As Cleveland Welcomes the International Downtown Conference, Waterfront Potential Takes the Spotlight

Hundreds of members of the International Downtown Association are gathering in Downtown Cleveland this week, for the IDA’s first major conference here in its 14 years. Credit: Mark Oprea

They came from Chattanooga, St. Paul, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Tokyo and South Africa.

All for pretty much one reason: to see if Downtown Cleveland was anything to write home about.

For the first time in the organization’s 14-year history, the International Downtown Association is hosting its first major conference event in Cleveland, which kicked off Wednesday and continues through the weekend.

Working in close collaboration with Downtown Cleveland, Inc., the three-day brainstorm aims to tackle, with hundreds of city center lovers in attendance, the best way to connect the parts that compose the whole.

An answer embedded in the conference name: Place Matters.

“We’ve really seen this coming out of the pandemic,” Drew Crawford, senior director of planning for DCI, said leading a group of 22 from the Rock Hall to Voinovich Park on Wednesday afternoon. “People want social interactions. They want to live in places that people want to be.”

Crawford, along with a small team from DCI, spent three hours on Wednesday boasting to conference attendees about Downtown’s latest development successes as he stood in front of construction cranes or poster boards—near the Rock Hall’s expansion, the future site of North Coast Yards and atop the hillside soon to host Irishtown Bend Park.

This week’s conference is the first ever IDA event in Cleveland. Credit: Mark Oprea

But Wednesday’s waterfront tour acted as almost a therapy session for the native Clevelanders tagging along: a chance to tell the crowd of urbanists that we may finally be developing our lakefront once and for all.

“Cleveland has had 17 prior lakefront plans going back to 1900, and we’re hoping this is our last,” Jessica Trivisonno, Bibb’s advisor on major projects, told the group of 22 on the second floor of Nuevo. “And we really think that we can make that the case.”

The North Coast Connector, that land bridge set to link Mall C with Huntington Bank Field, will cost $280 million, $130 million of which was slated to come from the feds, as per a 2023 grant from Biden’s Department of Transportation.

But 2025 is a much different year. Since January, President Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency has cut, or is planning to cut, millions of dollars for cities and the services that allow them to run somewhat smoothly—from food banks to tree commissions to community development corporations.

Trivisonno said Cleveland’s lakefront project isn’t one of them. The DOT’s $130 million is still coming, she said, meaning construction’s still lined up to start in 2027.

“They are clearing the backlog from the Biden administration,” Trivisonno said, “and will get these grants signed quickly.”

Before any bike lanes are put in, and the Shoreway’s converted to a boulevard, the city will be installing a temporary hangout on the parking lot north of Huntington Bank Field, called North Coast Yards.

Zoe Toscos, the director of project management for the North Coast Waterfront Development Corporation, said that spot, with its lakeside deck and shipping container eateries, will have its grand opening on June 13. It will close down early November.

Other U.S. downtowns with waterfronts—Seattle, New York, Chicago—did something along the same lines, Toscos said, before cranes came in and rebuilt permanent space, along Puget Sound or Lake Michigan.

“We don’t want folks to come down and say, okay, you earned $150 million, and this is all you did with it was put up some shipping containers,” she said. “This is an iteration.”

Outside, Crawford took the 22 trailing him across the Voinovich Green. Heads craned to spot byplanes taking off from Burke Lakefront Airport, or to snap photos of the KeyBank Tower in the distance.

And, of course, the construction starting at North Coast Yards. Construction getting rid of what seems a past signifier for Downtown’s strained history with the automobile.

“I mean, every park started as a dusty parking lot,” Jane Rossman, a planner from New York City, told Scene gazing out beyond the S.S. William G. Mather. “You know Brooklyn Bridge Park? Same story.”

Joe Spencer, who helps run the St. Paul Downtown Alliance, was trailing in a similar kind of attitude: hope for a city’s downtown that he was visiting for the first time.

“I think it’s great, actually,” he said. “With a city that’s suffered so much population loss? It’s amazing where it’s at today.”