The I-90 Accelerator
A few weeks ago I was finishing up my Bridge Builders class with a presentation at the West Tech Lofts. The West Tech Lofts was an old high school (true story - at one time the largest high school in the state of Ohio) that has been converted into loft apartments. Very, very cool place. As we wrapped up our Bridge Builders session, I took up an offer to tour the facility (a choice move - if you get the opportunity). It is an impressive redevelopment. While on a tour of the top floor I got a choice view of I-90, when I was struck by an endless array of streets that dead-end into the highway with the other half of the street cut from the other side - meaning I was looking at a street that was once unencumbered by the highway. (This made me think of a photo that was presented to me a few weeks back showing President Kennedy in Cleveland, during September of 1962, waving from his limousine. The photo noted that the shot was taken from W. 65th and Detroit Avenue. The reason for the drive was that Detroit Avenue at the time was the only way to get to the airport from Downtown. Quick Note: the limousine was the same one he was in when he was assassinated in Dallas two short months from then. I understand that I-90 does not take you to the airport but it reminded me of how young the highway system is in the U.S.) Street after street die at the hills that overlook the highway. These streets were once connected - full neighborhoods ripe with life and vigor. Long, long streets that had a rich history. Sad to see them cut up for a large highway.
Fast forward a few weeks and I am enjoying a fine dinner @ Jak's (W. Sixth and St. Clair - go there) with Jacob, a good friend. During our conversation Jacob mentions that he went to high-school at West Tech and remembers when he could walk from his old street south of West Tech all the way to the school. No highway. The near West Side at the time was a working-class, middle american neighborhood that was torn asunder by a federal highway project. Eminent domain forced thousands, not hundreds mind you, but thousands of tax paying working class out of the culturally rich neighborhoods of Cleveland and into the suburbs. The original plan for I-90 was to also go right through the east side (i.e. - Shaker Heights and Cleveland Heights - but those neighborhoods were a bit more wealthy and more vocal about the highway) but was quickly scuttled. The west side of Cleveland had no such hope. I-90, then, became an accelerator for the loss of the population base for the City. Opened the far west side of Cuyahoga County for development (hey no I-90 no Crocker Park, no Avon Lake, no Westlake). All in the name of progress. I am a bit shocked at the number of people who lost their homes and made way out to the burbs. Thousands! Just imagine the sense of neighborhood that could exist if I-90 were built a few miles south. Instead a great neighborhood with a dramatic history were cut to the bone.
One of the few things that "worked". - Unfortunately.
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Ruth Ketteringham a well-known Cleveland historian used to correct people when they would talk about the Interstate highway system as scars in our fabric. She would simply say no they are not scars scars represent healing they are open gaping wounds that continue to bleed.
Open gaping wounds bleeding our city of its people. I would submit that says it all. (Comment this)
Cleveland after the highway system became a doughnut of empty calories with nothing in the center, carbs and fat in the once teeming blue collar neighborhoods and a sugary glaze of non-nutritious sprawl line of McMansions and asphalt parking and bigbox stores on its outerness. (Research Jacobs and 271 Harvard interchange and Stark 's Crocker Park built on land owned by longtime politico Carney family) Thank you, money and land-grabbing developers and politicians. Our parents even had the foresight to allow the highway to divide the city from the lakefront. Wow… visionary!
Now the people in the city whose metro area has already been raped by polluting industries and high-speed sprawl-inducing freeways are asked to pay into the Clean Ohio Fund to clean up the EPA sites, county redevelopment brownfield redevelopment, tax abatement (and many other such programs) to attract residents and businesses back to nowheresville -- the central city. These neighborhoods can be revived by artists however or so says new to the region, Dean of SAED at Kent, Steven Fong. Therefore, I'm smoking as much as possible to fund that initiative. Hope I don't die before I get to see the St. Clair Superior neighborhood brought back by the likes of Alenka Banco. But don't count on the folks in the Ohio Boxboard building like Bill Busta and Liz Maugans or the long lobbying for live work space Bill and Harriet Gould cause the new highway expenditures will force them to move. Oh well, says ODOT when thinking of razing this building -- they're artists, they'll relocate to revive another block of the city for a song. I mean look at James Levin – he made a renaissance happen in the Detroit Shoreway and now he’s set his sights on the rest of the city’s footprint. If this is a solution, I encourage everyone to take up smoking ASAP. There’s that or dig out and implement Norm Krumholz’s widely recognized and implemented (in other cities) groundbreaking Equity Planning Policy Document.
Like Tony Coyne said, "They'd never do this in Chicago" (he was referring to the visionary (not) plan to remove a stunning downtown skyscraper built by a famous architect that languished in the portfolio of Jacobs) . No kidding and for all the headache of the expansion of the Dan Ryan, Chicagoans would never let that highway anywhere near their lakefront. In other cities, they have drawn a greenbelt around themselves to stop sprawl. We have one designed almost 100 years ago by William Stichcomb and Frederick Law Olmsted called the Emerald Necklace. We just can't see it.
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Funny you should mention stitchcomb and Olmsted and the Emerald Necklace. Recently, while researching for our successful cemetery tour in Brooklyn Centre we came across a reference to a "smaller" emerald neckalse plan within the "bigger" Emerald Necklace which began with purchases of land in Chagrin Falls and Rocky River. This smaller Emerald Necklace began along East Boulevard (our beautiful Rockefeller Park) to be showcased during August at Walk+Roll Cleveland went south to Washington Park in Newburgh Heights turned west to Brookside Park in Brooklyn Center (which used to be much larger until I-71 took a large portion of it. It then was to connect to WEST Boulevard to go north to the lake and Edgewater park.
When I locate the book and the reference I intend to blog about our visionary leaders of the past compared to our "thugs" of the present day. (Comment this)
The hero of this episode was Norm Krumholz, then Planning Director, who got City Council to turn down the state's proposal for a consent decree that would have allowed construction. (Comment this)
In Christopher Diehl's introduction of Norm tonight, he spoke these words, "In 2004 Cleveland State University's Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs endowed a scholarship in honor of his 25 years of service to the university. And at the time of the scholarship’s announcement, Norm said, “As a Cleveland landmark, you cannot demolish me for a year.'""
Norm is the father if Equity Planning. His ground breaking plan should be dusted off and read by our county commissioners, if not now, then when? How many more will have to suffer before we see some good plans for our region? (Comment this)