The purpose of the Cleveland Harbor Coast Guard Station Rehabilitation Study was to provide a comprehensive strategy to restore and reuse the existing building and site. Through a detailed facility conditions assessment and interaction with stakeholders and the community, possibilities for programmatic and development opportunities were explored. These discoveries led to three alternative schemes to save the Coast Guard Station which represent three different levels of intervention. Each scheme reaches beyond the site plans and delves into what each option entails, what needs to happen to make it work and the advantages and disadvantages that are inherent to each alternative. By exploring and revealing various options in a comprehensive manner, this study responds to a number of situations and opportunities that face the site today and in the future. The main element that remains constant throughout the three schemes is the creation of a public destination that integrates history, nature and education through a historic landmark.
Where previously there was only water, there is now a curiously raised parcel of land, over twenty feet above Lake Erie, roughly square with a pointed “beak” at its northwest corner. Dike 14’s eighty-eight acres began its own self-regeneration and has been evolving with little human intervention.
The Master Plan both protects the most critical natural areas of the site and leverages their opportunities into a public landscape that offers many types of experience with nature within urbanized Cleveland. Above all the Master Plan has been developed to be inclusive of all citizens and stakeholder interests and represents the accommodation and compromise of stakeholders’ interests when they were not coincident or in conflict. The Master Plan accommodates as many of the public’s desired uses and appropriately scales them so that they do not damage the site’s most valuable collection of habitats. It has been developed with a focus on balancing various values: ecological systems, user needs, costs, safety, and maintenance capabilities.
Learn more on the Cleveland City Planning Commission website.
Federal funding has been secured to develop an iconic pedestrian bridge linking the finger pier from Dock 32 and the southwest corner of Voinovich Park fully connecting the existing waterside promenade around North Coast Harbor.
To learn more about the bridge project, check out this page on the Cleveland City Planning Commission website.
On April 20, 2012 the City Planning Commission approved the Cleveland Downtown Lakefront Plan to guide mixed-use commercial development of the waterfront between West 3rd and East 18th Streets. Specifically, it proposes redevelopment strategies for three areas of the downtown lakefront: Harbor West, North Coast Harbor and Burke Development District.
For more information on the 2012 Downtown Lakefront Plan, please visit the Cleveland City Planning Commission website.
In 2014, Mayor Jackson selected a joint venture of Trammell Crow Company and Cumberland Development, LLC to be the developer of the North Coast Harbor.
The plan creates a vibrant mixed-use neighborhood. The project will add over 1,000 apartments and 80,000 SF of office and 50,000 SF of retail space to the city’s central business district. The neighborhood will also have a high quality school to attract young professionals who want to stay in the city to raise their families.
The development has been approved by Cleveland City Council for the 20+ acre site, situated around North Coast Harbor and north of the Cleveland Browns’ stadium. The area formerly comprised docks for the Cleveland-Cuyahoga County Port Authority.
Learn more on the Cleveland City Planning Commission website.
On December 17, 2004, The Cleveland City Planning Commission adopted “Connecting Cleveland: The Waterfront District Plan,” a comprehensive planning effort that was begun in April 2002 by Mayor Jane L. Campbell and the Cleveland Lakefront Partners to develop a community consensus for the future of eight miles of Lake Erie shoreline between Edgewater Park and Gordon Park. This milestone effort, representing the culmination of a thirty-two month planning process, evolved from an infrastructure reclamation study, which scrutinized the possibility of taking back what the Cleveland Memorial Shoreway had blocked from the Lakefront neighborhoods – connectivity. This study proposed the decommissioning of a high speed roadway and replacing it with a pedestrian-scaled boulevard that once again would engage the neighborhoods to Lake Erie.
Read more about the plan on the Cleveland City Planning Commission website.
A Strategic Guide to Connect Eastern Cuyahoga County
The Eastside Greenway Plan is a multi-jurisdictional greenway and non-motorized planning study in eastern Cuyahoga County, Ohio. The study examines existing and potential greenways across the region that can better connect residents to jobs, recreation, services, commercial centers, and natural resources through enhanced multi-modal facilities.
The study is a significant opportunity for coordinating greenway connectivity across municipal boundaries and developing a system of greenways that have regional significance.
To learn more, please check out this September 18, 2015 Eastside Greenway Plan pdf on the County Planning website.
This April 28, 2015 article by Steven Litt of The Plain Dealer, “Three finalists chosen in national design competition to improve areas below the Main Avenue Bridge” covers a national competition held by the Downtown Cleveland Alliance. Three finalists were announced from a field of 51 landscape architecture firms in a project to beautify the portion of the Flats beneath the Main Avenue Bridge.
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his September 20, 2017 article by Steven Litt of The Plain Dealer covers the pedestrian bridge as proposed by Boston architect Miguel Rosales. The Rosales bridge design would take advantage of the area just north of the Mall. It would fly over railroads and the Shoreway, touching the ground at one point with a V-shaped tower that would support a majestic array of cables and a curved, 900-foot-long walkway. The design would theoretically leave a great deal of land optn for development around the bridge’s central tower.
