Land bridge

In a series of articles running today and next Sunday, The Plain Dealer and cleveland.com will look first at the St. Louis project and then at another big waterfront effort in Cincinnati to see what lessons they hold for Cleveland.

For decades, pedestrians trying to reach the Gateway arch and the surrounding 90-acre park from downtown had to scuttle along narrow sidewalks on streets that bridged the highway trench and crossed two busy, three-lane highway access roads.

Now the connection from downtown to the park flows so smoothly that you hardly notice that there’s an interstate highway underneath you as you cross the pedestrian bridge.

That seamless connection suddenly became deeply relevant to Cleveland in May. That’s when Jimmy and Dee Haslam, co-owners of the NFL Browns, proposed extending the downtown Mall north to the city’s lakefront over railroad tracks and the Ohio 2 Shoreway, like the pedestrian bridge in St. Louis.

Continue reading the story on Cleveland.com

Land bridge

Thanks to Jennifer Conn and Spectrum News 1 for covering this story.  Among other things, we are pleased to see that the land bridge idea is top of mind with Cuyahoga County planners.

CUYAHOGA COUNTY, Ohio — Cuyahoga County planners have undertaken what could be considered a Herculean task: to connect and make about 32 miles of Lake Erie shoreline publicly accessible. About 90% of the Cuyahoga County shoreline is not available to the public and its 1.2 million residents, the county said.

The county’s goal is to open much of that shoreline by forming partnerships with hundreds of property owners — from single families and property associations to special interest groups and descendants of early industrialists who’ve owned properties for decades.

Continue reading the story on Spectrum News 1…