For 100 years the people who ran this city seemed bent on increasing the distance between themselves and Lake Erie. Tons of slag from steel mills, as well as other fill, were dumped into the lake, creating a dreary plain stretching out in front of the heights on which the main downtown area is built.
Now the city government, along with some influential private groups, is working to reverse the process. Starting next year, if plans are followed, seven and a half acres of land will be gouged out to create an inner harbor and a waterside park.
Cleveland is one of a large number of Middle Western cities that are looking to their waterfronts to improve the quality of life and attract people and businesses back downtown.
According to a survey by the Center for the Great Lakes, a nonprofit group that monitors commercial and environmental activities on the Great Lakes, 38 of 50 communities along the shoreline of the lakes have new waterfront projects under construction or in the advanced planning stage. This does not include such cities as Flint, Mich., and Indianapolis, which are developing the rivers that flow within their city limits.
Like better known projects in Baltimore and Boston, many of the ones in the Middle West are intended to recapture unused industrial property for public use and private development. Old, abandoned factories and warehouses, built when rivers and lakes were prime sources of transportation, are being pulled down or converted for residential and commercial use.
In Cleveland, where the Cuyahoga River attracted national attention in 1969 when it caught fire because of polluted material in the river, trendy restaurants are opening up along the banks of the river and young people are turning abandoned warehouses into lofts and apartments. Cleveland has discovered its waterfronts, and community leaders are counting on waterside amenities to help take the place of its fading economic base in heavy industry.
”Cleveland is a microcosm of a nation that is going through an economic change of life,” said George Voinovich, mayor since 1980. ”We are becoming a service organization, offering amenities like our orchestra, our museums and playhouses, medical facilities and ball teams that newer cities can never afford to match. Our waterfront development is an important part of our economic strategy.”
An important factor in the renewed interest in waterside development, urban specialists say, is that the water is a lot more attractive now, after more than a decade of serious pollution control efforts.
”Twenty years ago, Lake Erie was dying and the Cuyahoga was burning,”
said Donna Wise of the Center for the Great Lakes. ”You couldn`t do the kinds of things that are under way in Detroit and Cleveland now while the water was unattractive. The $7 billion spent over the past few years has been money well spent.”
Federal dollars remain a key ingredient in most of the downtown waterfront projects, since most cities do not have the financial resources for big, new undertakings. Fifty-four percent of the $103 million earmarked for the first phase of the North Coast project in Cleveland is to come from federal sources.
But much of the impetus for some of the region`s more notable waterfront transformations has come from the private sector. Ten years ago the section of Toledo along the Maumee River, which empties into an arm of Lake Erie just northeast of the city, was a wasteland of weed-filled parking lots and abandoned factories.
Then the Owens-Illinois Corp. and the Toledo Trust Co. agreed to build new headquarters along the river, and these buildings became the core of a complex that now includes a hotel, a waterside park and the Portside Festival Marketplace, a collection of shops and restaurants. A new convention center and another hotel are in the offing.
Milwaukee, like Cleveland, has a lakefront and a riverfront. While other cities, including Detroit, are eagerly promoting residential building along waterfronts to attract people downtown, Milwaukee has moved to stop private development.
”Milwaukeeans are passionate about their lakefront,” said William Ryan Drew, the city development commissioner. ”They want to keep it fun, public, accessible. Whenever commercial establishments, such as condominiums and hotels, have been proposed at the water`s edge, the public, loud and clear, has said no.” Instead, the lakefront has been developed into parks and marinas.
Attention is now shifting to the Milwaukee River and the development of a six-block riverwalk in the heart of the downtown section. The first block of the walk was opened in June by the department store Gimbels Midwest. City planners want to assure public access to the riverside along with a mix of shops and eating facilities for the convenience of strollers.
St. Louis residents were walled off from much of the city`s Mississippi River waterfront by the railroad tracks that were in active use until just a few years ago and roads built in the superhighway boom of the 1950s and 1960s. The tracks were removed in the early 1980s, spurring the development of Laclede`s Landing, a 60-acre tract north of the Gateway Arch, which is being converted into office space, restaurants and shops. A new hotel also has been built in the area.
Cincinnati has been developing its shoreline of the winding Ohio River for almost two decades, building a professional sports stadium, a luxury apartment building, acres of parkland and a floodwall that is used for picnics by downtown office workers. More apartments and condominium units are planned with the help of city tax abatements for developers.
”The river is the front door to the city,” said Neil Surber, Cincinnati`s director of economic development. ”It`s the only place we have for future growth.”
Most of Chicago`s 22 miles of shoreline on Lake Michigan is parkland, a result of a turn-of-the-century decision by the city`s leaders to assure public access to the lake. But a 48-acre site in the core of the city, where the Chicago River empties into Lake Michigan, remains in private hands and there are ambitious development plans, including the construction of thousands of apartment units overlooking the lake and the river.
Even smaller cities are looking toward their waterfronts to promote growth and improve the quality of life for their residents. Muskegon, a city of 40,000 people on Lake Michigan`s western shoreline, began work this year on the first section of a $42 million waterfront project known as Harbortown. It will include a marina, stores, restaurants and condominiums.
”Waterfront redevelopment is the most spectacularly unheralded example of urban renewal of our time,” said Josef W. Konvitz, an associate professor of history at Michigan State University. ”Eight or nine years ago city planners were tearing their hair out, trying to figure out what to do about the waterfronts. Nobody could have predicted how successful they would be.”
