CLEVELAND, Ohio - Ann Zoller, one of the most influential park advocates and planners in the city's modern history, will soon step down after five years as director of the nonprofit LAND Studio, which managed the recent transformations of Public Square and Perk Park, along with dozens of other projects.

Zoller's recent achievements cap 25 years of work as the city's parks director in the early 1990s, as a key staffer for the 1996 Bicentennial Commission, and as the 15-year director of Clean Land Ohio, later called ParkWorks, which merged with Cleveland Public Art in 2011 to become LAND Studio.

"It's a big decision, and it was a hard decision," Zoller said in a recent interview. "Doing the work I've done in this city for past 20 years has been a joy and privilege and extremely satisfying. The people I've worked with have been the best people I've ever known."

Zoller, who rarely speaks about herself in interviews, said she wanted time to seek what she called "more balance" in her life, but that she plans to re-engage in civic affairs.

"Working and having a vital professional life is central to who I am," she said, adding that she's "both excited and apprehensive" about finding a new role.

Finishing a big job

Zoller is departing after completing the highly acclaimed renovation of Public Square, which polished the city's global image through news reports that accompanied the recent Republican National Convention.

Typically, however, Zoller deflected attention and credit toward her staff, and partnering government agencies and nonprofits.

Yet those who know Zoller credit her for spearheading a change in the civic culture that made big projects like Perk Park and Public Square possible.

At LAND Studio, Zoller helped create a one-stop organization that manages everything from planning and design, to construction, programming and management of parks and public art.

LAND Studio and its two predecessor organizations raised design standards in the city, recruiting strong outside design and art talent, while commissioning projects from local designers and artists.

"Mediocre work gets mediocre results," Zoller said, summarizing a lesson she's learned. "It's easier to raise money for world-class work, because it compels and inspires."

The agency also runs interference for artists and designers with public officials responsible for approving and permitting changes to public spaces.

Zoller led scores of projects and raised roughly $100 million in private capital to augment public funds.

She oversaw the renovations of 23 public school playgrounds, plus public art installations, streetscape improvements and park rehabs across the city.

Examples range from the 1.5-acre "Learning Garden" at the Orchard Pre K-8 School, finished in the early 2000s on the city's West Side, to the recently completed "Rock Box" installations along East Ninth Street downtown, and the "Inter-Urban" murals along the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority's rapid transit Red Line.

Joe Roman, president and CEO of the Greater Cleveland Partnership, the city's chamber of commerce, said Zoller convinced foundations, corporations and City Hall that high-quality public spaces and public art are a necessity for a post-industrial Great Lakes city reinventing itself after decades of population loss and decline.

"Her work has helped Cleveland rethink itself," said Chris Ronayne, president of the nonprofit University Circle Inc. "It's all been positive -- a great narrative change."

A medal deserved

James Corner, the internationally respected landscape architect who designed the $50 million redo of Public Square, said the project probably would have been impossible without Zoller.

"She deserves a medal for public citizenship," Corner said. "She exceeded her role in terms of making a contribution to the public realm."

And Lillian Kuri, the Cleveland Foundation's program director for arts and urban design, praised Zoller for developing a deep bench of young talents on her 23-member staff.

Because of LAND Studio's depth, Kuri said, "I don't think they're going to miss a beat on important projects" during the upcoming leadership transition.

Zoller said she plans to remain at the helm until a successor can be appointed.

Barry Doggett, who chairs LAND Studio's board of trustees, said the organization would soon launch a national search for a successor and that he expects an appointment will be made early in 2017.

"We'll never replace her in kind," Doggett said of Zoller. "But what she's done is put in place a team that's extraordinarily competent and capable."

Doggett said that Greg Peckham, LAND Studio's managing director, is a candidate.

"Greg will set a very high bar," he said. "If someone is going to beat him, that's a pretty high bar to set."

Home-grown talent

Zoller, who lives in Gates Mills with her husband, John Mueller, is a native of Bay Village.

She attended Magnificat High School in Rocky River and earned a degree in French at Ohio State University in 1986.

In college, she worked for the state of Ohio's International Trade Division as an intern, concentrating on event planning, which she said was her only marketable skill upon graduation.

Zoller had a keen desire to return to Cleveland after earning her degree.

"Some people have wanderlust, some people have the pull of home," she said. "Family is here, friends are here."

Zoller found work with an event-planning organization, and soon thereafter got a job at City Hall, where she caught the attention of Mayor Michael White.

The mayor promoted Zoller to assistant director and then director of the city's Department of Parks, Recreation and Properties.

"I was a girl from Bay Village, and I was thrown into municipal government in a way that was extremely eye-opening," she said. "Mike White was an incredible guy to work for; his drive and pace were quite something."

Zoller's projects for the city included creating a midnight basketball league and youth advisory councils for recreation centers across the city.

After leading fundraising and marketing for the 1996 city bicentennial, Zoller took over Clean Land Ohio, founded in 1977 and known for a tree-planting campaign and for installing flower gardens with highly visible corporate donor signs at key intersections around the city.

Influential grant

A 1998 grant from the Lila Wallace Foundation enabled Zoller to travel the United States and learn about how park planners in other cities were using public-private partnerships to create more vibrant public spaces, and to populate them with organized events.

As a result, Zoller said, "we started kite festivals at Forest Hill Park in Glenville," and followed up "with church services and ice cream socials."

City Hall noticed. So did foundations. White asked Zoller to raise millions of dollars to improve school playgrounds and to program regular activities for families and children.

And Jay Talbot, then with the Cleveland Foundation, asked Zoller to participate in planning new public spaces for downtown.

Zoller collaborated on that effort with Ronayne, then the city's planning director; with Kuri, then director of Cleveland Public Art; and with Ruth Durack, then head of Kent State University's Urban Design Collaborative in Cleveland.

Their plan led to the protracted effort to renovate the then-shabby and unwelcoming one-acre Perk Park at Chester Avenue and East 12th Street. It took eight years to raise $3 million to pay for the project, in part because parks did not yet seem essential to downtown's revival.

"People really didn't understand," Zoller said. When she pitched potential funders, she said they told her parks "are what you do with money that's left over, and we don't have money that's left over."

But Perk Park's renovation, designed by New York landscape architect Tom Balsley, attracted national attention and enabled owners of adjacent office and apartment towers to fill vacancies with new tenants.

The renovation also helped convince the city's leaders and foundations that an even more ambitious renovation of Public Square was not just possible, but necessary.

Upcoming projects for LAND Studio include completion of the Lake Link Trail on the city's West Side, designed to connect the 101-mile Towpath Trail to Lake Erie at Whiskey Island, and management of FRONT, the citywide global art festival planned for 2018.

"I think we created a market demand for high-quality public spaces and doing it at a very high level," Zoller said. "People want to feel a sense of pride and ownership. Place matters."