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Columbus Road is a path for growth Area is home to residential development By STAN BULLARD sbullard@crain.com
CONTRIBUTED PHOTO
A rendering of what the redesigned Public Square could look like when completed.
Connecting Cleveland with commission’s plan Vision that is four years in the works could be boon for downtown By JAY MILLER jmiller@crain.com
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eople are coming back to downtown Cleveland. Some are coming to the Horseshoe Casino Cleveland at Public Square, others are coming to conferences at the new Cleveland Convention Center and the Global Center for Health Innovation. More people are living downtown in apartments and condominiums, some carved out of what used to be office buildings, from the Cuyahoga River to the Cleveland State University campus a mile-and-a-half
away. Now, civic planners are proposing a $60 million plan to entice those people and others like them to spend more time downtown. And, in a dramatic measure for a city that mostly has turned its back on the waterfront for more than 200 years, they even want to make it easier to enjoy Lake Erie. It’s all in the name of connectivity and bringing more life and comfort to a downtown that has been spottily developed. Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson in 2010 created the Group Plan Commission to oversee this transforma-
tion. The commission hired James Corner Field Operations of New York to redesign Public Square, and Gustafson Guthrie Nichol, a Seattle landscape architecture practice, to work on the Mall. The commission hopes to begin turning this vision into reality with a groundbreaking this fall for a redesigned Public Square. The central village green would run from Public Square north along the spaces of the city’s central Mall to a bridge that would span the Shoreway and railroad tracks, carrying visitors to the museums along the lakefront. See PLAN Page 24
Sam McNulty plans to build a townhouse for himself as part of a residential development he’s working on at Columbus Road and Abbey Avenue. He bought the longempty, gravel-covered site earlier this year because it’s less than a five-minute walk from the office next to the West Side Market where McNulty and his partners run five nearby beer-centric businesses. Brian and Muriel Storrie have bought a three-story townhouse that is under construction on the slope of Columbus west of the bridge. For now, it will be a getaway location from their home in Little Rock, Ark. Later it will be a full-time home after Brian Storrie eases into retirement from college teaching. Such disparate motivations are starting to help rejuvenate Columbus Road, which has played a central role in Cleveland historically but has been bypassed by more recent redevelopment action nearby in the Flats and adjoining city neighborhoods and downtown. But now, Columbus Road — best known now for being the home of Hooples bar and the pioneering Irishtown Bend townhouses from the early 2000s, as well as a handful of frame homes and old industrial buildings — is starting to get its turn at a second act. Driving the momentum is its walking- and bike-riding distance to the popular, housingshort Tremont and Ohio City neighborhoods and the West Side Market; its proximity to downtown attractions; and a growing number of recreation options, including rowing on the Cuyahoga River.
David Sharkey, a partner in Cleveland-based Civic Builders, which is constructing the home for the Storries as part of its Columbus Hill project, sees the street as a key crossroads. “It’s in the middle of everything and the middle of nowhere at the same time,” Sharkey said, thanks to tree-covered slopes that mask views of the West Side in the summer.
“This is all greater downtown. It’s all part of the same inner ring of history and architecture ...” – Tom Yablonsky executive vice president, Downtown Cleveland Alliance
Back to the city For the most part, until 2011 when the Columbus Road Bridge was closed for repairs — it’s now scheduled to reopen again in the fall — the street has been a drive-by. Motorists used it as an alternative route to downtown Cleveland from the highways, including some hardy souls who still use the western part of Columbus to detour to the West Third Street Bridge. On the bridge’s east side, the biggest things on the peninsula bisected by Columbus Road in the last 15 years have been demolition of old riverfront warehouses for parking spots and construction of Larry Flynt’s Hustler Club, which replaced the strip club’s former Old River Road location that was razed to become part of the Flats East Bank Neighborhood. See COLUMBUS ROAD Page 23
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Entire contents © 2014 by Crain Communications Inc. Vol. 35, No. 25