MKSK NWT plaza.png

A new master plan for the Gordon Square Arts District calls for improvements including vibrant landscaping and new public art and retail to activate a plaza in front of the new Near West Theater at West 67th Street and Detroit Avenue.

(MKSK)

CLEVELAND, Ohio - The city's planning commission on Friday endorsed a new master plan for the future of the Gordon Square Arts District aimed at expanding the neighborhood's success as a nationally acclaimed example of arts-based economic development.

Gordon Square's revival has been based on highly coordinated public and private investments in theater renovations, streetscapes and public amenities.

The new, 112-page planning document (visible at the bottom of this post) calls for additional streetscape improvements on Detroit Avenue, development of outdoor public gathering areas, better use of existing surface parking lots with signs and "way-finding" information, and other recommendations.

Detroit Avenue, shown here in November, 2014, looking east from the roof of the Gordon Square Arcade at West 65th Street, is seen in a new master plan as the culture spine of Cleveland's West Side, based on growth generated by earlier investments in neighborhood cultural attractions and streetscapes.

The new plan represents the next stage of thinking about Gordon Square, which earlier this year completed a six-year, $30 million capital campaign that has fueled a local renaissance.

The campaign, which included corporate, foundation and private donations, along with $9.5 million in public funds, paid for streetscape improvements on Detroit Avenue, plus renovations to Cleveland Public Theatre and the Capitol Theatre, and construction of a new Near West Theatre.

As a result of those investments - and the arts programming they encouraged - new businesses, residents and visitors have flowed into the area centered on the historic Gordon Square Arcade at West 65th Street and Detroit Avenue.

"Nearly a billion dollars of investment is happening in this neighborhood," Councilman Matt Zone, who represents Detroit Shoreway and its Gordon Square cultural node, told the planning commission Friday.

"We've created over 600 new jobs since 2006 and generated $4 million in income taxes."

Zone singled out the City of Cleveland's 2009 investment of $3.5 million in streetscape improvements from West 58th to West 73rd Street on Detroit Avenue "as this little bit of leverage" that stimulated strong private investment along the avenue.

A key tenet of the new master plan, developed by the Columbus-based design firm of MKSK, is that of extending the streetscape improvements - including lighting, greenery, signage, and public art - east and west of the core Gordon Square area.

The idea is to more firmly connect the arts district to the Creative Studios gallery complex north of Detroit Avenue at West 78th Street, and to the burgeoning Hingetown area, centered on Church and Detroit Avenues at West 29th Street in Ohio City.

Zone said that Mayor Frank Jackson has already committed $1.6 million to the streetscape extension idea, but that more private money needs to be raised.

The plan also calls for stronger connections to Edgewater Park just north of the district on the Lake Erie shoreline.

A new master plan for the Gordon Square Arts District developed by Columbus-based MKSK calls for improved signage, public art and landscaping to encourage pedestrians to use existing tunnels at West 65th and 76th Streets to cross beneath the Norfolk Southern rail tracks that separate the neighborhood from Edgewater Park on Lake Erie to the north.

Along with better signage, the plan recommends new lighting or public art to improve the dark interiors of pedestrian tunnels at West 65th and West 76th streets that burrow under the lakefront Norfolk Southern railroad tracks to connect Edgewater Park to Detroit Shoreway.

In addition, the plan recommends building high-density residential and retail development on the sites of Max Hayes High School at West 45th Street and Detroit Avenue and Watterson-Lake Elementary at West 74th Street, soon to be closed by the Cleveland Metropolitan School District.

Entrepreneur Sean Watterson, co-owner of the Happy Dog neighborhood bar and offbeat cultural mecca at 5801 Detroit Avenue, described the plan as part of an effort to turn the avenue into the cultural spine of the city's West Side.

"We see Detroit from West 25th to West 78th as an arts corridor where art is being made, and as a complement to University Circle, where it's going to be displayed."

As if to underscore the rising interest in Detroit Avenue shown by developers, Vintage Development Group, in a separate item on the commission's agenda, presented a plan for a 60-unit apartment building at 3219 Detroit Ave.

With apartments ranging from 650 to 1,500 square feet, the six-story building is designed to capture views north to Lake Erie and to engender vitality along the avenue, said Cleveland architect Dominick Durante of LDA Architects, designer of the project.

The building will replace Club Cleveland, a modern-style bathhouse that had catered to gay men, and that had closed and grown dilapidated in recent years.

"You need to have higher density projects to get people out on the street, to make it a walkable community that supports restaurants and retail and all the things you want to walk to from your house," Durante said after the commission's unanimous vote to approve his apartment design.

Durante's vision aligned strikingly with prescriptions in the MKSK plan for Detroit Shoreway, and with Zone's and Watterson's visions of Detroit Avenue as a cultural Main Street for the West Side.

A view of West 67th Street looking north from the roof of the Gordon Square Arcade emphasizes the proximity of the Gordon Square Arts District to Edgewater Park and the Lake Erie shoreline. A new master plan for the district stresses the importance of emphasizing the neighborhood's lakefront location.

During the discussion about the master plan, commission member Lillian Kuri encouraged Zone and officials from the nonprofit corporation managing Gordon Square to consider asking the city to build a parking garage in the neighborhood similar to one operated by Cleveland Heights in its Coventry retail district.

Zone said that with 500 parking spaces in existing surface lots, Gordon Square could meet current needs and does not want to encourage demolishing additional buildings to make way for parking.

In fact, the plan instead encourages development of new buildings on existing vacant lots along Detroit to create a greater sense of community cohesion and activity.

Zone said the district studied whether to build a 300-space garage, which could have cost $7 million to $11 million, but concluded that demand does not yet exist.

"We're not at the saturation point where we can charge the types of appropriate revenue to pay down debt service" on a garage, he said.

Jennifer Coleman, a member of the commission, also suggested that the planners may want to consider having a new arts-themed high school built in the neighborhood in the future to connect the area's artistic and cultural strengths to educational opportunities.

Doing so would encourage families to settle for the long haul in Gordon Square and Detroit Shoreway, she said.

"We think you are right-on," Zone said.

A new master plan for the Gordon Square Arts District developed by Columbus-based MKSK calls for extending streetscape improvements made along Detroit Avenue in the core of the district to areas that lie to the east and west.

But he said he completely backs the notion of using the Max Hayes and Watterson-Lake sites for housing and retail - not as new schools in the near future.

Summing up her views on the plan, Kuri said: "it's fabulous" as an example of how Cleveland neighborhoods re-emerging after decades of decline are in a position to connect to one another, erasing areas of blight that separate them.

"This represents a moment for Cleveland," she said. "This next phase for Cleveland is about a connected city where all the entrepreneurs and artists and innovators are connecting the fabric of the city."