CLEVELAND — Since 1950, when its population peaked at 914,808, Cleveland
has steadily shed residents and jobs. In 2010, just 396,815 people
lived within the city limits, almost 81,000 fewer than a decade before,
and about the same number of people who lived in Cleveland in 1900.
The sequence of events is sadly familiar: the disappearance of
labor-intensive industry that paid a living wage, followed by entrenched
poverty and the social disruption that it brings.
But in recent years Cleveland’s municipal government and its
Regional Transit Authority
have rallied major employers, banks, foundations and developers around a
central goal of rebuilding the city’s core according to the new urban
market trends of the 21st century — health care, higher education,
entertainment, good food, new housing and expanded mass transportation.
A point of focus has been the emerging Uptown arts and entertainment
district along Euclid Avenue, near where John D. Rockefeller and other
industrialists and financiers built opulent mansions.
When it is finished next year, the new $27 million Museum of Contemporary Art, designed by
Farshid Moussavi,
will perch, like a lustrous black gem, at the entrance to the district,
at Euclid and Mayfield Road. A pedestrian plaza designed by
James Corner Field Operations, a designer of the High Line elevated park in
New York City,
separates the new museum from two four-story, mixed-use residential
buildings under construction on the north and south sides of Euclid.
The 60,106-square-foot south building will have 70 rental apartments
above 21,189 square feet of restaurant and retail space. The north
structure, larger at 84,399 square feet, has 44 apartments and 36,480
square feet of retail space that includes a bookstore and a big grocery,
the first in the area. Both buildings were designed by Stanley
Saitowitz of
Natoma Architects in San Francisco, and built at a cost of $44 million by MRN Ltd., a Cleveland development group.
To get residents and visitors to and from the arts district, the
Regional Transit Authority is planning to move two existing rail stops
on the city’s 19-mile Red Line closer to Uptown, nearby Little Italy and
Case Western Reserve University at a cost of nearly $30 million.
“All of this new construction is enhanced by international design,” said
Ari Maron, a 33-year-old partner in the family-owned MRN Ltd. “The
focus is the street. You provide the right mix of assets. You fill the
buildings with people and open the storefronts to the sidewalk. You
create a place where people want to be which didn’t exist before.”
In effect, the Uptown area will be what amounts to a new downtown for
the University Circle neighborhood on the east side of the city. Within
the square mile of University Circle, and within easy walking distance
of Uptown, are Case Western Reserve, the Cleveland Institute of Art, the
Cleveland Institute of Music, University Hospitals, Cleveland Clinic,
the Cleveland Orchestra, the Museum of Art and the Museum of Natural
History.
Spread across a campuslike expanse of green space, these institutions
form a distinct economic microclimate that has fostered the highest
growth in job numbers, income and residents in a city that lost 17
percent of its population from 2000 to 2010.
“There are 5,000 more jobs here than in 2005,” said Chris Ronayne, an urban planner who is president of
University Circle Inc.,
a nonprofit community service organization that has helped manage the
area’s development. “About 50,000 people work here. The number of
residents grew 11 percent since 2000. And there are 10,000 people who
live here now.”
By almost any measure of civic energy and interest, Uptown looks to be a
success. Mr. Maron said MRN Ltd. had already leased all three retail
and seven restaurant spaces in his project. The one-bedroom,
one-bathroom, 750-square-foot apartments have drawn strong interest and
will rent for about $1,500 a month when they go on the market in
January, he said.
Other new projects in Uptown include a planned $26 million, 150-room
Marriott hotel just down Euclid on Cornell Road. The Cleveland Institute
of Art now trains 520 students in a 155,000-square-foot building, where
Ford Model Ts were once made, that was recently renovated at a cost of
$35 million. Next June the institute is scheduled to break ground on a
$30 million, 91,000-square-foot, four-story addition — designed by
Stantec Architecture, which has an office in Cleveland — that will be
clad in multicolored panes of glass, said Grafton Nunes, the president
and chief executive.
And just a block away, Case Western Reserve in 2002 completed a $62
million, 152,000-square-foot classroom building, designed by Frank
Gehry, for its Weatherhead School of Management.
“That area of the city is really coming fast as a center of Cleveland’s
growth,” said Tracey A. Nichols, the director of the city Department of
Economic Development. “We are convinced projects like Uptown will
continue to be built and in the next generation this will be a city of
500,000 people again.”
One of the first major projects for Uptown, completed in 2008, was the
$200 million reconstruction of Euclid Avenue, which included installing a
dedicated lane for an unusual bus rapid transit line. The
three-year-old line has attracted 12 million riders and connects the
city’s central Public Square to University Circle.
The bus service, known as the
HealthLine, and the reconstructed boulevard are credited with contributing to a boom in development that The Plain Dealer
reported in July
had reached a total of $5 billion. Along with Uptown, where the
investment so far totals $162 million, other big projects include a $560
redevelopment of University Hospitals Case Medical Center, a $350
million casino on Public Square and a $465 million, 555,000-square-foot
convention center and medical mart downtown.
“There were skeptics about the HealthLine,” said David Beach, an urban
design expert with the Museum of Natural History. “It’s proving that an
investment in transit and improvements in streetscape do start to change
real estate investment patterns over time. In a slow economy it takes a
few years. But we are seeing new development up and down the Euclid
corridor now.”
Article Courtesy of The New York Times
