There is no scarcity of sports to watch pretty much any night of the week in Downtown Cleveland. You can see the Monsters play hockey, the Cavs or Charge shoot hoops, the Guardians run the bases, the Browns go 5-16.
But as far as playing any kind of sport in the open air, for free, Downtown is severely lacking. Its ten public parks or green spaces—Perk Plaza, Voinovich Park, Settlers Landing, Public Square, Willard Park, Canal Basin and Malls A, B and C—have no places for people to play the sports that Clevelanders routinely pay hundreds of dollars to experience professionally just blocks away.
That is, until this June, when Downtown will welcome its first public sports amenity in the decade since the 2016 Republican National Convention.
On Friday, the City Planning Commission moved designs forward for a Cavs-themed basketball court to be built on the green space off Huron and Ontario, known as Meet Me Here Plaza.
Paid for with a $750,000 grant from the state, the court is a collaboration between Bedrock, Downtown Cleveland, Inc., and the city in a bid to celebrate the city’s most momentous sports win—that 2016 championship grab—in the past half century.
And to build what DCI president Michael Deemer called, during Friday’s meeting, an “ideal location for development of a play area.”
“Our vision for Downtown Cleveland is one that’s a safe, connected, active, growing space,” he said. “It’s really to say that [this] placemaking is a driver for economic development.” (DCI declined to comment to Scene in a text message on Friday afternoon.)
Economic development that seems to be happening regardless of a new outdoor basketball court, one with a 2016-era court design, new trees and paver plazas, benches for expected spectators.
And mostly by Bedrock. Along with its Cavs Global Peak Performance Center to be opened soon, the Detroit-based company is planning to break ground on a new music venue, Cosm, an immersive indoor entertainment venue, and, one assumes, at least some of its Riverfront neighborhood before the end of the decade.
But Meet Me Here’s court is the only amentity that, at least for now, won’t cost Clevelanders a dime to use. That court would join just two other free-to-use sports-related amenities nearby: the volleyball and bocce courts at Voinovich Park.
Those deficiencies were made clear by the city’s latest park plan. Downtown, it says, is a “civic park district” meant more for citywide gathering than it is a neighborhood spot to chase a ball around. While a third of Downtowners believed there were enough parks within walking distance of their homes, the plan’s survey found none of them felt that there were enough spots nearby for recreation.
Hopefully, that will change come June, when the public Cavs-themed court is built, as plans reveal.
As for security and curfew, the court most likely will follow the procedure of Cleveland’s neighborhood parks, which make lingering there after 11 p.m. a potential misdemeanor. (Save for events.)
But, as CPC planner Dan Shinkle said on Friday, the success of a basketball court across the street from Rocket Arena could spell good things for the link to the lakefront—at Public Square, to the Malls, to whatever park space might end up in the North Coast final design.
“We really hope this is the first of many opportunities to continue to expand a playful, kind of family-friendly, kids-oriented downtown,” Shinkle said.
“I think this will really take us to the 21st century as a city,” he added.
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