A Minority Report on the Mall
by Steve Rugare
CUDC Quarterly 3:3/4  - Winter 2004

During the Lakefront Challenge public forum, one member of the response panel remarked that a bridge connecting Mall C and the lakefront was "a no-brainer." Another panelist said that not to build such a bridge would require "courage." One or the other of these comments might have been a slip of the tongue, but, as Freud taught us, a slip of the tongue can lead to insight. What if completing the Group Plan axis does require no brains and no courage? What if it’s not such a great idea after all?

Most designers simply can’t resist an axial connection like the Group Plan’s. Give an urbanist any two landmarks or open spaces, and chances are he’ll lay out a connection between them. This habit brings benefits often enough that we don’t give it much thought, but it is only a habit, if not a compulsion. The problem comes when one or both of the things being connected isn’t that interesting. The connection itself can be a masterpiece of artful streetscape, but people don’t generally get on a bridge just to walk back and forth. They’re usually interested in what’s on the other side.

While Clevelanders yearn to get to the lake, our Civic Center complex—the product of the 1903 Group Plan and its various addenda—is precisely a place that nobody wants to get to. Like most products of the City Beautiful movement, it is grossly over-scaled and under-programmed. It symbolizes the city’s aspirations – or at least those of a certain triumphalist moment –but it neither requires nor encourages the presence of actual citizens. If you want to be in the civic heart of Cleveland, go to Public Square. If you want to know our history, go to one of the neighborhoods. If you want to admire sublime structures, go to the future Canal Basin Park in the valley. By comparison with these places the Group Plan is an aspirational appliqué. It is no "small plan," but it has none of the magic that comes when people actually inhabit a place. Are people going to start going there all of a sudden just so they can walk over a very expensive bridge to the lake?

Of course, a city’s psyche—like an individual’s—doesn’t give up easily on a cherished obsession. Rather than abandoning the group plan, we will no doubt continue trying to fix it. "If only there were something special on the grand axis," perhaps well say, "like a new convention center, then it would all finally work." And if that fails, well, maybe a museum or something. Given the very high opportunity costs of any major investment in Cleveland at this juncture, it might be time to exercise some brains and courage and lay this century-old obsession to rest.