COMMENTARY

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- On Monday, July 7, Cleveland and Northeast Ohio will officially gain a spectacular public amenity: the newest section of the regional Towpath Trail to open along the Cuyahoga River.

U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown is scheduled to speak at a 1 p.m. ribbon-cutting, along with Cuyahoga County Executive Ed FitzGerald, U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur and other officials.

A map details the stages of the Towpath Trail project in Cleveland, along with scheduled years of completion, plus a temporary bike route that will be ready with signs on city streets July 7.

The new trail is a 10-foot-wide, multipurpose pathway flanked on either side by roughly 75-feet of newly graded earth seeded with native grasses.

It extends eight-tenths of a mile north from University Avenue to Carter Road and comprises a relatively modest-sounding nine acres.

The trail flanks the eastern edge of the 70-acre Scranton Road Peninsula, a battered and largely fallow riverside industrial zone where factories once stood, and which now awaits redevelopment.

Despite a location that may sound unpromising, the trail section offers spectacular views of the downtown skyline, bridges over the river and industrial scenery of a kind that inspired Cleveland artists as far back as photographer Margaret Bourke White in the 1920s.

There's no question that the completion of the segment, funded with $9.1 million in federal and state money, is an exciting moment. But it also accentuates how terribly difficult it has been to finish the northernmost six miles of the Towpath Trail in Cleveland.

It was in 1996 that Congress designated the Ohio & Erie Canal Corridor as one of 22 national heritage areas in the United States.

The Towpath Trail, generally following the path of the 1832 Ohio & Erie Canal, would serve as the spine of the new corridor, reaching 110 miles south of Cleveland to unite the city with its historic agricultural hinterland.

Built in 1825-32, the canal had long been abandoned, but a reclamation effort was under way.

The first 22 miles of renewed Towpath Trail opened in 1993 in what is now known as the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, halfway between Cleveland and Akron. Over the next six years, another 38 miles of the restored or redesigned Towpath opened south of Cleveland and Cuyahoga County.

In 1999, Cleveland Metroparks opened the 306-acre Ohio & Erie Canal Reservation in Valley View, Independence and Cuyahoga Heights.

A slide from a presentation about the Scranton/Flats trail shows the area of Cuyahoga riverbank improved by the $9.1 million project.

The reservation included 4.2 miles of Towpath, which brought the trail north into Cuyahoga County from Rockside Road to the industrial zone along Harvard Road, just inside Cleveland's southern border. And that's when the action slowed to a crawl.

Today, 85 miles of Towpath have been completed south of Cleveland.

Inside the city's border, however, difficulties in dealing with land assembly, public funding, polluted industrial sites and bureaucratic review of plans in Columbus and Washington, D.C., have been formidable.

Accordingly, the project exemplifies America's inability to move quickly on important infrastructure projects, plus the difficulties in developing effective regional cooperation in Northeast Ohio.

For example, it took two written agreements in 2004 and 2009 to specify that the city would assemble and own the land for the Towpath, that Cuyahoga County would design it, that the Metroparks would manage it and provide annual maintenance, and that the nonprofit Canalway Partners would staff the project.

On Monday, six officials from those agencies and two designers who gathered at the new trail section for a group interview said it would be at least five years before the four "Stages" completing the final six miles of trail in Cleveland would be complete.

"This'll be a career-capper for me" said George Cantor, a chief planner with the city of Cleveland. "I've been working on it since 2003."

"It's a very complex project," said Stan Kosileski, planning and fiscal administrator for the Cuyahoga County Department of Public Works.

The new Scranton/Flats trail opens up spectacular vistas of familiar landmarks such as the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge.

The planners also said that by July 7, the city intends to install signs along a temporary alternate route for bicyclists that will connect downtown Cleveland to the Harvard Road section of the Towpath for the first time.

The route extends south from Scranton Road to Kenilworth Avenue, West 14th Street and the Quigley Road Connector. It's a small but notable consolation for those who have waited so many years for the completion of the Towpath.

Within the context of the challenges Cantor, Kosileski and the other planners described, the completion of the new trail section on Scranton Peninsula counts as a significant accomplishment.

Most important, its high quality as a new form of waterfront public space in Cleveland has the potential to reignite public interest in completing the rest of the Towpath Trail in Cleveland.

It could also increase public pressure to complete associated spur trails reaching deep into city neighborhoods from the valley. These include the proposed Red Line Greenway, reaching deep into the West Side, and the Lake Link Trail, extending north from Scranton Peninsula to the Lake Erie shoreline at Wendy Park on Whiskey Island.

The Scranton/Flats trail has the potential to stir action because its impact is immediate and powerful, and because it has the uncanny effect of creating fresh perceptions about the river and the surrounding landscape.

From the trail, for example, the steel and concrete structure of the 1932 Lorain-Carnegie Bridge – a familiar local landmark -- can seem suddenly fresh and strikingly beautiful, as if it had just been built.

Designed by the Cleveland office of the engineering firm of Michael Baker LLC and the Cleveland firm Behnke Landscape Architecture, the project addresses many needs from recreation and beautification to ecological restoration.

Contractors removed scrub, trash and debris from the riverbank and scooped out soil to create basins outside the shipping channel where fish can breed and grow free of turbulence from bow thrusters on ore boats that ply the river.

By removing soil and sculpting a new riverbank, designers found a cheap way to avoid the huge expense of reinstalling steel bulkheads that had collapsed.

The trail also features an as-yet-unnamed observation pier that juts from the shoreline to the edge of the river's navigation channel, offering vistas of passing ore boats.

A view looking south along the new Scranton/Flats trail.

The design for the Scranton/Flats trail, which is part of "Stage 4" of the Cleveland section, far surpasses Stage 2, a loop running a mile from south to north around the 150-acre Steelyard Commons shopping complex, built in 2009 about two miles south of downtown by developer Mitchell Schneider.

Funded by an admittedly generous $1 million donation from Schneider, the Steelyard section nevertheless resembles a cattle chute flanked by chain link. The design raised serious questions about whether trail planners were eager to compromise in order to get something – anything -- done.

The new Scranton/Flats trail shows instead that the Towpath partners have the capacity to deliver a high-quality public good.

One lesson from the new segment is that not all federal agencies act with equal speed in reviewing projects and handing out dollars. The Scranton/Flats trail received significant funding through the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative.

Money from those sources paved the way for a relatively quick review and approval by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers.

The Towpath planners said they had better luck with those agencies than with the Ohio Department of Transportation, which has overseen funding from traditional federal sources for the other and slower-moving sections of trail.

The bottom line is that Stage 3 of the Towpath in Cleveland, which will extend north from Steelyard Commons around the eastern edge of Tremont to the Scranton/Flats trail, is scheduled for completion in 2017.

The view looking south from the new Scranton/Flats trail includes the Norfolk-Southern rail bridge over the Cuyahoga River, plus the completed new I-90 bridge, and the old I-90 bridge, now under demolition.

The remaining pieces of Stage 4, which will extend the Scranton/Flats trail south to meet Stage 3 and north to the Towpath's northern trailhead at the future Canal Basin Park, are scheduled for completion in 2018.

And Stage 1, which will thread its way north from Harvard Road to Steelyard Commons around the environmentally troubled Harshaw Chemical site – where uranium was processed for atomic bombs in World War II – is currently scheduled for completion in 2019.

The park at Canal Basin on Cleveland, site of the original transfer point between lake schooners and canal barges, also has yet to be planned and funded.

It's a complex story. Yet all it takes to see the incredible potential of the completed Towpath in Cleveland is a quick stroll along the river's edge next to Scranton Road. It's a walk anyone who cares about the future of the city ought to take.