With First Master Plan in Decades, Campus District Hopes to Spur Development, Establish Neighborhood Identity

The Campus District may be the most disjointed neighborhood in Cleveland’s city center.

There’s the array of strip clubs and cheap artist housing on the northern edge, along Hamilton Avenue. You have the bite-sized, gilded block that is Old Chinatown. There’s an industrial row along Superior, then Cleveland State to the south, Euclid Avenue’s swath of bars and college cafés, then Tri-C and public housing in Central on the southern edge. And series of ultra-wide streets in-between.

That scattered nature is something that Campus District director Mark Lammon wants badly to change.

This week, after almost a year and a half of planning, Lammon and the district started promoting a 150-page Campus District Master Plan, an extensive document that they hope to will steer about a dozen streets downtown into a more cohesive neighborhood in the next decade.

The plan is far-reaching in how it aims to do that: plant more trees; put up new signage; modernize the area’s “outdated” zoning code; construct at least ten new parks and parklets; revamp a dusty streetscape with new benches, trash cans, light poles, public restrooms and café seating.

A refreshed Campus District image and brand, in other words.

“I mean, the neighborhood was originally called The Quadrangle; there are still signs up that say ‘Quadrangle’ and others that say ‘Campus District’,” Lammon told Scene. “We have multiple types of way-finding because the identity of the neighborhood’s continuously changed.”

The northern end of the Campus District is a swath of vacant-seeming industrial buildings with streets seeing little foot traffic. A master plan hopes to add more apartment units and mixed-use development to the area in general. Credit: Mark Oprea

“A lot of it’s already up,” Lammon said. “It’s just getting the branding all uniform and in place.”

What was nearly decimated during the Urban Renewal of the 1950s and 1960s, and the winding of I-90 through the area, was virtually kept intact when Cleveland State grew along Euclid Avenue in the following decades. As businesses shifted north and south, the area chiseled itself into a neighborhood built around CSU. The Campus District moniker was officially adopted in the 2010s.

But the area’s been slow to grow despite marking an identity. A vast majority of the district’s buildings outside of CSU are 50-plus years old. And from 2010 to 2020, despite CSU’s enrollment growth, the Campus District saw a population climb of just 51 people, the study found.

So, what will new bike lanes and benches accomplish? The Superior Midway, a two-and-a-half-mile, center-lane bike track that will slice through Campus District North, is slated to break ground later this year. A makeover Lammon hopes to see replicated along East 22nd St., in a project currently dubbed The Campus Trail.

The aim is similar to Downtown Cleveland, Inc.’s playbook for Downtown as a whole: improve the streetscape, modernize the zoning, build new houses and—ideally—new business and ground-floor retail will follow. An ambitious housing goal includes building 1,000 new units in a ten-year span.

Which people really want. In a survey Lammon helped carry out last year, a combined 29 percent of respondents said “retail” and “business” should be priority number one of the Campus District Master Plan. (Mostly new grocery stores and bakeries.)

“You know, I’m not expecting like a high-end, Michigan Avenue fashion district to pop up,” Lammon said. “I just don’t think that’s possible.”

“But really, retail to support daily life,” he said, “I think is really what we’re aiming for.”

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