale, though. I can't afford the shat I like.

^^^ OH snap, the guy who wrote that article used to be my old boss!