CLEVELAND, Ohio -- After five years of planning and lining up funding, the rehabilitation of a stark, uninviting stretch of East 22nd Street in downtown Cleveland is nearing construction.

But first, style details of the $5.8 million project must be determined.

What kind of benches, pavers and planted boulevards should go in the nearly one-mile stretch between Euclid and Orange avenues?

Should seating be in wrought iron or undulating stone?

Will planted medians have trees surrounded by ornamental grass or raised flower-and-shrub beds?

Should decorative walks be made of brick or hexagonal grey pavers?

Representatives of the main institutions along the roadway are expected to decide those questions at a meeting next Tuesday. A hearing to get public input on the options was held earlier this month. URS Corporation is the design engineer.

The changes are aimed at refreshing and making more bike- and pedestrian-friendly a key avenue connecting Cleveland State University to the north with St. Vincent Charity Medical Center and Cuyahoga Community College to the south. In or near the corridor are more than 12,000 full-time employees, 26,000 students and 9,100 residents.

It's a street that today is "bleak and unappealing," a "harsh environment" with "sporadic landscaping," "decayed sidewalks" and "crumbling curbing," according to a 2011 analysis.

And it has but one small business, a corner store on nearby Cedar Avenue.

Rehabilitation of a 0.7-mile stretch of East 22nd Street in Cleveland is scheduled to start in March.

"The East 22nd Street project is really critical because it will help people cycle and walk," Bobbi Reichtell, executive director of Campus District Inc., said. "But it's also, I think, a seed for economic development.

"It's a neighborhood with a huge population living here and working here but no services for residents and employees. The thing I hear most from people is they want a coffeehouse. They want a restaurant."

Cleveland State University student Randy Bowling said classmates who live on campus rarely leave the university grounds, in part because there's nothing in the way of nearby restaurants or shops.

"This has the ability to break away from that mold," Bowling said of the revitalization project. "This will help show students that they really are members of the community."

CSU spokesman Kevin Ziegler said the streetscape "will enhance a thoroughfare adjacent to the Center for Innovation in Health Professions building, which is under construction. It should also add to the more than $500 million that Cleveland State University has invested in recent years to transform the campus."

Construction is set to begin in March on the corridor from Cleveland's Main Post Office on Orange Avenue to CSU's Rhodes Tower at Euclid Avenue. The work should be done by November 2015.

While finishing details are in flux, planners have already decided on major roadway changes.

East 22nd will be narrowed between Woodland and Central avenues to allow more room for benches, bike racks, decorative lighting and landscaping. Modifying the road will strike a better balance between motorized and non-motorized travelers, planners decided.

The street in this section will get a dedicated bike lane in each direction, with vehicle traffic reduced from three lanes each way to two.

The blocks between Carnegie and Euclid also will have bike lanes added on both sides, and bike racks, benches, vegetative buffer strips and decorative crosswalks installed. The southbound bike lane will be a "contraflow" pattern, against traffic, because the street is one way headed north.

Two other chunks of the East 22nd Street project -- from Central to Carnegie avenues and from Orange to Woodland -- will have minimal streetscaping because they're expected to be ripped up and rebuilt as part of the Ohio Department of Transportation's Inner Belt work.

These sections have dedicated bike lanes on only one side of the road and shared bike-vehicle lanes on the other. The advocacy group Bike Cleveland and Campus District Inc. are pushing for dedicated lanes in both directions. Stakeholders will take up that debate next week.

The Inner Belt work that affects East 22nd, part of the overall rebuilding of Interstate 90 in downtown Cleveland, is in "contract group three," with construction estimated to be from 2017 to 2021.

That means that one part of East 22nd that the 2011 study by City Architecture Inc. described as "visually obtrusive, disruptive and noisy" – where East 22nd crosses over the freeway -- will stay that way for a while.

"There's no cap involved in this project because there's significant work that's going to be done to the bridge," Reichtell said.

She was referring to an early hope that the bridge could be widened into a broad thoroughfare with a wide green passageway on the east side that would merge into a triangular pocket park. That plan has been dropped because it's too expensive at $8 million.

"The problem is there aren't really sources of money at that scale just for green space," Reichtell explained.

But Campus District Inc. has a fallback plan in which the bridge, when it's rebuilt, would have a more modest 16-foot-wide green boulevard along the east side, which would still do a lot to block out the sights and sounds of the cars roaring below the overpass.

The modified cap would cost $800,000 to $1 million and could be eligible for federal funding, Reichtell said.

The East 22nd Street project itself is being funded by the city of Cleveland and the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency.