“The painfully slow process of filling the ugly parking lots with new buildings has started. Stark, who has assembled roughly 30 acres in the district in partnership with others (including parking-lot owner T.J. Asher), wants to speed things up.
‘Left half-done, it’s a desolation,’ he says.
He argues that a ‘Big Bang’ will create the impetus to extend the downtown grid north across the lakefront railroad tracks to Dock 20 at the mouth of the Cuyahoga River, now used by the Cleveland-Cuyahoga County Port Authority to store piles of gravel and cement silos, hardly the highest and best use of the property.
‘The most important thing is to extend the city grid to the lake,’ Stark says…” (go to article)
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December 9, 2007 at 9:21 am
Contemporary buildings instead of iterations of conceptualized historic structures? Cutting the larger blocks in half to create a more pedestrian friendly rhythm and new north south lanes of approach to tie disparate parts of the new community together? Really?
I’m sorry; I just haven’t witnessed actual logic of this sort in Cleveland for a while. I need a chance to catch my breath. Obviously this is a very bold idea. I hope that it will translate well during implementation. There is so much potential here (the most prominent reason for why people stick around) that maybe it is truly a project of this scope that would be needed to realize it.
Of course with great potential for success lay a larger potential for failure. I wonder if the “usual crew” will get their sticky fingers into this project and destroy whatever beauty or goodness it could have possessed. Guess we will have to keep a close eye on this one.