CLEVELAND, Ohio The ground shook. Debris rained down as the sharp teeth of an excavator bucket chewed at the concrete innards of a three-story, brick-faced building. A man in heavy work clothes and a hard hat sprayed water from a hose to keep the dust down.
That was the scene Monday as contractors began tearing down the former Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority Big 8' apartment complex on West 25th Street in Ohio City, a block south of Detroit Avenue.
After more than a decade of planning, dreaming, designing, and grant-writing, the demolition marked the first highly visible step toward the creation of a 23-acre park at Irishtown Bend overlooking the Cuyahoga River and the downtown skyline.
Every bite of the excavators bucket opened up a bit more of the view.
Once the site of a 19th-century Irish immigrant settlement, Irishtown Bend is a sodden, unstable, weed-covered slope on the outer curve of the Cuyahoga River opposite Columbus Road Peninsula, with a few buildings on top, along West 25th Street.
For decades, the hillside has threatened to avalanche into the river, an event that could rupture a major sewer line and block ore boats from reaching steel mills upstream.
The Port of Cleveland, Cleveland Metroparks, LAND Studio, Ohio City Inc., the City of Cleveland and other nonprofit organizations and government agencies have joined forces to stabilize the slope, rebuild waterside bulkheads, and create a park with trails zig-zagging down to the water.
Other partners include the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency (NOACA),
West Creek Conservancy, CMHA, the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District, and the Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless.
Its a pretty monumental day,' said Tom McNair executive director of Ohio City Inc. Its an odd thing in our business where you literally spend years working making things happen. To reach a point where you can see actual, tangible progress on a project is pretty incredible.
McNair and other advocates have long described the Irishtown project as a gigantic two-fer, with numerous benefits to communities and businesses.
Safeguarding the slope would protect a $3.5-billion shipping industry that serves 20,000 jobs in the region, according to information attributed to the Port of Cleveland on LAND Studios website.
The park also has the potential to become one of Ohios best public waterfronts, with trails connecting it to Lake Erie at nearby Wendy Park on Whiskey Island, and to the Towpath Trail, which links Cleveland to the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, Akron, and points south.
The northernmost five miles of the Towpath, reaching Canal Basin Park opposite Irishtown Bend, are scheduled for completion this summer.
Other nearby trails nearing completion this year include the 2.25-mile Red Line Greenway, which will intersect the Towpath at Columbus Road at Franklin Boulevard, and reach deep into the West Side.
The Irishtown Bend project is also likely to help spur residential redevelopment on the citys West Side, where a reverse migration after decades of white flight has brought an influx of new residents.
New and upcoming projects in the neighborhood include the 158-unit Church and State apartment building at Detroit Avenue and West 28th Street, and the 10-story, 288-unit Intro apartment building at West 25th Street and Lorain Avenue, which bills itself as Americas tallest timber-framed building.
McNair said the project to stabilize the Irishtown slope and build the park has so far attracted roughly $40 million in grants and donated property.
The funding includes $9 million awarded for the project in 2019 by the U.S. Department of Transportation through NOACA for slope stabilization.
Linda Sternheimer, the director of planning and urban development at the Port of Cleveland said the agency hopes by this fall to complete engineering plans for stabilization of the slope and to start construction by next winter.
NOACA, meanwhile, has identified $3.3 million to extend a half-mile section of the Cleveland Foundation Centennial Lake Link Trail across the lower edge of Irishtown Bend along the river, which will connect to already completed sections leading north to Whiskey Island and south to the Towpath.
Cleveland Metroparks said the trail link could be finished as soon as 2024.
To pay for the acquisition and demolition of the CMHA apartments and a nearby former CMHA office, which will also be demolished soon, LAND Studio obtained a $1.4 million grant from the Ohio Public Works Commissions Clean Ohio Conservation Fund.
Cleveland Metroparks is leading the demolitions. The two buildings have been vacant for nearly a decade.McNair said the Big 8 building, a long, rectangular, three-story structure, took its name from its role in housing families with up to eight members.
Various plans for the transformation of Irishtown Bend have been underway at least since 2006. It was then that nonprofits including ParkWorks, a predecessor of LAND Studio, initiated discussions about the area.
In 2007, Michael Christoff and Bradley Fink, two then-recent graduates of Kent State Universitys College of Architecture and Environmental Design, organized a low-cost international design competition to brainstorm ideas for a future park on the bend.
Two years later, ParkWorks and other organizations completed a Flats Connection Plan,' using part of a $740,000 grant from the Gund Foundation. Many of the trails envisioned in that plan have been built or are close to being completed.
In late 2009, the Trust for Public Land, a national nonprofit land conservation organization based in San Francisco, announced it had closed a $3.2 million deal to preserve 1.3 miles of abandoned rail bed on the west bank of the Flats for a future trail network.
In 2014, the Cleveland Foundation announced it would devote $5 million toward building those trails, most of which are now complete or soon will be, except for the Irishtown Bend section.
In 2017, LAND Studio, Ohio City and partnering agencies unveiled the first conceptual plans for the new park on the bend. Those plans continue to evolve in synch with the Ports work on engineering the stabilization of the slope.
We know theres a long way left to go with this,' McNair said. But to reach the point where we finally see buildings coming down and opening up the viewshed so people can see whats so exciting, is really special.
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Demolition in Ohio City signals big visible first step toward creation of park at Irishtown Bend - cleveland.com
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