City of Cleveland Eyes Permanently Closing West 29th in Hingetown to Traffic. Businesses Have Concerns

West 29th Street in an undated photo. Credit: Google Maps

Last September, following years of political and technical hurdles, the City of Cleveland succeeded in its goal of permanently closing down Market Avenue in Ohio City to car traffic.

A sigh of relief came came for many: the tiny corridor filled with bars and restaurants would finally become the pedestrian street so many had envisioned it as. For good.

This week, the city announced its next target: West 29th in Hingetown.

On Monday, the Project For Public Spaces, a nonprofit based in Brooklyn, New York, revealed that the City Planning Commission was one of 89 applicants nationwide selected to get a $100,000 “placemaking” grant to study Hingetown’s main artery for street closure.

“As one of the few open public spaces in the neighborhood, this new public space would allow for greater informal interaction between neighbors, greater safety and protection from car traffic,” a statement on its website read, “more robust gathering space for the community to patronize local retail, and the opportunity to increase the tree canopy in a formerly redlined neighborhood that still suffers from a generational lack of trees and greenspace.”

The city has eyed Hingetown for a serious makeover into an “open street” since at least 2022, when it involved local businesses in the pursuit of amplifying the neighborhood’s potential.

That is, as PFPS’ Co-Executive Director Nate Storring told Scene in an email, “the potential and local capacity to transform this roadway into a place for the community.”

Such energy—or at least the vision of what West 29th, between Detroit and Clinton, could be—stems in part from temporary closures that have proved successful, including the Cleveland Museum of Art’s City Stages concerts.

“But that’s just two concerts in July,” Dean Rufus, the owner of Dean Rufus’ House of Fun on West 29th, told Scene in a phone call. (City Stages used to have four to five shows annually.) “Even if the street were shut down, like, six days a week, that’s not 365 days a year.”

“I’m annoyed by the whole thing,” he added. “Either way, there’s nothing I can do about it.”

City Stages returns to Hingetown Credit: Cleveland Museum of Art

Alex Budin, the owner of Jukebox up the block, said he was one of the numerous business owners the city reached out to in June of 2022 to gauge locals’ enthusiasm in the project.

After just hearing about PFPS’ grant “last week,” Budin is still doubtful that, like Market Avenue before it, pedestrianizing West 29th would be overall good for retail. The bulk of those concerns, he said, revolve around exactly what City Planning aims to do away with: the 20 or 30 on-street parking spaces up and down those two blocks.

Those, Budin argued, that Jukebox patrons, along with delivery trucks and DoorDash drivers, rely on regularly. As do, Budin added, Jukebox’s heated patio he’s sure to use “as early as October and as late as May.”

“That’s seven to eight months!” he said. “They’re talking about closing the street the whole time. I mean, I don’t know if there’s infrastructure to make West 29th hospitable for even half that time.”

As for other parking availabilty, the Church + State garage is less than a block off the street.

Though Budin, along with others in Hingetown feel like they’ve been “leapfrogged” by the city, the bar owner said he’s open to at least entertaining the result of City Planning’s study: “There’s some potential for some goodness there,” Budin said.

In a statement, a city spokesperson said: ““This announcement was strictly related to funding and not design. We made sure that we involved local businesses and adjacent property owners early on in this process and we will continue working with them and the community to ensure their concerns are heard and their input is considered into the overall design plan. We have received positive feedback ever since we made Market Avenue an Open Street concept – a similar project to this also in the Ohio City neighborhood.”

It’s likely that Planning’s eventual analysis of West 29th could follow the same approach as its Mobility Team did with Lorain Avenue to the south, where a two-mile long bike lane might be constructed by the end of the decade. As businesses there also lament, that include losing a quarter to half of the current on-street parking.

Storring pointed to open street projects in Baltimore, Detroit and New York, to show off perks, with traffic safety being the most obvious winner. And some raised property values, like after 34th Avenue in Queens was shut down to cars.

“The proof is in the pudding,” Storring said. But, “Of course, West 29th is its own place with its own community.”

Ironically enough, General Motors was the main sponsor of the grant money the city received.