Lakefront Project Plans Come Into Focus as North Coast Master Plan Team Completes Second Listening Tour

The Cleveland Planning Commission narrowed down aspects of what will be a master blueprint for the future of Cleveland’s lakefront with its final feedback session for the North Coast on Thursday.

A sort of sequel to the initial engagement sessions held last November, May’s meetings followed a similar philosophy in fine-tuning what James Corner Field Operations, the New York-based design firm hired to present a master plan to Mayor Bibb, may end up delivering. Final plans are due to City Hall by the end of 2023.

And, based on the feedback of hundreds of Clevelanders, along with traffic limitations encountered along the way, the planning commission crossed out two ideas for what the North Coast Connector—the elusive land bridge, in other terms—may actually be when it’s finally built.

Renderings showing plausible options for the Shoreway’s probable conversion into a boulevard. Credit: North Coast / Cleveland Planning Commission

That is, the Shoreway will stay, and most likely be converted into a 35 MPH boulevard, with a grass median, extending from West 3rd to East 18th.

Joyce Pan Huang, director of city planning, in her introductory speech to the 80 attendees on Thursday’s Zoom call, echoed Bibb’s all-inclusive premise about the North Coast, the blanket name for the city-owned area of land that stretches from Cleveland Browns Stadium to the western edge of I-71.

And when it comes down to what the North Coast should be, Clevelanders, Huang said, know best.

“For over 100 years, we’ve made plans to better connect with the lakefront, and we are really looking to make this the very last plan,” Huang said. “We believe we have the opportunity to realize those dreams and bridge these divides. [While we have] design experts and engineering experts, we also believe that you’re experts, you’re residents, you live on the lakefront.”

Besides eliminating the possibilities of removing the Shoreway entirely, or doing “nothing,” this round’s surveying of hundreds of participants marked the CPC’s preparation for the North Coast Master Plan, a blueprint for actual activities and usage of land that’s long been dormant or inaccessible.

Although opinions were highly scattered, 80 percent of the participants said they simply wanted glorified, lakefront parkland—places to “walk, bike, roll, explore, sit and relax.”

The prospects have clearly inspired James Corner Field Operations.

Lisa Switkin, an architect for James Corner who helped design New York’s famous High Line, said that her design firm was tapping multi-city case studies—like Chicago’s River Walk and the 11th Street Bridge in Washington, D.C.—to show attendees what the land north of Mall C could look like. A dense data map that layered two decades of failure to launch lakefront plans, from the 2011 Browns proposal to the city’s 2021 “Lakefront Vision,” showed how planning dreams overlapped. (Mostly parking and shopping.)

Switkin’s assessment, which we be refined in tandem with the city’s, boils down, it seems, to what the lakefront’s pined for all along: better transit connectors, more bike lanes, actual shopping or restaurants of some sort, and no more ugly parking lots that eat up 1,600 feet of Lake Erie’s edge.

“We want this to be a place of joy. We want people to come down and almost feel like it’s their backyard,” Switkin said.

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