Editor's Note: New Connections to Old Stories
CUDC Quarterly, 3:2 - Summer, 2003

This issue features two projects that deal with urban connections, but not just with the sort of connections that appear as lines on a map. In various ways, the Cuyahoga Valley course and the "From the Circle to the Lake" charrette delve into sites rich in history and find ways to bring them up-to-date. Sometimes, this involves preservation, but often it involves something totally new–turning John D. Rockefeller’s first refinery into a regenerative wetland, or rethinking the park created in his name (to provide the wealthy with a pleasant drive from Bratenahl to Euclid Avenue) into an amenity for the people who live around it now.

Design proposals for sites like these are exciting because of the constraints that have to be negotiated. The Cuyahoga Valley is dirty and neglected. It’s where the city puts broken glass, stray pets and impounded cars, but this forgotten sediment of industrial and urban history can tell stories when it’s disturbed.

The "Circle to Lake" sites are hardly forgotten. University Circle’s famous institutions are feverishly revising and enlarging themselves for a new century. Still, they sit at one end of a distinguished, but slightly tattered, complex of landscapes (Gordon, Rockefeller and Wade parks) that could tell a new and better story were it considered as a whole.

These terms come to mind because of something Professor Tourbier said after attending a lakefront planning meeting. It would be much easier to do something great on the riverfront than on the lake, he said, because the lakefront "has no stories to tell," He didn’t say this to argue against lakefront development, but to caution against the seductiveness of developing on a "blank slate." Such development tends to have very shallow roots, and the projects contained in this issue—for sites that lead from the city to the lake—might serve as models for deepening those roots as lakefront planning gets more specific.

Click here for more on the "From the Circle to the Lake" Charrette.

Click here for more on the Cuyahoga Valley course.