Cleveland: a Connected City Field Guide © 2014 Ceos for Cities Table of Contents
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Cleveland: A Connected City Field Guide © 2014 CEOs for Cities Table of Contents Cleveland State University Levin College of Urban Affairs 1717 Euclid Ave. Cleveland, OH 44115 Offices: Cleveland, Chicago 4 Preface: The Connected City www.ceosforcities.org 6 Cleveland: Becoming Itself ISBN: 978-0-692-23580-5 10 Introduction Written by: Justin Glanville 12 Downtown Cleveland Designed by: Lee Zelenak www.the-beagle.com 18 Waterfronts 24 Euclid Corridor, Campus District and MidTown 30 University Circle 36 St. Clair-Superior 42 Shaker Square and Buckeye The Connected City 48 Detroit-Shoreway “Cities thrive as places where people can easily interact and connect. These connections are of two sorts: the easy interaction 54 Ohio City and Hingetown of local residents and easy connections to the rest of the world. Both internal and external connections are important. 60 Tremont Internal connections help promote the creation of new ideas and make cities work better for their residents. External 66 Special Topics connections enable people and businesses to tap into the global economy. We measure the local connectedness of cities by looking 72 Conclusion at a diverse array of factors including voting, community involvement, economic integration and transit use. Our measures of external connections include foreign travel, the presence of foreign students and broadband Internet use.” — CEOs for Cities, City Vitals 2.0 Cleveland: A Connected City Field Guide 3 The Connected City Each of these theories alone is wrong. A successful city must have all of these elements. It must have compelling public places, creative and educated talent, pathways for economic opportunity and smart technology. It must have quality architecture, smart buildings, green parks, bustling streetscapes and innovative startups. “…our ability to connect And it must do something else. It must connect these assets to one another, in ways with each other is the that are meaningful and accessible to residents. As CEOs for Cities argued in our research report City Success: Theories of defining characteristic Urban Prosperity, city leaders ought to think about elements of success as an artist would view a color palette. Each city is different and needs a different blend. of our species.” It’s not enough simply to check boxes off a checklist. Economic growth and development is about linking and leveraging a city’s distinctive assets of people, place, and opportunity. — Ed Glaeser, Triumph of the City It’s that simple. And complex. CEOs for Cities has developed a signature benchmarking framework, City Vitals, There is no shortage of theories about the using the four letters that make up the word “City” to spell the genetic code of city success: Connections, Innovation, Talent, and Your Distinctiveness. How a city secret sauce for city success. Some experts connects its physical, human, social, and digital capital will, more than anything argue that geography matters more else, determine its economic future. than ever and success depends on physical Success is all about connections. capital and authentic placemaking. Others submit that in a knowledge economy, This Field Guide to Cleveland is not intended to be an exhaustive look at the city. A number of great neighborhoods, innovative organizations and companies, cities must build human capital and creative strong leaders, and exciting economic initiatives are not mentioned. But the thread talent. Some insist that social capital and that runs through this Field Guide, and through Cleveland, is how my great home economic opportunity ultimately define city is creatively connecting its distinctive assets in an on-going, never-ending the soul of a city. Still others predict that the effort to be The Connected City. future city is about smart digital capital and harnessing the power of technology. Lee Fisher President and CEO CEOs for Cities www.ceosforcities.org Cleveland: A Connected City Field Guide 5 Cleveland: Becoming Itself Major League is not a movie about baseball. In fact, it’s the I Ching, the sum of all wisdom, the forecast for our city’s trajectory. Cleveland (and our baseball team) came down from early 20th-century heydays into decades of struggling to figure out exactly who we are. We dabbled in others’ personalities, sometimes even embraced being the “next” someone else, and by the 2000s, every newspaper was picking on Cleveland to finish dead last. But, like Coach Lou Brown, we stuck around just long enough to give them, well, something to write about. We pinpointed our city’s sweet spots, embraced our histories and started drawing the lines that would connect our inheritance to our future. Entrepreneurs and change-makers are joining their predecessors to lift this city from slump to streak. It turns out you don’t need to replicate New York or Chicago’s storied formulas for winning games. We’re doing it our own way — one base, one storefront, one attitude at a time. While we haven’t won the pennant yet, Cleveland, like Jake Taylor in the bottom of the ninth, is calling its own shots. Things don’t happen overnight. But feel that energy? We’re warmed up and ready to swing. Gina Prodan Kelly Creative Director CEOs for Cities Cleveland: A Connected City Field Guide 7 the challenge of connection Welcome to Cleveland. As you’ll notice, we’re a complex Across the city, there are unmistakable signs of a re-embrace of urban living. University Circle and Downtown and Ohio City have growing city. We have an east side and populations and hold their own among the most vibrant urban neighborhoods in the country, breathtaking in their cultural amenities a west side that can feel like and building stock and public spaces. Entrepreneurs are setting up shop two different worlds. We have in once-fading commercial districts. Yet one need not look far for signs of struggle. The city’s population a strong history of looking out continues to decline, and now stands at less than half its 1950 peak. A third for less advantaged citizens — of our residents live below the poverty line. Some 20,000 lots stand vacant. Many people — particularly the city’s large black population — continue even as we tend to segregate to feel cut off from economic opportunity. Unemployment in the city’s ourselves along class and race poorest neighborhoods stands at more than 15 percent. All of this makes us an ideal place to study the challenge of connection — lines. We are both industrial and physical connection, yes, but also social and technological and economic and environmental connection. Cleveland, more than perhaps any other natural, with a river, a great place in the U.S., can be a model for how a city can serve both its well-off lake and one of the nation’s and its struggling, for how nature can coexist with development, for how newcomers can integrate with preexisting populations. most-visited national parks just How do we provide for people who are “doing well,” in traditional terms, outside the city border. without marginalizing those who are not? How do we create urban places that are “green” — not just on the surface but because they reconnect people with the natural systems around them? How do we attract Maybe most interesting of all, new residents without alienating existing ones? These are feats that many more unambiguously prosperous cities haven’t managed. Maybe we are reviving and we are Cleveland can. getting smaller. This field guide is for anyone interested in exploring Cleveland in an inquisitive and balanced way. There’s a lot to be inspired by, a lot to learn from — and a lot to discover. Cleveland: A Connected City Field Guide 11 Context and History Downtown Downtown was Cleveland’s first neighborhood, carved out of a dense hardwood forest between the east Cleveland bank of the Cuyahoga River and the south shore of Lake Erie. Connecticut surveyor Moses Cleaveland laid out the grid of streets in 1796. His plan wasn’t very sensitive to the site’s topography. He jammed a typical New England town layout rigid street grid surrounding a generous Public Square — onto a triangular piece of land. In its earliest years, downtown Cleveland was a rough-and-tumble frontier outpost. Huge tree stumps lay rooted in the dirt roads. The river’s swampy floodplain was a haven for mosquitoes. Malaria and ague killed off most of the handful of residents brave enough to try permanent settlement. It’s hardly surprising that the first permanent business in the neighborhood was a saloon! In fact, the area now known as University Circle (see p. 30) attracted more settlers than the town center for Cleveland’s first few decades. The Ohio and Erie Canal, linking Lake Erie to the Ohio River, changed all that. In conjunction with its opening in 1827, the Cuyahoga River was channelized. The swampiest areas along its banks were drained. Cleveland’s population grew. Ohio City (see p. 54), a twin settlement on the river’s west bank, also expanded. Downtown’s time as a residential neighborhood didn’t last long. Once the Industrial Revolution hit in the late 19th century, smokestacks and pollution chased residents away almost as fast as the mosquitoes and malaria had decades before. Outlying neighborhoods and suburbs took the outflow. Cleveland: A Connected City Field Guide 13 For most of the 20th century, Downtown was strictly a center of commerce and industry. People came to work and shop, then emptied out by five o’clock. In the 1990s, leaders tried to inject glitz into the proceedings with big public-private Lake Erie building projects such as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, the Great Lakes Science Center and three new stadiums for the city’s professional sports teams.