CLEVELAND—Just in time to play a starring role in next week’s Republican National Convention, Cleveland’s most iconic civic space has undergone a $50-million face-lift.
Public Square, for the past century little more than an unpleasant traffic-clogged intersection at the center of the city, is again a park for people—six acres of swooping promenades lined with sinuous sculptural seating, lush gardens and a public lawn.
Designed by urban landscape guru James Corner, the guy behind Manhattan’s widely lauded High Line, the new Public Square, only a few blocks from Quicken Arena, will be one of the most visible public protest zones during the convention. Corner’s philosophy about urban open space has as much to do with promoting civic involvement and democracy as it is does recreation, which makes the timing of the convention all the more fitting. Members of the public are already signing up for half-hour speaking slots on the Square’s new public stage—nearly the same spot where in the 19th century famous orators like Stephen Douglas, Horace Greeley and Sam Houston, and William McKinley once spoke to thousands.
It’s the keystone of an ambitious effort to reknit the Forest City’s grand, Progressive Era public spaces, and one Clevelanders hope will solidify their downtown’s quiet renaissance. “We were certain that if something dramatic wasn’t done to improve our public spaces, we would not see the potential realized for downtown,” says Ann Zoller, executive director of the LAND Studio, a nonprofit that plans and designs the city’s public spaces and played a central role in the Public Square redesign. “And we didn’t want to just check the box, we wanted to do it at a world-class level.”
The remake of Public Square links the once moribund downtown with the city’s 26-acre mall— the grand, European-style civic space designed by David Burnham at the turn of the 19th century that includes the city’s grand auditorium, court house and city hall—and the Lake Erie waterfront beyond, long stranded behind rail and highway corridors. Reconnect these spaces, the idea goes, and you unlock their latent potential.
“It’s really all about making the city more attractive, about making it work for workers, residents and visitors,” says Corner, whose New York-based James Corner Field Operations has helped make landscape architecture hot. “We’re in this renaissance where it’s being recognized that public open spaces add significant value to cities, not only by catalyzing new economic developments, but also through health, fitness and the promotion of sociality, diversity and democracy.”
Cleveland is a fitting place for such a renaissance. Laid out by New Englanders—this part of Ohio was originally claimed and colonized by Connecticut as its “Western Reserve”—Public Square was the town common, where residents grazed their hogs and cattle between the Presbyterian Church and the county courthouse in the first decades of the 19th century. Clevelanders have been fighting over how the square should be used ever since.
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First the struggle was over fencing. In the 1830s, the town council enclosed the four quadrants to “prevent the depredations of the cattle and swine” which were hindering traffic on Superior and Ontario, the streets that crossed one another at the square’s center. Then they legislated against “boys from using it as a ball ground” or “roosting” on the fence to the “annoyance of traffic.”
But public pressure for a recreational space grew with the city, which in the 20 years from 1830 to 1850 had grown from a village of 1,000 to an urban center of 20,000. There were petitions for the square to be enclosed, cutting off Superior Avenue and Ontario Street, to create “a grand central park,” a plan vehemently opposed by area merchants, who feared it would deflect traffic from their stores.
For a time, the public prevailed. Looping sidewalks, ornamental shrubbery and a grand fountain were constructed in the newly enclosed park, where bands played on weekends. But the business community refused to relent, eventually convincing the courts that the city had no right to cut off street traffic, and the potential right-of-ways of an aspiring new streetcar company. In 1867, the fences were breached, and the park again cut in four by traffic. By the 1890s, what was left of the park was disheveled and the square had become a dreary transit hub.
“That’s been the clash over the years,” says J. Mark Souther, associate professor of history at Cleveland State University. “Should it be a recreational space on one hand or a transportation space on the other.”
Public Square was lost to recreation, but the city fathers tried to compensate with the creation of the “Group Plan of 1903,” at that time the most comprehensive city plan in the country outside of Washington, D.C. Inspired by the plans for the nation’s capital, state and city officials convened a commission headed by the country’s preeminent architect, Daniel Burnham, the man who designed the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair’s “White City” and who led the subsequent redesign of the National Mall in Washington.
The plan directed the placement and design parameters for a new City Hall, county courthouse, public library, federal building and railway station around a grand mall located between Public Square and the lakefront. “We took for our inspiration the Place de la Concorde,” commission member Arnold Brunner later recalled, and especially the twin palaces Ange-Jacques Gabriel built on that square for Louis XV, photographs of which the commissioners included in their official report “with other views of Paris.”
Cleveland executed the plan, building a civic district that stands as a monument to that city’s turn-of-the-century wealth and ambition. In 1920, it was the fifth-largest city in the country with more than twice as many people— 800,000—as it has today, a booming manufacturing center and a homegrown elite who lavished money on cultural institutions like the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra, which remains one of the best in the world. That year saw the construction of the $150 million Cleveland Union Terminal complex on the south side of Public Square, a 52-story tower perched over an underground railway terminal that was then the tallest building between New York and Chicago.
Then it all came crashing down. The Great Depression hit the city especially hard and, after a short boom in World War II, it continued to hemorrhage people and industries. There were race riots in 1967. Factories relocated to the Sun Belt. Wealthy residents moved to the suburbs. Downtown department stores closed. The polluted Cuyahoga River caught fire in 1969 and, nine years later, the city defaulted on its debts, the first city to do so since the Depression. Outsiders began calling it “the Mistake on the Lake.” As recently as 2010, it topped the Forbes list of America’s Most Miserable Cities “thanks to its high unemployment, high taxes, lousy weather, corruption by public officials and crummy sports teams.”
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In that spring of 2010, Anthony Coyne, a real estate attorney and amateur urban historian who served as chairman of the city planning commission, met with Mayor Frank Jackson in the opulent Red Room of City Hall, a neo-classical structure at the center of Burnham’s civic plan. He had a crazy idea.
Jackson, he suggested, should follow in the footsteps of his distant predecessor, Progressive Era lion Tom Johnson, and convene a new Group Plan Commission tasked with reconnecting the city’s public spaces. “I said, 'Mayor, we’ve let a lot of our public realm spaces go,'” Coyne recalls. “We keep taking about being a ‘green city on a blue lake,’ but we have to quit talking and get walking.” They should develop a new plan for Public Square, the Mall and link them to the lakefront, long detached from the city by rail and highways.
Jackson loved it.
“In Europe, I always noticed how they had these huge public spaces where people just hung out,” Jackson recalls. “I said, yeah, that’s a great idea Mr. Coyne, I support it. Now how do you want to do it?”
The result was a new commission made up of business and nonprofit leaders who, many months and public meetings later, recommended a three-pronged approach: enhance the Mall, build inviting pedestrian bridges over the highway to the waterfront and, most important, redesigning Public Square.
Mayor Jackson was adamant that it become a recreational space again. “I said I want you to eliminate all the streets and create one big park that’s pedestrian friendly,” Jackson says. “If you left it up to me, I would prohibit cars downtown altogether, because cars just mess up a city. But that was too radical, so my fallback would be this approach to Public Square.”
Previous traffic studies had suggested closing Superior and Ontario to traffic would be impractical and create major problems for the public bus system. But the commission ordered another study, one that didn’t subscribe to the conventional wisdom. Superior Avenue could be reduced to a bus-only, at-grade lane as it crossed the park and Ontario could be cut off entirely. This was a game-changer, says Zoller, whose group had been devising plans for Public Square since 2002 and managed the project for the commission. “This let James Corner Field Operations have a lot more freedom,” she says.
Corner’s design in hand, the community came together to raise the $50 million investment. The public-private partnership was a clear rejection of the business versus public battle that had dominated the debate since the early 1800s.
Philanthropic foundations contributed nearly $14 million, corporate entities more than $8 million, and the city issued $8 million in tax increment financing bonds. Private and city utility companies kicked in $15 million in water, electric, sewer, and broadband replacements and upgrades. The state provided the final $3.5 million last year to close a budget gap, ensuring it would be completed before the GOP convention.
“By bringing in the business leadership and the downtown civic organizations we were able to leverage additional resources,” says Jeremy Paris, the Group Plan’s executive director. “At a time when there isn’t as much federal infrastructure spending, smart cities have to take the reins and to address their infrastructure and growth priorities.”
Public Square officially reopened June 30 with a marching band and a performance by the cheerleaders of the Cleveland Cavaliers, whose NBA championship victory only days before has the entire city on a high. “Like the Cavaliers, Cleveland has come back in a serious way,” says Lee Fisher, who is taking a leave as president of CEOs for Cities to serve as interim dean of the Cleveland State University’s law school. “I think that’s one of the reasons the RNC chose to come here: they saw the plans for Public Square and they could see we believed in ourselves.”
“Cleveland,” he added, the morning after the Cavaliers’ thrilling June 19 championship victory, “really is Believe Land now.”