When I returned to Cleveland this past week, after a five-year absence, I was optimistic that Public Square and its environs drawing on our recently acquired national collective knowledge of what works in downtown revitalization would have improved. Often when I visit a city, I feel a bit like a colonialist, parachuting into town for a few hours, and making judgements about how the downtown is doing and thinking and writing about it based on admittedly limited information. Cleveland for me is different. I first visited Northeastern Ohio in 1973, and spent four years near there attending college. I’ve been a regular visitor (several times a year) since. However, I haven’t visited since November 2016 when I served as a poll watcher in Lakewood, a close-in Cleveland suburb. I haven’t been able to get myself to return to where I spent a miserable evening at a bar in a Mexican restaurant watching the returns come in on the television.
In fact, my first blog posts were about Cleveland after a one week stay during the summer of 2016. (http://www.theplacemaster.com/2016/07/09/photos-from-clevelands-public-square/ http://www.theplacemaster.com/2016/07/08/when-will-we-ever-learn/). I was distinctly unimpressed with the city’s then recent $50 million redesign of Public Square, the city’s most high profile public space. And since that time, the situation in Public Square has gotten … worse! My recent visit included downtown Cleveland, an orchestra concert, and the Mid-town area, where Euclid Avenue was once the site of magnificent homes (https://www.abebooks.com/Showplace-America-Clevelands-Euclid-Avenue-1850-1910/30406229480/bd), and had over the decades become an environment of empty lots, liquor stores and derelict structures.
Public Square was nearly deserted on the day of my visit, which was sunny and cold. The space was minimally maintained, with the only visible activity being the hanging of some decorative lights on trees. A cheesy ice rink was being installed – surrounded by unsightly shipping containers. The food kiosk was reasonably busy, but the picnic tables outside of it were completely unused. Most appalling was that the space was littered with concrete – planters and jersey barriers – placed in the space for “security reasons.” Why in the world would you spend $50 million to “improve” a space and then install horrible, unsightly objects – even for the best of reasons? There were round green planters (with one scraggly tree planted in each) to keep cars from driving on the pathways, and huge white barriers blocking carefully designed curb cut ramps, intended to make the spaces more open and accessible. In fact, one of the dumbest public space “amenities” I’ve ever seen were the flimsy, poorly maintained metal ramps over the curbs, to make the spaces accessible, since the original ramps had been blocked off and were unusable to the mobility impaired. How can this have happened?
Unused tables in the shade outside of Public Square food kiosk
I also noticed, since this was a late autumn visit (as opposed to my earlier summer visit), that Terminal Tower, one of Cleveland’s iconic structures, blocked the winter sun from the space during much of the day. The food kiosk was placed directly in that shadow, and obscured the view of the tower from the Square. The Square was mostly dark and windy.
In order to improve the level of activity in the Square, as I argued five years ago, the Square needs to be more heavily programmed. It needs movable chairs, especially to enable users to catch whatever sunlight there is in pockets outside the shade. It needs more stuff for sale, particularly food, in order to generate activity. A market would be great. The existing kiosk needs to be more open. It’s single rest room looks like a war zone. Public Square needs a more visible maintenance and security presence. The horticulture needs to be better maintained and designed (it appears to have been designed for minimal maintenance – a bad idea, badly executed).
There is clearly a bunch of old, discredited thinking going on in Cleveland regarding economic development and downtown revitalization. Cleveland’s civic leaders believe they have scored a win attracting plans for a newly constructed headquarters for Sherwin Williams on what are now parking lots adjacent to Public Square. This, in a city with almost three million square feet of available office space, much of which is in architecturally significant buildings. The planned development is a 36 story, one million square foot tower complex, with no ground level retail, set back from the street. While, yeah, this will bring some investment and jobs downtown, and it is better for the civic psyche than losing the company to somewhere else, the likely net improvement in the quality of the experience in downtown Cleveland is likely to be minimal. I thought architects and planners have learned not to do this kind of anti-urbanistic stuff. The building is likely to be surrounded by a dead plaza. And senior Sherwin-Williams executives are probably going to be driving from the suburbs into the complex’s garage, having lunch in the corporate dining room, and leaving for the suburbs at the end of the day. Having a development that activates the street level would be far preferable, especially at this key location adjacent to Public Square.
Downtown Cleveland was relatively free of pedestrians on my Friday visit. I had a difficult time finding a place open to eat lunch. The major pre-covid economic trend in the downtown was the conversion of historic office structures into luxury housing. There is now a large amount of product apparently ready to come on line and flood the market, so the continuation of that trend is likely to slow post-pandemic – and isn’t going to be sufficient to sop up the tremendous amount of empty commercial space in the downtown. One unusual thing about the Cleveland downtown is that it has so much empty office space above active retail space. My experience is that downtown is livelier at night than during the day, particularly when there is a ball game.
Downtown Cleveland has amazing historic social resources – including its fabulously beautiful commercial arcades. It is frustrating that developers and civic leaders have been unable to capitalize on Cleveland’s many strengths. This is particularly true because at the other end of Euclid Avenue is one of the most important health care complexes in the world, the Cleveland Clinic at University Circle. Also at University Circle are Case Western Reserve University, one of the country’s great art museums, and Severance Hall, home of what is arguably the finest American orchestra, and at the same time, perhaps the most acoustically congenial space for orchestral music in the country.
The Cleveland Orchestra is a remarkable institution. It’s existence in Cleveland, a city without the plutocratic wealth that has become a major factor in gateway cities across the country, is remarkable. Orchestra patrons probably dig deeper into their pockets to support the orchestra than any cultural institution in any other city in the United States. The philanthropists supporting the Orchestra are in large measure professionals (doctors and attorneys), rather than people in finance or real estate.
The concert I attended was not what I had signed up for. Conductor, Semyon Bychkov, cancelled on relatively short notice, and was replaced by Thierry Fischer, music director of the São Paulo and Utah Symphonies. Tchaikovsky’s First Symphony and Dvorak’s “In Nature’s Realm,” were replaced with Messian’s “Les Offrandes oubliées” (The Forgotten Offerings) and the Mussorgsky/Ravel chestnut, “Pictures at an Exhibition.” The Ravel Piano Concerto with 21-year-old Israeli pianist, Tom Borrow, was the sole survivor. The loss of the Dvorak and Bychkov were regrettable, but the addition of the Messian piece, new to me, was a plus. While the orchestra sounded great, the concert was a disappointment.
Admission to the concert required proof of vaccination and ID and the hall was mostly full. The audience was wildly enthusiastic especially after the coloristic Mussorgsky. I was definitely the odd person out in my reaction. I was happy to hear the Messiaen, written in 1930 when he was 22. Messiaen is a favorite composer of mine, and his influence on composers in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, like Glass, Saariaho and Reich, is yet to be fully appreciated. Hearing an early work of this composer, revealed much about the development of Messiaen’s distinctive voice. The piece, unsurprisingly, draws much on Debussy, without the cragginess that later became part of Messiaen’s signature musical vocabulary. Drawing firmly on his deep Catholic spirituality, it made clear how the composer developed his unique world of sound. The orchestra’s performance, as it was throughout the evening, was warm and glowing – by contrast with the edgier, brighter sounds of the New York Philharmonic and San Francisco Symphony I had heard earlier in the season.
Borrow’s rendition of the Ravel was showy, speedy and virtuosic in the worst sense of the word. It was essentially empty. The fast tempi he set in the first and third movements prevented Ravel’s humor and savior faire from being reflected in the orchestra. Borrow, clearly technically gifted, needs to step back and take a deep breath, less he end up a Western Laing Laing.
The “Pictures,” a Ravel transcription of a Mussorgsky piano suite, suffered similarly from an impulse to highlight its bright colors and distinctive effects. Having recently heard the Met perform the composer’s Boris Godunov in his original orchestration (rather than the usual souped-up Rimsky-Korsakoff edition), I was primed to understand the significance of the widely held, but perhaps mistaken view, that Mussorgsky was something of an unschooled musical savant, whose work needed the domestication of the musically more lettered in order to be accepted in polite company. While the Orchestra’s sound was nothing short of glorious, certainly avoiding the vulgarity that Ravel’s technicolor meddling encourages, the performance was ultimately crowd pleasing and unsatisfying; certainly more French than Russian in spirit.
I particularly admired the dark passion of the string playing during the entire evening. It appeared to me that the violin and viola players worked to produce a full, rounded, less tense effect. Similarly, the winds never blared, and in the French manner produced a characteristically complex timbre. Unfortunately, Maestro Fischer, in both the Ravel offerings, went for the easy wins, failing to capitalize on this orchestra’s particular virtues. The orchestra remains a wonder, and a treasure for Cleveland. I need to go back soon to enjoy a more substantive program (this, BTW, was my fourth orchestra to hear this season, including the two mentioned above, and the Philadelphia (whose Shostakovich’s entertaining, witty piano concerto with Juja Wang, was, in stark positive contrast to Borrow’s humorless Ravel) earlier in the season.
I had high hopes for the positive redevelopment of Euclid Avenue, the link between downtown and University Circle, which must be an essential element of a revived Cleveland. Bus rapid transit infrastructure, called the Health Line, was installed in the mid-teens along the length of the Avenue – and in 2016 appeared to be catalyzing mixed-use, mixed income development, particularly at corners where it had station stops.
Significant progress has been made in removing much of the decay along the avenue, and grassy lots have replaced all of the derelict structures. There has been some scattered residential development, as well as a hotel approximately midway between downtown and the Clinic. However, the importance of density and critical mass to successful revitalization appears to have been lost on the developers and planners involved in Mid-town redevelopment.
The most glaring example of this is the construction of townhouses along a portion of Euclid, the most prominent features of which are driveway and garages off a service road set back from the Avenue. I get that Cleveland is a heartland city, where the car continues to dominate the market, but to build automobile-centric development along an expensive transit corridor investment seems like both backward thinking and a lost opportunity. Similarly, the mid-rise, multiple dwelling unit construction along Euclid lacked street level retail. As result, the development of Euclid so far will not produce a walkable neighborhood. Going to the newly built Aldi’s to pick up groceries will still require resort to a car (reflected in the store’s large parking lot). The door to the store faces the lot, and not the street. No one walks on Euclid, and I didn’t see anyone get on or off the Health Line during my couple of hours scouting around. Dense, mixed-use development at the transit nodes wasn’t happening. Development activity was spread out in non-adjacent lots along the Avenue, preventing the possibility of essential secondary, symbiotic effects. Critical mass is an absolute necessity for neighborhood revitalization. One or two transit stops should be selected for the focus of improvement activity in order to promote such effects. Nondescript, 66th Street has been selected for the focus of future investments, even though it did not appear to have any particular existing social, cultural or infrastructure assets.
One interesting problem facing Mid-town Cleveland is how small the number of historic residents raising the specter of “gentrification” is: fewer than a couple of thousand. Those two thousand people appear to have outsized political force in inhibiting the possibility of neighborhood revitalization for possibly tens of thousands of new residents, with concerns about changing neighborhood character and rising rents. Apparently, what those folks most need is improvements to their current sub-standard housing conditions, something that, given the small numbers involved, shouldn’t be all that expensive to provide an assist to. The value proposition for Cleveland as a place is its high-quality social infrastructure combined with low local housing costs. Attracting new, college educated residents looking for inexpensive space, while improving the existing housing stock for current residents – ought to be at the center of any redevelopment strategy for a city that once had a population of over 900,000 and now is less than 400,000.
My visit to the office of the Mid-town area’s local development corporation (one of dozens in Cleveland, all still supported by the declining Federal Community Development Block Grant funding), was delayed by my foolishly trying to access its office through the building’s locked front door on Euclid. The entrance to the building was through a huge, empty rear parking lot. To me this was a symbol of the old school thinking still governing urban policy in Cleveland. As one Cleveland leader cleverly told me, “we think in the IEDC rather than the IDA framework” (International Economic Development Council/International Downtown Association). That is, focusing on automobile-oriented, large scale subsidized development, rather than placemaking and transit-oriented, neighborhood walkability. Cleveland remains in the derriere garde of the revitalization of American cities. Leaders in cities across the country have drawn on Jane Jacobs and William H. Whyte’s thinking about how urban social infrastructure works and made great strides in improving the quality of life for their residents. Another Ohio city, Cincinnati is a great example. Not in Cleveland.
If I were running that LDC, I’d make sure that the ground floor of the building where my office was located had a coffee shop, restaurant or bookstore (which I would subsidize, if necessary), with chairs and tables on the sidewalk out front, and that the welcoming entrance was through the door on Euclid, to make the point about what is possible on what once was called “America’s Showplace.”
*Randy Newman, “Burn On”
