CLEVELAND, Ohio — It’s been obvious for years to commercial real estate broker and dedicated jogger Conor Coakley that Cleveland should have a 3-mile recreational loop connecting the Ohio City neighborhood to downtown via bridges over the Cuyahoga River.
With skyline views and vistas of the Flats along the river, such a route would be a handsome amenity for a Midwest industrial city striving for revitalization.
Last year, Coakley and a team of volunteer executives and architects associated with the nonprofit group Leadership Cleveland unveiled a proposal showing how such a loop could be created at relatively low cost, in part by re-striping Huron Road behind Tower City Center to create a track for cyclists and runners.
But a recently completed $13 million repaving project omitted a bike path, leaving a 2,200-foot-long gap on the east side of the river between paths that now traverse the Detroit-Superior and Lorain-Carnegie bridges.