Cleveland, Greater Cleveland Partnership, Launch Biggest Civic Effort in Decades To Make Downtown-Lakefront Connection A Reality

Steven Litt, cleveland.com

 Clevelanders have tried at least nine times over the past 35 years to rally support for a way to build a stronger link between the city’s downtown and its Lake Erie waterfront.

And nine times, those attempts fizzled over lack of money, lack of political support, lack of corporate backing, failure to engage the public, and, perhaps most important, a lack of civic will.

This time, it could be different.

Mayor Justin Bibb, the city of Cleveland, and the Greater Cleveland Partnership, Northeast Ohio’s chamber of commerce, have organized a civic task force with five working groups and more than 150 participants to carry out a fresh attempt at a lakefront transformation.

It’s the biggest effort of its kind in decades. Officials from the city and Greater Cleveland Partnership discussed it in recent interviews with cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer.

The mission is to figure out how to follow up on a proposal unveiled last May by Jimmy and Dee Haslam, owners of the NFL Browns, and later adopted by the city, to extend the downtown Mall as a kind of “land bridge’' or linear park, over the Ohio 2 Shoreway and lakefront railroad lines to North Coast Harbor.

The extension would provide a broad, inviting pedestrian link between downtown and the city-owned FirstEnergy Stadium, where the Browns’ lease is up in late 2028, plus other lakefront attractions including the Rock and Hall of Fame, and the Great Lakes Science Center.

Just as important, the new connection would extend the city grid to the water’s edge, along with the opportunity to open up new land for development and expand the skyline.

The work of the task force will add to a more narrowly-focused study initiated last year by outgoing mayor Frank Jackson to analyze the potential impact on regional traffic of as many as seven variations on the original Haslam concept.

The city organized the $5 million, 18-month traffic feasibility study in collaboration with the Ohio Department of Transportation, which is paying for half of the work.

The Big Push

Gary Hribar, the CEO of Osborn Engineering, which is conducting the traffic feasibility study, said the civic energy represented by the new lakefront task force is bigger and broader than that generated by any other proposal in recent decades.

“This definitely has more early momentum than any of those efforts that I can recall,’’ Hribar said.

The traffic study will address the key question of whether extending the Mall would require removing the highway ramp connecting the Shoreway to the Main Avenue Bridge over the Cuyahoga River, a move that would dramatically change east-west regional traffic patterns across the lakefront.

The task force convened by the city and the Greater Cleveland Partnership will evaluate lakefront design concepts, and figure out how to pay for construction. It will also look at how to manage a big, complex project across election cycles, and how to make the project and any subsequent development equitable in terms of race and economics. Starting later this year, the group will also invite extensive public participation.

“The goal is to provide overall alignment, guidance, strategy, and recommendations on a quarterly basis back up to the city for their decision-making,’’ said Baiju Shah, the Greater Cleveland Partnership’s president and CEO.

A vexing gap

The gap between downtown and the lakefront has vexed city planners for more than a century. The area’s terrain is a big part of the problem, but so are manmade barriers created by the railroads and Shoreway.

Downtown rests atop a bluff rising 60 to 75 feet above Lake Erie. Areas of landfill pushed the water’s edge further and further north to serve a growing commercial and industrial port. Railroad lines installed in the 19th-century added a major barrier.

The Shoreway, built in the mid-20th century, worsened the separation. To reach lakefront attractions, pedestrians now have to walk a quarter-mile north from Lakeside Avenue on sidewalks along West Third and East Ninth Streets with crosswalks at busy intersections and the Shoreway’s on- and off-ramps.

The Mall has overlooked the lakefront gap for more than a century. It’s the 15-acre centerpiece of the city’s civic and government center, conceived in 1903 by the Group Plan Commission, and led by Chicago architect Daniel Burnham.

After building Municipal Stadium along the downtown lakefront in 1931, the city extended the Mall temporarily to link downtown to the fairground for the Great Lakes Exposition in 1936-37.

Little changed until the late 1980s when the city created North Coast Harbor, the 7-acre basin that later became the setting for the Rock Hall, the Great Lakes Science Center, and FirstEnergy Stadium, built on the former site of Municipal Stadium.

In 2013, the northern two-thirds of the Mall — Malls B and C — were reconfigured as the green roof of the Huntington Convention Center of Cleveland. Both segments overlook the lakefront gap.

The current effort to erase the rift has a stronger civic consensus behind it than previous ones, Shah and members of Bibb’s staff said.

The possibility of funding through sources including the new infrastructure bill signed into law last year by President Biden also enhances the chance for success.

“We’re working in an environment where there’s a lot of federal money for catalytic projects like this,’’ said Jeff Epstein, Bibb’s chief of integrated development. “We’ve talked about this for too long. We have to make it happen this time.”

Organizing for action

In contrast to the previous attempts, Shah said that his organization and the city have configured the new task force as “a committee that will endure because of the multi-year nature of the project.”

The organizational chart for the project places the city at the top, supported by a leadership committee, with Bradford Davy, Bibb’s chief strategy officer, serving as its administrative chairman; and an operating committee, with Jeff Epstein, the city’s chief of integrated development, serving as administrative chair.

The two primary committees, plus a project office at Greater Cleveland Partnership, are supported by five working groups devoted to “Funding, Advocacy, and Deal Structures,’’ “Community Benefit,’’ “Infrastructure,’’ “Urban Design and Land Use,’’ and “Engagement and Communications.’’

The committees and working groups include city and Cuyahoga County officials, plus members of civic organizations, and professional groups.

City Council President Blaine Griffin is serving on both of the top committees.

“It is a big effort and a great effort,’' he said Tuesday. “I’m all in. We have council members embedded in all the committees.’'

The funding, advocacy, and deal structure working group, for example, includes Ward 13 Councilman Kris Harsh along with staff members of the Cleveland and Gund foundations, the nonprofit Downtown Cleveland Alliance, Amtrak, U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown’s office, Bike Cleveland, and the Rock Hall.

The community benefits group, which includes Ward 7 Councilwoman Stephanie Howse, also includes representatives of the Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority, the Urban League of Greater Cleveland, Global Cleveland, the Cleveland chapter of the American Institute of Architects, LAND Studio, and the Cleveland Browns Foundation.

The working groups started meeting in late February, Shah said. The operating committee has been meeting every other week for several months, and the leadership committee has met once so far, in April, he said.

In a related effort, the Greater Cleveland Partnership has hired HR&A Advisors, a national real estate consulting firm, to provide advice on whether Cleveland needs to form a new public-private entity to carry out the lakefront project, such as a new development authority.

The consultant will look at public-private structures that could unlock financial resources while providing flexibility and sustained oversight extending beyond election cycles and political transitions, Shah said.

That’s something the mayor recognizes as important and valid, said Davy, Bibb’s chief strategy officer.

“A project of this magnitude will live well beyond his tenure,’’ Davy said. “The lakefront will be here after all of us. It’s important we put the whims of politics and changing seasons to the side.”

Any new development entity could be configured to help with other lakefront projects, such as the potential future closure and reuse of Burke Lakefront Airport, or the so-called “CHEERS’' proposal of Cleveland Metroparks, aimed at using clean, recycled sediment dredged from the Cuyahoga River to create new lakefront parkland on the city’s East Side.

But Davy and Epstein said that any such projects will ultimately be led by the city to benefit local and regional residents.

Transparency promised

What’s missing in the new drive on the lakefront so far are broad, inclusive opportunities for public input and feedback.

The Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency, NOACA, which coordinates federal transportation spending in the region, maintains a relatively obscure portal for public comments on its website. The URL included here is a Tiny URL: https://tinyurl.com/mrr53www.

In May 2021, City Council and the city’s planning commission held two meetings on the Haslam concept shortly after it was unveiled. Since then, much of the lakefront effort, apart from discussions over the traffic feasibility study, has been under the radar.

One explanation is that the Bibb administration needed time to get up to speed in its first 100 days.

“We’ve been working at a pretty strong clip to accomplish a multitude of goals,’’ Davy said.

But Shah, Hribar, and city officials said public meetings will begin by late summer or fall. The city is also planning within several months to launch a website enabling public feedback on the traffic feasibility analysis and other aspects of the project.

One big reason for transparency is that federal funding could depend on it.

“The idea here would be to do things in compliance with potential funding sources,’’ Hribar said.

In the meantime, the new lakefront task force and its working groups will continue to meet privately, Shah said.

The meetings “are meant to be areas for deliberation and debate of lots of different ideas from many stakeholders to make recommendations to the city and City Council that will ultimately have more public engagement points on any decisions,” he said.

Epstein and Davy said that future public participation will be substantive. There’s no foregone conclusion about simply building what the Haslams and Jackson unveiled last year, they said.

“This is not a project or a series of projects where the city is huddled in a room with drawings on our own,” Epstein said. The more transparent, “the better the outcome will be,” he said.

Previous efforts

Previous lakefront proposals that failed included top-down, corporate-led proposals along with concepts initiated by the city, and bottom-up ideas generated by advocates working outside traditional power structures.

The unrealized visions include a proposal by Progressive Corp. in the late 1980s to build its headquarters on the lakefront, plus concepts advanced in 1998 and 2001 by Cleveland Tomorrow, with the Greater Cleveland Growth Association collaborating on the 2001 effort.

The city’s 2004 Waterfront District Plan proposed extending the Mall, but a 2009 proposal developed by planner Stanton Eckstut didn’t follow up on the idea. Several proposals that followed, however, did include linkages involving variations on extending the Mall.

While none of the previous concepts gained traction, they provide evidence of a persistent desire to better connect downtown Cleveland to Lake Erie. And that idea finally appears to be getting traction.

“You have broad public interest that makes this now an imperative,” Shah said.