8ShadesofGray

keep collinwood weird: kresge grant will propel arts-led revival on waterloo Lee Chilcote, Fresh Water Cleveland Thursday, September 26, 2013 The two-story building on the corner of E. 156th Street and Waterloo Road might be stubbornly vacant, but that hasn’t stopped artists from making it beautiful. This summer, Hygienic Dress League, street artists from Detroit, painted it bright gold, right down to the doors and windows, before adding a guy in a gas mask holding a bird. Armed with paint and a projector, they worked at night over the course of a few days. Welcome to Waterloo, which is fast becoming the weirdest, most creative strip in Cleveland. Long a haven for biker bars and ethnic halls, it's now a diverse district lined with public art, where residents can take in a concert at the Beachland Ballroom, check out an art opening at a local gallery, or knock back a microbrew at a corner pub. It's a neighborhood that's steadily evolved over the last decade, but that slow and steady progress is about to get a huge boost thanks to a $1.1 million grant from the Kresge Foundation (yes, that Kresge, the large philanthropy whose support you’ll hear about on NPR). The nonprofit Northeast Shores Community Development Corporation will use the money to renovate five blighted commercial properties for creative startups and artist housing. This will add to the 20 or so arts-based businesses currently on the street ... ... More available at http://freshwatercleveland.com/features/keepcollinwoodweird092613.aspx

To me, this was the most disappointing part of the whole proposed conversion. IIRC (and I could be wrong here ... it's been a while!), it proposed demolishing several buildings at the northeast corner of West 28th and Detroit for expanded traffic flow off of the Shoreway. The particular property at the corner, Linda's Superette, has been considered by many to be a nuisance property, which I think reduced people's anxiety about demo. That said, this is basically removing traffic from West 25th, which would support future speculative development where two large surface lots currently sit, and increase traffic at an intersection directly adjacent to an extremely active nightclub and several high-density residential buildings. For public housing residents down the hill, this also seems problematic as the Shoreway's swoop to the northeast and the higher-density tower being adjacent to West 28th makes West 28th a more logical pedestrian corridor than the West 25th side. And all of this happening right at a time when Hingetown storefronts, arts spaces and residential rehab are poised to make this a much more pedestrian-oriented part of Ohio City. It just seems really perplexing to me ... Again, if I've recalled all the details correctly :)

^ I think just as a reference to the fencing around the pool :) I'm not seeing a pool in the site plan.

^ And streetscape construction has had adverse impacts on businesses across the city, regardless of transit improvements. The BRT features might have extended the timeline for construction, making business disruption more prolonged. But I think there was a fair amount of business anxiety and uncertainty in Detroit Shoreway with the Detroit streetscape improvements and in Tremont for Professor and Innerbelt construction and now in Collinwood for Waterloo streetscape. It's almost like you need some crazy idea for how to activate streets during major traffic disruptions. Oh, look, here's one such program in St. Paul (www.irrigatearts.org) and one getting announced locally Friday (http://collinwoodrising.eventbrite.com) :D

Yeah, I could do without the parking fronting Chester ... We do this all over town - "It'll just be parking until the next phase". See FEB for another example. And just ask the Avenue District how quickly street-adjacent surface parking is getting absorbed. That aside, great effort here ... That I think only truly works with some serious traffic calming along Chester. I can't think of too many streets in Cleveland that are less appealing to walk across. So if you're hoping people will be walking from the medical school to the grocery, we need to make that walk seem a little less life-threatening.

I'm sure that will be a great space but sad to see the lovely work done on Dredgers' gone (regardless of what you think of restaurant versus clothing) :(

^ Dean Rufus and Blow Hair are of course already open. Among the new tenants, Kutya Rev is already open, and if everything stays on schedule, I believe Cleveland Tea Revival is slated for October and Beet Jar Juice Bar for November. Not sure on Harness Cycle but slated for sometime in the fall. Oh, and the courtyard behind the building is AWESOME! That's going to be a great space.

Yayyy!!! This is one of my biggest pet peeves with Cleveland streetscapes ... We've finally turned a corner toward making streets more pedestrian and cyclist friendly, more aesthetically pleasing, more greenspace-intensive, with more sustainability features. So we create all these beautiful corridors along Euclid, East 12th, Detroit, etc. ... And then we plop in a bunch of brown and grey basic utilities, standard visual signage clutter, etc. Glad to see this project moving forward and hoping it can draw attention to this issue citywide. We could really stand to copy what St. Paul did ... Since 2005, they've housed an Artist in Residence at the city's Public Works Department to help influence thinking about public works decisions citywide. They receive a stipend, plus a separate $50,000 budget to do their own streetscape project. Some results: using art to liven up recycling bins and also to draw public attention to recycling as a habit; integrating resident-submitted poems into sidewalk panels that Public Works are already in the process of replacing; and installing visual art streetside as a traffic calming device. It's not dissimilar from the model the foundations used to house a sustainability officer in city government, a position that helped the city identify places where sustainability could actually cut government costs and a position that ultimately grew to a cabinet-level position and the identification of the sustainability economy as a key priority of Mayor Jackson. Time to do it again with art!! :)

Thanks! I could picture the two in operation but guess I just disregarded the third :)

Nice one, Piccadilly! But does anyone have clarity on site? I don't understand how it will be "sandwiched between Crop Bistro & Bar and Bonbon Pastry & Cafe" ... Aren't those two businesses directly next door to one another? Is this going across the street, or is Crop vacating part of their floor space? Or am I just crazy and Bonbon only uses part of their street frontage?? Haha.

I don't see an interior :( Is it just my browser?

Wow, if both of those things are happening, Crop is a busy bee ... From what's been reported, they're also planning on opening a spot on Waterloo, in partnership with Terry Stewart, who formerly headed up the Rock Hall. http://www.cleveland.com/entertainment/index.ssf/2013/02/crops_rocks_will_bring_a_new_k.html

That's one of the best "Visit Cleveland" articles I've ever seen ... Not just in its attention to detail, but in its exploration of gems beyond Downtown and University Circle. When was the last time an out-of-town publication mentioned Asiatown, Slavic Village or North Collinwood, when it wasn't about the foreclosure crisis :)

Cleveland rocks New York-based artists seek refuge from high rents in Cleveland, Ohio. BY IRINA IVANOVA, CRAIN'S NEW YORK SEPTEMBER 15, 2013 Cleveland could be the latest city to benefit as local artists flee New York's high cost of living. Several nonprofits there recently hosted a "Welcome to Cleveland" weekend, offering an all-expenses-paid tour of eight neighborhoods and an introduction to the city's artist-friendly financing, including grants for public art projects and homes priced as low as $6,500 ... ... More available at http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20130915/ARTS/130919922

Welcome to Collinwood by Sam Allard, Cleveland Scene September 11, 2013 If Cleveland is "a laboratory for rethinking how slow-growth cities prosper"—via Cuyahoga Partnership for Arts and Culture (CPAC) — then artists are both its scientists and its lab rats. In fact Collinwood has become the nucleus or petri dish of a massive experiment at CPAC's culturally attuned hands, one which encourages artists to move to the neighborhood by incentivizing long-term residence and providing funding for creative projects and engagement with the community. One of the cooler things they've been up to culminated last month, when CPAC and Northeast Shores CDC hosted a dozen artists from around the country. ... ... More available at http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20130915/ARTS/130919922

Yowza! Am I reading that correctly? As a university, without variance, you have to expand parking square footage three-fold of any new building square-footage?? Talk about a density killer.

Great to see this moving along. Favorite part? The tiny portion of the parcel devoted to parking, with a reference to parking opportunities nearby ... Just need some notation of proximity to a Rapid station and several bus routes directly adjacent on Detroit :)

^ There are some pretty good ones at the Cleveland Memory Project: http://images.ulib.csuohio.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/press/id/2551/rec/6

My guess (and it's just a guess) is that the presence of LAND Studio, might be part of the reason for this. Philly (and some other public art peers, like Pittsburgh's Sprout Fund) are very focused on murals as the powerhouse of their public art strategy. The City of Cleveland does have their Mural My Neighborhood program (http://www.city.cleveland.oh.us/CityofCleveland/Home/Government/CityAgencies/ParksRecreationandProperties/Cultural%20Arts/MuralMyNeighborhood), but as a division of Public Works, I don't think they've ever received the type of financial support that efforts in Philly have received. Instead, the autonomous LAND Studio is the better funded alternative for public art delivery in the city, and their strategy is less mural-intensive ... Murals tend to be supporting players in larger community projects (gathering space, walking trail, etc.), rather than stand-alone projects all over the city. Personally, I like LAND's strategy better than concentrating solely or mostly on murals. That being said, I think we are seeing mural art really popping up in places like Ohio City and St. Clair Superior. I'd wager a guess that Collinwood, particularly in the Waterloo Arts & Entertainment District, is probably closest to hitting a "critical mass" of murals. With the launch of Zoetic Walls (https://www.facebook.com/ZoeticWallsCleveland) by Waterloo Arts, the district's mural collection has exploded from 3 to 14 (and I think 3-5 more slated before the year ends), with many pieces done by top-tier street artists from around the country/globe. Heart Cleve :)

Gary Dumm, one of the muralists here, is one of Cuyahoga County's Creative Workforce Fellows. Check out this video about him and his work: Let's keep funding local artists so they can keep doing stuff like this! :)

This is insanely disappointing. Setting aside the demo that was required for this project, and setting aside the obsession with green space on a campus that already has a pretty significant amount of greenspace, and setting aside the addition of a small surface parking area (definitely not in the Master Plan) across the street from a large surface parking lot ... Why wouldn't you at least design a building with a more linear design so that you could combine those green spaces into something meaningful??? If you dropped the L-shape in favor of something rectilinear that fronted both Euclid and Prospect on the western part of the parcel, you could have a really lovely park running across the street from the Trinity Campus and providing a programmable space and pedestrian corridor between the Student Center and the transit center? Or reverse that configuration and put the building on the east and have a park running from Wolstein to the Student Center, advancing the Master Plan goal of creating a north-south spine from Wolstein AND increasing the likelihood that something gets built on that huge parking lot or that it becomes an extension of that park as well. That helps maintain a sense of street frontage and addresses one of the big problems with CSU's existing greenspace ... That it generally is not large enough for programming, and that it's generally not laid out with activation in mind. A big lawn and benches do not a campus greenspace make ... In my time at CSU, I can't recall ever seeing anyone, for instance, use the relatively large lawn adjacent to the Levin College. Instead ... Frowny face :(

^^ Well, technically there already is a good school there ... Currently, the fairly high-performing MC2STEM CMSD high school starts their 9th grade class off at the Great Lakes Science Center before they move on to other campuses. Probably 80 or 90 kids over there. I don't think an enormous school would work there, but I do think a high-performing magnet or charter could def do well. In terms of grocery, I think it really depends on how dense this development ends up being ... I don't feel like that's a very intuitive spot for the vast majority of downtown workers or residents to do grocery shopping, and I don't think day visitors are typically thinking about full grocery shopping on a visit to the lakefront. For anything but a very small boutique grocery, I think you would need a pretty dense residential base to support a grocery. In Cleveland, we seem to use Baltimore Harbor a lot as a point of inspiration (http://goo.gl/maps/8Clnp), but I feel like that city's waterfront is much less physically separated from the city core than ours. Not to say that vibrant mixed-use isn't possible on this site ... It's got some great visitor attractions already baked in that will help generate pedestrian volume. But no matter how strong we make our pedestrian and rail connections, I still think the psychological barriers presented by the Shoreway increase the likelihood that this needs to be sustainable primarily as an island unto itself, rather than relying on spillover traffic from downtown population to its south. In some ways, I feel like Toronto (http://goo.gl/maps/MBSdo), which has a similar Shoreway configuration, presents a more realistic outcome for the Cleve ... a strong emphasis on waterfront trails and parks and visitor attractions, lots of residential and hotel, some office and relatively light retail, with some stand-alone chain, some more mom-and-pop/small restaurant on Queens Quay and an emphasis on more booth-type, temporary, indie sales stuff ... Which seems to work well for seasonal variations in visitation.

Cleveland designer Brian Jasinski is in the running for a Martha Stewart "American Made" award. He's currently got one of the highest number of votes nationwide!! But he could, of course, use additional love from Urban Ohio to push him over the edge :) You can vote for him up to 6 times a day at http://www.marthastewart.com/americanmade/nominee/83041 See more about him and his work in this Creative Workforce Fellowship video at ... a massive annual artist support program that's another reason to love the Cleve :)

I could be wrong, but I believe the 2010 Census just missed the pretty substantial Phase 2 of Euclid Commons ... Census conducted in April, units came online over the summer. This article says that it added 262 beds in fall 2011: http://blog.cleveland.com/metro/2011/09/cleveland_state_university_has.html This 10,000 number excludes inmates and also (correct me if I'm wrong ClevelandOhio) excludes Flats West Bank, both of which civic leaders have traditionally been including in downtown population estimates. I think the consensus seems to be that these exclusions lead to a more accurate reflection of downtown population, but it's also "hiding" about 4,200 people that a decade ago we would have seen included in downtown estimates.

You are correct. "Economically disadvantaged students are students determined to be eligible for their schools’ free and reduced price meals under the National School Lunch Program." Regardless, it's worthwhile to note that statewide, 43% of students are considered economically disadvantaged ... As jborger points out, it is clearly the case that CMSD (and the other big urban school districts) are disproportionately coping with disengaged parents who are themselves are disproportionately dealing with single-parent situations, criminal records, unemployment and underemployment, poverty, etc. John Hay to suburbs might be an unfair comparison, but given the significant disparities in opportunities for urban students and suburban students, comparing our big metropolitan school districts to suburban ones apples-to-apples is a little misleading as well.