Cleveland has a lot of malls.  Stretching all the way back to the historic Arcades and all the way up to the present there have been plenty of shopping malls in the greater Cleveland area.  But when a mall dies, how do you bring it back to life?  The Galleria has been working hard to reinvent itself as an urban greenhouse and green business hot spot.  Other area malls are struggling to even stay standing.  What do you do with a behemoth that is not reaching its potential?  While some can demolish and rebuild like the Westpark mall, some have to find a way to stay relevant as they are, like Tower City.  As we ponder this question, the city of Cleveland is thinking about another kind of mall.

Downtown has a few large green spaces that are called The Cleveland Mall.  One original meaning of the word mall is an esplanade where pedestrians can walk and probably where the name came from.   From Wikipedia:

It was conceived as part of the 1903 Group Plan by Daniel Burnham, John Carrère, and Arnold Brunner[2] as a vast public room flanked by the city’s major civic and governmental buildings, all built in the neoclassical style. Many of those buildings were built over the following three decades, including the Metzenbaum Courthouse (1910), Cuyahoga County Courthouse (1912), Cleveland City Hall (1916), Public Auditorium (1922), the Cleveland Public Library main building (1925), and the Cleveland Public Schools Board of Education building (1931).[3] Other buildings include Key Tower, the Cuyahoga County Administration Building, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.[4]

One of the things that is important to any city is park and greenspace in its downtown.  But what do you do when a downtown needs to be completely revitalized and reborn?  What is more important greenspaces or the ability to attract new commerce?  I feel they go hand in hand and I know that I am not alone.  Will we or won’t we get a new convention center?  What about the Medical Mart?  These issues have been going around and around for years.  And don’t get me started on the waterfront redevelopment that has been discussed for at least a full decade. At least there is a place to find out more and to have your voice heard.  There will be a public forum on the malls and their future in the plans for downtown on May 6th at 5:30pm.  It will held at the Louis Stokes Downtown Public Library.  The library is located at 325 Superior Ave.

This is of great concern to me given Cleveland’s long history of tearing up something great and ending up with parking.  How many surface lots in downtown Cleveland were created by the demolition of historic buildings?  Did you know we had a hippodrome?  While future thinkers managed to save Playhouse Square (now the second largest theater district in the US, or so I have heard), we have lost a host of large and beautiful theaters around town.  Currently the Cleveland Playhouse is in danger as it was purchased by the Cleveland Clinic and their record of keeping historic buildings is spotty at best.  We love to tear things down in the name of progress, but rarely managed to follow through on the whole plan.  Money and best intentions do not always mesh, as can be seen by our slow movement on our own property, but when it comes to demolition, I say err on the side of caution.  If we tear up the mall in our efforts to revitalize downtown, will the plan come together and a final product built that is worth the loss?  I am more worried about the stalled development on the East bank of The Flats.  That was supposed to revitalize downtown and be the crowning gem in Cleveland’s glittering new attractive downtown.  Instead we are looking at a mess of debris and mud.  If Cleveland is so anxious to build a fantastic new convention center and   medical mart, why not buy back this property and build on it?  The land has been cleared and there are plenty of historic properties surrounding it that could use the revitalization that it brings to refurbish themselves.  What is left of nearby warehouses could easily be the building blocks for our new downtown hotels.  Instead, we think about tearing up a valued and treasured landmark in the name of progress.  What will be the fate of the Civic Auditorium?  Have you been inside?  While it may not be conducive to modern conventions, it is a beautiful property that needs loving restoration and not destruction.  And can we follow through?  If we break ground on this project, will it turn into another large surface lot?  When I heard about the beautiful Cleveland Hippodrome, I said “what hippodrome?”  Let’s not leave the next generation wondering, “Mall, what mall?”  Come and hear your voice heard at the meeting on May 6th.