CLEVELAND, Ohio - University Circle, the city's second downtown, is finally getting a skyline.

Developers Mitchell Schneider and Sam Petros held a "topping out" ceremony Tuesday for One University Circle, the 20-story, 267-unit apartment tower scheduled for completion in May at Euclid Avenue and Stokes Boulevard, the tallest building on the city's East Side.

Rising up to grab stunning views of Lake Erie and downtown skyscrapers four miles to the west, the luxury high-rise symbolizes the energy of University Circle, the square-mile cluster of medical, educational and cultural institutions that constitutes the city's second downtown.

Course reversal

It also highlights the 180-degree turn taken in recent years by University Circle Inc., or UCI, the nonprofit development corporation that has guided the district's growth, and which will mark its 60th anniversary Monday.

After having mowed down residential and commercial areas to make way for institutional expansion, UCI is working hard to revive the livability and street-level vitality that it erased in its early decades.

One University Circle is, literally, the highest expression of that aspiration to date. And it comes at a moment of rising momentum. The district has 8,000 residents, 15,000 students and, including the adjacent Cleveland Clinic, it has 42,000 jobs - 10,000 more than in 2005.

Gentrification fears

But the successes of UCI and University Circle have raised fresh concerns about whether growth could increase property values and real estate taxes in adjacent low-income and predominantly black neighborhoods of Hough, Fairfax and Glenville, displacing residents through gentrification.

Chris Ronayne, UCI's president since 2005, points out that displacement pressures in Cleveland, which has lost 60 percent of its population since 1950, pale in comparison to those of big coastal cities.

"We do need to be sensitive block by block toward pricing and to whether people can find affordable housing within walking distance of employment centers," he said. "But we are not yet Boston, we are not yet San Francisco."

Khrys Shefton, director of real estate at Famicos Foundation, based in Glenville, said that UCI, University Circle Institutions and developers should ensure that growth brings jobs and other benefits along with affordable housing, plus a sincere respect for the people and history of surrounding neighborhoods.

"If you make this about new people instead of people who already live there, then you're lost," she said. "Then you're talking about gentrification."

Good problems to have

University Circle and surrounding neighborhoods are lucky to face such challenges, said David Abbott, executive director of the Gund Foundation and president of UCI from 1998 to 2002.

"These are better problems to have than the problems of disinvestment, abandonment and departures that Cleveland has dealt with for decades," he said.

Whatever happens next, the One University Circle tower shows how development and wealth are flowing back into the city more than a century after the grandees of Millionaire's Row on Euclid Avenue departed in a huff over taxes and commercial development.

Reaching that inflection point has been a saga for UCI.

Founded in 1957, the foundation that later became UCI grew out of philanthropist Elizabeth Ring Mather's passion for assembling land and anchoring University Circle institutions in place as white flight and suburban sprawl were heating up.

History of bulldozing

But the forerunner of UCI wiped out residential areas and the lively, if gritty entertainment district along East 105th Street established by black entrepreneur Winston Willis.

The development corporation and the city also had streets redesigned with the automobile in mind, creating a public realm whose dullness undercut the vibrancy of institutions including the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Cleveland Orchestra.

Despite offering educational programs that reached tens of thousands of Cleveland schoolchildren, UCI and member institutions left the area feeling walled off from surrounding high-poverty black neighborhoods.

University Circle was "a smashing success" in providing for institutional expansion, Ronayne said. "But, through another lens," he asked, "what was smashed along the way to make that happen?"

UCI changed course in 2000 under Abbott's leadership.

"We recommended making a complete neighborhood out of University Circle instead of just an institutional neighborhood," he said.

Strategic projects

UCI carried out that mission on Ronayne's watch in part by leasing or selling nine key parcels - mostly used for surface parking - to leverage important new projects.

Those included the $116 million One University Circle tower, plus Uptown, the eight-acre, $150 million-plus redevelopment at Euclid Avenue and Mayfield Road that includes more than 150 apartments, plus the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, the expanded Cleveland Institute of Art, and associated dorms.

Impact of transit

Meanwhile, UCI benefited hugely from the $200 million Euclid Avenue bus rapid transit HealthLine installed by the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority in 2008.

For example, it piggybacked on the RTA project, using matching grants from the Kent H. Smith Charitable Trust to raise $14 million to improve public spaces with lighting, landscaping, signs and way-finding maps.

For their part, University Circle institutions and the nearby Cleveland Clinic poured more than $4 billion into the area over the past 20 years, with projects including major expansions at the Clinic and University Hospitals, and the $320 million expansion and renovation of the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Another $1.3 billion worth of projects is planned or scheduled for completion in the next two years or beyond.

The Cleveland Foundation contributed its Greater University Circle Initiative, which engaged institutions in housing assistance for area employees, plus purchasing from employee-owned coops that provide laundry services, produce and solar installations.

Inequality persists, but for Ronayne, UCI's 60th anniversary is a moment to savor as University Circle rebuilds itself as a neighborhood - and strives to heal the breach with its neighbors.

"We're building back what you see in the pictures of the early 1900s," he said. "University Circle isn't just a district, it's a community."