A New Urban District for Cleveland
An Unusual Design Process Leads to Big Plans for Lee-Harvard
CUDC Quarterly, 1:2 - Fall, 2000
The commercial corridor extending north from the intersection of Lee Road and Harvard Avenue is different from most of Cleveland’s East Side. It is largely composed of one-story buildings, and the general texture of the area is geared toward the automobile. In this respect, it’s a lot like some of the inner-ring suburbs, and it presents challenges that face commercial strips both in and out of the Cleveland city limits.
Unlike many nearby Cleveland neighborhoods, however, Lee-Harvard has the advantage of a stable, prosperous population, mostly African-American, with disposable income to spend on convenience retailing and commercial services near their homes. But the current building stock and character of the Lee-Harvard corridor do not support current consumer preferences or retailing practices.
On the one hand, the stock of commercial buildings on Lee Road is unattractive to chain retailers. They typically require "big box" structures with a significant amount of parking. This type of development program requires much larger parcels than are available along Lee Road. On the other hand, the automobile-dominated design order of Lee-Harvard makes it unattractive for small retail and service businesses that depend on a more tightly knit, pedestrian-oriented commercial environment for success.
As a result, Lee-Harvard’s commercial base has always suffered. In the last few years, even fast food vendors have struggled. Recently, the city of Cleveland joined in a public-private partnership with Forest City Enterprises to renovate the strip shopping center at the southeast corner of the Lee-Harvard intersection. In conjunction with this project, Neighborhood Progress, Inc. (NPI) and the Amistad Community Development Corporation commissioned the Urban Design Center to design redevelopment strategies for the commercial corridor along Lee Road.
Led by Associate Director Andrew Baqué, the UDC staff began by collecting detailed information on existing conditions in the area. This exercise was followed by public meetings to identify the major concerns of residents and other stakeholders. The usual outcome of this sort of participatory design process would be recommendations emphasizing preservation, adaptive reuse and incremental change, and identifying opportunities for specific interventions that will give a more usable, lively and unified image to the existing urban circumstances.
Occasionally, though, a project comes along that requires an unexpected design solution. For Lee-Harvard, the signs kept pointing in the direction of radical change. This has a lot to do with the neighborhood’s age.
Most of the corridor and its surrounding residential community was built out in the years immediately before and after World War II. This is just when the typical forms of the suburban strip were taking shape, but they were not yet fully evolved. So the buildings along Lee Road have some characteristics related to their more urban relatives (no setbacks, entries off the sidewalk) and some that relate to the suburban models that came along a few years later. In particular, they are nearly all single-story and do very little to create a sense of enclosure around the space of the street. Combine this building type with several lanes of relatively high-speed traffic and little refuge for pedestrians, and you have a place with very little potential in today’s marketplace.
Andew Baqué describes the Lee-Harvard corridor as "stuck on the fence," not really urban but not really suburban either. To realize its potential, it "has to be pushed one way or the other." The suburban model would require demolishing adjacent housing to make room for big parking lots. Moreover, public feedback and the clients’ commitment (shared by the UDC) to building livable neighborhoods argued in favor of making Lee-Harvard a more genuinely urban place.
Market research was necessary to test the feasibility of this idea. NPI hired Main Street Connections of Columbus to prepare a market analysis of the neighborhood, determining what level of commercial investment it could support and in what retail categories.
The results came as a surprise to everyone. The average household income in Lee Harvard is $44,661, making it one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the city. This market is at present remarkably underserved, and the research showed the potential for more than150,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space in the corridor.
With this information it was possible to begin developing principles for new land use patterns, new building types and revised streetscape conditions. The new principles call for:
Concentration of Commercial Uses–On Lee Road, as along many commercial corridors in Cleveland and its inner suburbs, low density commercial development strings out over great distances, never achieving the density and continuity required to create a storefront shopping district. The UDC’s plan therefore proposes overlay zoning channeling commercial uses into the immediate vicinity of the Lee-Harvard intersection, with more dispersed areas converted to housing.
Mixed-Use Building Types–New commercial development will follow guidelines encouraging a completely different building type from the current one. The street is to be a defined space bounded by multistory buildings. Retail is required on the ground floor, with a mix of uses--including restaurant, office and residential--permitted on upper floors. Parking is pushed to the rear of the lots.
New Multifamily Housing–The Lee Road frontage re-zoned for residential use would be developed as multifamily housing, allowing for a greater mix of residents and creating a wider range of housing opportunities in the neighborhood for single people, young professionals and the elderly. In order to maintain continuity with the existing residential fabric of single-family homes, the guidelines for these buildings require massing and materials that relate to nearby housing.
Traffic Calming and Public Space–Lee Road is currently a rather high speed artery, and the street is configured with little attention to pedestrians. The corridor plan includes more on-street parking, reduction in travel lanes during non-peak hours and other traffic calming devices. Combined with a small plaza at the Lee-Harvard intersection and a park at the center of the commercial core, these will help strike a balance between pedestrians and auto activity in the corridor.
Naturally, the Lee-Harvard plan’s sponsors and designers have questioned themselves at every step as the plan became far more ambitious than a routine streetscape project. Above all, feasibility has been a constant worry, and a highly consultative process has been used to assure that the resulting plan would be politically and economically realistic.
Comments and suggestions were solicited regularly from representatives of the community and several City departments. At the same time, the clients have put a lot of effort into substantiating the plan and identifying mechanisms for its realization. To that end, additional consultants were hired: KWD Architects to give unit cost projections on the new building types and Great Lakes CB to look at the economic feasibility of specific pilot projects.
While the implementation is only just beginning, the UDC’s design work is largely completed. The UDC currently is producing a written report, as well as a large body of graphic materials documenting the design vision and its implementation requirements. Included are renderings of the proposed urban fabric and streetscape and design guidelines for the commercial and residential cores. Additional guidelines have been developed for such special circumstances as businesses that need drive-throughs. These solutions represent significant research into design solutions for aging suburban commercial areas.
The next step for Lee-Harvard is to finalize the siting of demonstration projects for both the commercial and residential concepts embodied in the plan. It is hoped that public investment in these, along with the wealth of encouraging economic date, will stimulate private investment in the creation of, in effect, a new neighborhood core, finally giving Lee-Harvard the urban center it has long needed.
