CLEVELAND, Ohio - Simultaneous meetings scheduled for Thursday evening on opposite sides of town will sketch the latest visions aimed at uniting the city with its greatest geographic asset - Lake Erie.

At 6 p.m. at Ariel International Center, 1163 East 40th St., planners engaged by the city and a trio of East Side community development corporations will unveil new plans for a seven-mile recreational loop along the North and South Marginal roads near downtown, next to the Shoreway and just inboard of Burke Lakefront Airport.

At the same time, Ward 15 Councilman Matt Zone and Cudell Improvement Inc. will host a public meeting at Louisa May Alcott School, 10308 Baltic Road, at which the Ohio Department of Transportation will share details on upcoming improvements and reconstruction along the West Shoreway.

Taken together, the two meetings represent the latest updates on efforts to address the reality that Cleveland has walled itself off from the lake for decades with highways, railroads and other uses including industrial docks and the airport.

Momentum on the lakefront

Other lakefront planning and development efforts now underway also include:

- Cuyahoga County's $25 million project to build an iconic pedestrian bridge from the downtown Mall over the Shoreway and waterfront railroad lines to North Coast Harbor by 2017.

- Developer Richard Pace's feasibility analysis of developing housing, retail, a school, a hotel and other uses on more than 20 acres of the downtown waterfront around North Coast Harbor and FirstEnergy Stadium.

- An effort by the city, the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority, Greyhound and Amtrak to design an intermodal transit hub on the lakefront east of East Ninth Street, next to the North Point Garage.

Neither of the Thursday meetings will present a big-picture analysis of everything that's going on along the lakefront. Instead, they'll zoom in on efforts to humanize and soften the Shoreway, a traditional barrier to lakefront access.

Lakefront west

The West Shoreway project, long in the making, will transform the 50 mph West Side thoroughfare into a tree-lined, 35 mph boulevard with stronger linkages between Edgewater Park and the Detroit Shoreway neighborhood to the south via enhanced pedestrian tunnels.

A lush rendering by City Architecture shows what the West Shoreway will look like after a $40 million project designed by ODOT.

The ODOT District 12 website states that work on that project begins the week starting Monday, June 1, with off-peak closures in both directions on Clifton Avenue and the Main Avenue Bridge.

The $40 million project includes replacement of paving between Lake Avenue/Clifton Boulevard and the Main Avenue Bridge, including the ramps to and from West Boulevard, according to ODOT's website.

The project will also add an eastbound exit ramp off the Shoreway to West 73rd Street and Edgewater Park.

A multipurpose trail will be added in along the West Shoreway from West Boulevard to West 28th Street.

Lakefront east

On the East Side, the new plans, still in the conceptual stage, call for replacing crumbling sidewalks along the North and South Marginal rads with a sinuous, 10-foot-wide multipurpose pathway, set back at least 6 feet from the curb.

The plan, called the Lakefront Greenway and Downtown Connector Study, also calls for closing nearly a mile of North Marginal Road to traffic west of Quay 55 and turning it into a linear park next to the airport. Although closed to traffic, the trail would be available to emergency vehicles.

A rendering of the proposed of a proposed recreational loop on Cleveland's North Marginal Road.

The overall loop would be connected to the St. Clair-Superior neighborhood, just to the south, with a new pedestrian bridge over the I-90 portion of the Shoreway at East 40th Street, where Kirtland Park was severed from the water when the highway was built.

Additional connections would be available via existing bridges at East 18th and East 55th streets.

Other suggestions in the plan include eliminating the westbound ramp from Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. to the Shoreway in favor of enhanced Shoreway access via Lake Shore Boulevard and a new roundabout at West 72nd Street.

Those changes would significantly increase acreage of green space on the lakefront and improve safety, planners said.

Also at Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., the study suggests completing a bike path connection beneath the I-90 (Shoreway) overpass with new lighting and paving, and formally completing a trail that extends south along the boulevard into Shaker Heights, following the course of Doan Brook.

A pragmatic vision

The East Side plan isn't a sweeping vision, as its planners readily acknowledge. Nor is it likely to be as costly as the West Shoreway plan.

"We're trying to balance being realistic and having a nice vision of what this could and should be, while working within the realities of this kind of project," said Michelle Johnson, a senior planner with Akron-based Environmental Design Group, which collaborated on the East Side plan with the Cleveland office of Michael Baker International.

The greenway and connector study doesn't call for closing Burke Lakefront Airport and developing it or turning it into a park - ideas that Mayor Frank Jackson opposes.

Nor does it call for the pie-in-the-sky, wildly expensive notion of burying the Shoreway and lakefront railroad lines in a tunnel.

Instead, the idea is to create a pragmatic and affordable near-term way to increase public activity on the lakefront, which could lead to bigger things in the future.

"We are all about getting this sucker built," said Bobbi Reichtell, executive director of the nonprofit Campus District Inc., which collaborated on the $93,000 study along with the St. Clair Superior Development Corp., the Historic Warehouse District and the city of Cleveland.

Thursday's meeting is the last of a series on the lakefront east proposal before it goes to the city's Planning Commission for approval, and before the sponsors hit the road to seek funding.

"If there were big objections, we'd regroup," Reichtell said, while emphasizing that public input so far, not to mention previous planning efforts, suggest that the plan is ready to realize.

Moving ahead



The next steps, Reichtell said, include coming up with detailed cost estimates, which should be available Thursday, along with a plan to seek construction money from sources including the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency, and various state and federal programs.

The plans themselves were developed with $75,000 through NOACA's Transportation for Livable Communities Initiative and $18,000 from the city.

The lakefront projects on both sides of the city represent efforts to realize portions of the Waterfront District Plan of 2004, the biggest lakefront planning effort in a half-century.

Developed during the administration of former Mayor Jane Campbell, the waterfront plan sketched a broad vision for city's entire nine-mile shoreline.

Collectively, the two efforts under consideration Thursday, plus the others underway, represent fresh momentum in the long-running effort to bring the bigger lakefront vision to fruition.

"I think where we're heading is really important," Reichtell said of the East Side study, in words that could be applied to all the lakefront efforts, taken as a whole.