Credit: Sam Allard / Scene
RTA announced Monday that due to the military lockdown in downtown and Ohio City, (the so-called “curfew zones”), Tower City Station — the city’s largest transit hub — will be closed through Tuesday. The curfew is currently scheduled to expire at 8 p.m.

All downtown bus traffic is being re-routed around downtown in order to comply with the curfew, which forbids existing outdoors for all but a few exempt categories of people. Even residents are supposed to remain indoors, though they have been theoretically permitted — assuming the right cops got the right memo — to enter and exit the curfew zones for emergency errands or whathaveyou.

Justin Bibb, an RTA board member, called the city’s actions “not acceptable” yesterday. He noted, as others have, that he had no groceries at home and was terrified of facing arrest if he left his residence.


Portions of the curfew zone are high-poverty areas, and included multiple senior housing facilities. Many of these residents have limited or no access to vehicles. Eliminating public transit during the “curfew” does real harm to these people.

The RTA’s main office also happens to be in the downtown curfew zone. The transit authority’s employees are working remotely today, (though most of the office workers likely already were due to COVID-19). More importantly, Tower City and its customer service center is closed. 

All west side buses are terminating at the Red Line West 25th Street Station, and all east side buses are terminating at Tri-C Metro Campus. In a statement, RTA said that to access crosstown trips, customers may travel on the Red Line between the East 34th Street Campus Station and the West 25th Street Station.

What a disaster.

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This article appears in May 27 – Jun 2, 2020.

Sam Allard is a former senior writer at Scene.

7 replies on “Tower City Station Still Closed for Cleveland Curfew, All Bus Traffic Rerouted Around Downtown”

  1. Military lockdown? Interesting choice of words. Is Sam Allard trying to distort the truth?
    The truth is that the Democratic political leaders of Cleveland and Cuyahoga County are really in charge, and the Ohio Army National Guard is just helping the Cleveland City Government out after Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson requested its help.
    The curfew was ordered by Democratic and African-American Mayor Frank Jackson, not the Ohio Army National Guard.

  2. Scene is a big fan of vandalism, arson, and looting — of other people’s property, of course.

  3. Man, wtf would Scene do without the “plight of poor brown people” to exploit?

  4. Do you know what else is a disaster, is the completely incompetent Democrat leadership of this corruption-filled dump of a city and county!!!

    Until crooks like Taxin Jackson, and his cohort thief Budish are finally, and forcibly, removed from office, nothing will likely ever change around here except paying more and more taxes for more and more of their ineptness!!!

  7. so Sam allard and his antifa friends smash burn and tag up all of downtown. They riled up the black youth to loot the businesses including the 1 grocery store down here. We who live down here have to go through checkpoints with papers to get in and out. And HE IS COMPLAINING?!?! Him and his friends did this to us. Theyre still twisting the story and continuing this charade of protest/riots.

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