CLEVELAND, Ohio – When and if city builds a pedestrian bridge that connects the downtown Mall directly to the Lake Erie waterfront at North Coast Harbor, it won’t look like the slender, cable-stayed design proposed by Boston architect Miguel Rosales in 2014.

“It’s safe to say that we are moving away from that idea at this point,” Freddy Collier, Cleveland’s planning director, said in a year-end interview reviewing current city projects.

“We believe there may be a much more feasible option,” Collier said. “There’s no shame in saying that.”

The city has tried for more than a century to figure out how to better connect downtown to the lakefront. The central business district is separated from North Coast Harbor by a 50-foot drop in elevation and a bleak, quarter-mile-wide landscape of railroad lines, roads and parking lots.

The pedestrian bridge, which Rosales designed with the engineering firm of WSP, was originally planned for completion in time for the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland.

The city and Cuyahoga County each pledged $10 million toward the bridge, and the state of Ohio kicked in $5 million. But the city and county delayed the project in 2015 after cost estimates rose to $33 million.

Collier said the city is examining concepts that would create greater opportunities for private development north of City Hall and the Huntington Convention Center and between the traffic bridges at East Ninth and West Third streets.

Collier said the city is also exploring how a pedestrian bridge could be linked to a new multi-modal transportation facility in the area, where a small, outmoded Amtrak station now stands.

Cleveland lawyer Jeffrey Appelbaum, who led a feasibility study of the Rosales design, declined to comment Wednesday.

Rosales, who co-designed the iconic Leonard Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge in Boston, also declined to comment.

The concept Rosales developed for the pedestrian bridge called for a curving span roughly 900 feet long and 14 feet wide. It was to extend from the northeast corner of the downtown Mall to a landing spot between the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Great Lakes Science Center on the north side of Erieside Avenue.

The bridge would have been supported by a fanlike array of cables held aloft by a V-shaped tower rising 170-feet high.

At one point, the city considered erecting a statue of Superman in the middle of a spiral pedestrian ramp at the north end of the bridge.

The vehicular bridges at East Ninth and West Third streets have sidewalks leading to and from the lakefront, but pedestrians have to contend with sometimes heavy traffic using the Shoreway on- and off-ramps.

In 2017, in place of the Rosales concept, the nonprofit Green Ribbon Coalition floated the concept of creating a $100 million land bridge – a wide, green, landscaped platform - to connect the downtown Mall directly to the lakefront.

Similar concepts have been planned or realized in St. Louis, Dallas, Philadelphia and other cities. No funding mechanism has been identified for the Cleveland proposal.

“We’ve been under the impression for a couple months that the city has been leaning toward our concept,” said Dick Clough, the Lakewood-based advertising and marketing consultant who chairs the coalition’s executive board. But he said he’s received no official word from the city.

Collier said that the city and county are discussing alternative concepts for the lakefront bridge with the Rock Hall, the Great Lakes Science Center and lakefront developer Dick Pace, who is developing restaurant and residential projects around the museums and FirstEnergy Stadium, lakefront home of the Cleveland Browns.

“We need to think of what it is we want to get done,” Pace said. “I’m confident we’re going to get there.”

Collier said he hoped the lakefront interests, including the Browns, would reach consensus on a design approach in 2019.

A Browns spokesman said the team fully supports the discussion.

As of 2014, Rosales had four pedestrian bridge concepts under consideration in Cleveland.

One is now scheduled for construction. It’s a $6 million pedestrian bridge over railroad tracks at Whiskey Island, to be built by Metroparks starting in 2019 as part of a lakefront trail network.

The city dropped a Rosales design for a slender, curving drawbridge over the boating channel at North Coast Harbor. Instead, it will build a different design at a cost of nearly $17 million, with an estimated completion in 2022.

Another Rosales design would have spanned Rockefeller Park in University Circle to connect the Cleveland Museum of Art to the Maltz Performing Arts Center at Temple-Tifereth Israel.

Case Western Reserve University rejected the bridge concept in favor of collaborating with the art museum on the Nord Family Greenway, a landscaped connection with trees, slopes and lawns completed earlier this year.