JBC is pleased to have been a part of the Sasaki team for this project. (from Cleveland Magazine)
The University Circle Inc. president tells us how the space
connects the Hough neighborhood and University Circle.
Colorful colonials, white picket fences and wraparound
porches line the Hough neighborhood’s Newton Avenue. The quaint road between
East 101st Street and East 97th Street is one of Chris Ronayne’s favorites, but
something about streets like Newton, Logan Court, Woodward Avenue and Lamont
Avenue bothers him.
“It’s a very curious thing that our street infrastructure in
an urban grid is chock-full of cul-de-sacs in the Hough neighborhood,” says the
president of University Circle Inc. “Something was designed by intent, which
seemed to create an insular mobility pattern. It doesn’t square with me.”
To Hough residents, those dead-end streets — along with a
steep, unruly landscape and a wall of back-of-the-house architecture along
Martin Luther King Jr. Drive on Case Western Reserve University’s southern
campus — was a message: “Keep out.” But a few dozen steps away, Ronayne sees
the Nord Family Greenway as “a physical statement about our intentionality to
connect.”
Completed in June, the 15-acre green space links CWRU’s
Tinkham Veale University Center and the reformed 1920s-era temple that now
houses the Maltz Performing Arts Center. Running through the Cleveland Museum
of Art’s Fine Arts Garden, the 2,200-foot-long stretch of grass, trees, tiered
walkways and picnic areas expands a traditionally north-south campus to the
east and west. Designed by Sasaki, the $15 million landscape project is the
result of collaboration between the university, the art museum, the Cleveland
Foundation and principal donors Eric and Jane Nord.
But beyond a campus pathway and event space, the Greenway,
which replaces that inward-facing design, is an overdue welcoming of the Hough
neighborhood into University Circle’s cultural mecca.
“Right now places feel a world away that are only five
blocks away,” says Ronayne. “It’s on all of us if a kid within a mile of the
Circle has never experienced a Circle institution.”
Yet, truly embracing Hough means matching brick-and-mortar
efforts with social infrastructure. As examples, Ronayne mentions UCI’s Circle
Scholars, an after-school program where seventh- and eighth-graders visit the
museums and learn about local history from curators, or Future Connections, an
eight-week course that teaches career skills to local high school seniors.
“We’ve got open jobs in the field of nursing and too few
applicants,” he says. “We’d be remiss if we’re not locally teaching kids about
the job opportunities of tomorrow.”
Strolling past the Chinese Cultural Garden, which may soon
welcome more ethnic monuments as neighbors, the former Cleveland planning
director points back to the space between East 105th Street and those dead-end
Hough streets.
Ronayne hopes the Greenway eventually reaches past Maltz to
those streets. He also hopes to see the health care industry create hubs of
economic innovation — things like the forthcoming Cleveland Clinic and CWRU
dental clinic — in spaces like Mount Sinai.
“Now the next step is, ‘OK, I can get there, but now give me
a reason to go,’ ” Ronayne says. “Obviously culture is a reason, but how about
a job?”
