VIEWPOINT - CUDC Quarterly 4:2 - Summer 2005

One Good Bridge Is Not Enough
Hunter Morrison
Senior Fellow, Urban Design Center of Northeast Ohio

Steven Litt, architecture critic for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, has followed closely and reported compellingly the unfolding story of the Innerbelt Bridge which takes Interstate 90 over the Cuyahoga River. His articles (which can be accessed on www.cleveland.com/plaindealer) document the civic debate now taking place in Cleveland concerning the role of highway investments as civic design and the importance of this project to a community that seeks to continue a 25-year-long process of reshaping its image and repositioning its economy by redesigning its built environment.

The debate now taking place in Cleveland is well known to those who have followed Boston’s Big Dig. This controversial project includes not only the extraordinarily costly burial of Interstate 93 through downtown Boston, but also the construction of the Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge, a spectacular new 10-lane cable-stayed hybrid bridge across the Mystic River.

This project replaced a dark, foreboding and deteriorating six-lane double-deck bridge with an iconic testament to the high tech, high touch, high image world of contemporary Boston. Like the Golden Gate Bridge which, since its construction in 1937, has come to symbolize San Francisco, the new Bunker Hill Bridge promises the same symbolic impact for a city that has long been concerned with the design of its built environment. 

The debate now raging in Cleveland over the redesign and possible replacement of the Interstate 90 bridge raises many of the same issues of design, image, cost and function that characterized the debate in Boston from the moment Fred Salvucci, then an advisor to Mayor Kevin White, first raised the issue of replacing the aged, elevated Central Artery through downtown Boston in the early 1970s. Led by Paul Alsenas, director of the Cuyahoga County Planning Commission, this debate asks fundamental questions about the future of our central city and our region. A synopsis of the county’s position can be accessed here. 

In Cleveland, as in Boston, the debate raises the issue of whether beauty is a public good worthy of support by the public purse. In Boston, the debate took place over almost two decades and was resolved in favor of replacing the bridge and elevated highway with a memorable new bridge that dramatically expressed its structural engineering and a buried highway that treated the roadway as a necessary evil on top of which would be built a unique linear park that promised to reconnect downtown and the North End.

In Cleveland, the debate has just begun: While it is likely that the decision of whether to repair or replace Cleveland’s bridge will be made within a matter of months, the discussion of design and costs, and tradeoffs is likely to continue well beyond that initial, critical step.

The debate over the future of the Innerbelt Bridge is not just about the design of a single, highly visible piece of roadway infrastructure. It is, at its core, a debate over the future of the City of Cleveland and the broader Northeast Ohio region, for it raises fundamental questions about the value of beauty as a public good, the importance of placemaking in the region’s economic development strategy, and the role of civic design in remaking the image and the tangible reality of a city and a region struggling to compete both nationally and globally as places to live, work and invest.

That we in 2005 Cleveland are even having this debate over the Innerbelt Bridge is testament to how far we have fallen—not in accomplishment but in aspiration—over the past 100 years.

That we in 2005 in Cleveland should be debating whether to treat a major bridge as a memorable civic investment or as a mundane piece of roadway infrastructure indistinguishable from any of a thousand other highway bridges would be incomprehensible to the generation of Daniel Burnham and the successor generations that together designed and built many of Cleveland’s most memorable buildings and all of our most memorable bridges and roadways.

As Burnham so aptly put it in his 1912 speech to Chicago’s business leaders, a community, to progress, must “aim high in hope and work” and not be satisfied with the ordinary or the ineptly designed. These generations took seriously Burnham’s admonition: “Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty” and saw the design of a bridge or a roadway as a project of civic importance requiring the full and integrated participation of all the design professionals, from architecture and city planning to landscape design and civil engineering.

One needs only to look at Charles F. Schweinfurth’s elegant and timeless bridges through Rockerfeller Park or the Norfolk and Western railroad bridge over the West Boulevard parkway, or the Fulton Road Bridge over Brookside Park and the Big Creek to see that our predecessors—designers and politicians alike—saw the importance in their investment of time, talent and treasure in major public works that integrated the built and natural environments and resulted in memorable and lasting testaments to their civic vision. 

The contrast between the aspirational and interdisciplinary approach to civic design that characterized investment in Cleveland’s major roads and bridges during the first three decades of the 20th century and the functional, cost-driven and uninspired approach to the same civic decisions that has characterized infrastructure investments during the last four decades is best understood by looking at two adjacent bridges that cross the Rocky River between the Cleveland suburbs of Lakewood and Rocky River.

The oldest, the Hilliard Road Bridge, dates from 1925 and has all of the elegance of proportion, dimension and execution that one would expect of the sophisticated Jazz Age. Like its contemporary, the Fulton Road Bridge which occupies a critical site within Brookside Parks and the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo, the Madison Road Bridge’s grand and well-proportioned concrete arches gracefully compliment a heavily wooded Rocky River Metropolitan Park and are a visually delightful sculptural presence in the natural landscape. The view from above is even more memorable. The sidewalks are wide enough to walk across the valley comfortably; the parapet walls are low enough and transparent enough to afford both the walker and the driver a clear view of the park. And, perhaps, the most special feature of the design is the use of cantilevered balconies which, at four points along the bridge, afford walkers the opportunity to take in the view of the park.

This bridge, which links two Cleveland suburbs that were being developed during the era of its construction, was hailed in the press and was clearly seen at the time as a public investment of significance. Eighty years later, it is still regarded as an important piece of civic design and is carefully maintained by the Cuyahoga County Engineer.

Contrasting with this memorable bridge is a completely undistinguished bridge that crosses the same park about one half mile to the north of Hilliard Road. The Detroit-Rocky River Bridge was completed in 1980 to replace the historic Detroit-Rocky River Bridge, dating from 1910. The latter structure, like its companion Hilliard Road Bridge, crossed the Rocky River on a unique and memorable concrete structure of well-proportioned arches, the remnants of which form the base of an office tower built on the Rocky River end of the old right of way. 

The new Detroit-Rocky River Bridge, like countless other highway bridges designed and built since World War II, is plain, functional and unappealing. From below, the bridge rests on a simple and uninspiring structure of haunched, plated girders supporting a concrete deck and resting on a set of simple concrete piers. From above, the bridge presents the walker and the driver alike a stark and flat parapet, a standard prison-gray safety fence, and sidewalks just narrow enough to be uninviting. Ironically, this bridge, connecting historic retail districts in the two suburbs, could be alive with people on foot and bicycle sharing the right of way with people in cars and busses. While envisioning this bridge as a latter day Ponte Vecchio would stretch credulity, the fact remains that this bridge is positioned to link, rather than divide, these two older traditional shopping districts.

If only it was designed to do so…. 

Clearly our predecessors—those who designed the Cleveland of the period 1900-1930 understood that the design of roads and bridges matters to the quality of place. As they would have put it, “style sells.”

Our generation understands the importance of “style” in the design of private homes, retail centers, and consumer products. When acting in the private realm, we have no tolerance for the ordinary or the uniform. We search, instead, for products and places that will meet our individual needs and wants and will define our uniqueness to the wider world.

When we act in the public realm, however, the exact opposite is too often true. When we design roads, bridges, sidewalks, signage, light poles and all of the elements that together constitute our public realm we too often tolerate the ordinary, unimaginative and unappealing all under the justification of “cost effectiveness.”  Gone from the debate is the discussion of beauty as a public good worthy of public investment. Instead we see the aesthetic qualities of a project being defined as “enhancements” which can be added to the project—if funds are available—and not as fundamental aspects of the design that are inseparable from the finished product.

Our challenge, then, is not just to think through the design of a single and admittedly important project—the Innerbelt Bridge. As promising as a single new icon to the future would be, a well-designed and memorable new bridge, in and of itself, will not address the fundamental fact that our city and our region need to become more beautiful and more memorable, and not more ordinary and more uninspiring.

If we cannot—once again—become some-place, we will become no-place. And no-body chooses to come to or invest in no-place.

The Hilliard Boulevard Bridge viewed from below in the Rocky River Reservation, with a bit of the adjacent I-90 overpass for good measure.