What makes a city a city? If you think about it or even if you have to look it up, you think roads, buildings, and parks and that's all true. What else? Utilities like water and sewer. Transportation like cabs, buses, and trains. Things to do something at like restaurants, bars, other forms of entertainment. Jobs, buildings, hotels. Now take all of those things and plot them out in your mind. Think of a beautiful urban landscape engineered to your dream of what a city is supposed to be...
Back in the day the Van Sweringen brothers along with the firm of Graham, Anderson, Probst, and White came up with the idea and concept for the Cleveland Union Terminal. They used New York City's grand central terminal as the basis for their idea of a large unified train terminal in Cleveland. Over the years different people and groups have added shops, buildings, parking, a casino, a post office, a department store, a hotel, businesses, and restaurants to the original Union Terminal. Tower City is what most people call the whole complex now a days even though it is a collection of different buildings built in the same area fitting into a uniform shape by design. They are all connected in one way or another by the former Union Terminal platform area that was converted into the mall we know today.
So Tower City has all of this stuff going for it even if the city it once knew when it was first opened has dwindled down to what it is today. I notice all of this when I walk to the Higbee building which is part of the Tower City center. I work there when I can as you may know. I gamble at the casino. I shop at the mall. I eat lunch at the food court. I've watched a movie at the theater. I've arrived and departed from the RTA station. I've been in the hotel ball room. I've eaten dinner at the restaurants. There's still a small post office by the entrance to the mall where you can mail a letter and buy stamps. I plan on one day staying at the hotel and going to the top of the Terminal Tower. It really is the center of the city and a self-contained city in itself in some ways...but it's missing something.
If I Sim City-ed a city out in the middle of the desert, what would it be missing? People! Sure there are visitors but cities need people and more specifically residents. For all of these years only 2 people have ever called any building in Tower City home. The Van Sweringen brothers. Sure there have been plans to add residential to Tower City but nothing has come of it. There was no need for it when it all was first built. Cleveland was the 5th largest city in the US. There were people coming to Tower City. As buildings were added we still had a top 15 population and there was no Brecksville's or Strongsville's yet to go to...well not like we know them today anyways. There was a need to fulfill and that wasn't with residential. Today is a different story.
I can tell you from experience that the stock of for sale houses in this city is shit. Sure there are great areas close to downtown but the further you go out, the younger the houses get until you get to this weird limbo area where all the idea of charm and wood work was replaced by rounded entryways into each room and attics that are too short to stand up in. Think a typical house in Parma. That's what they remind me of anyways. I'm all for saving historical structures but just because houses are old, it doesn't mean they need to stick around. I'm actually cool with just bulldozing large swaths of shitty houses in order to build more urban and attractive neighborhoods... but I digress. In a city where the safe neighborhoods are gentrified out of your price range, the medium neighborhoods have houses that only widows can live comfortably in, and the rest is murder central, you'd think that having a prime time address like Tower City Center would be no-brainer for unique, hip, and memorable residential, right?!?
Let's look at it from angle #2. Tower City has a mediocre mall, a movie theater that's about to get some competition from the East Bank and Playhouse Square, the train hub of a desperate for riders transit group, a soon to be new Public Square, a prime location in a city with a downtown rental occupancy rate around 99%, and old unoccupied commercial space. Nothing creates business like having a built in clientele. It's already proven that rentals are being rented as fast as they can come online. You can get to/from here from/to University Circle, Browns Stadium, the Airport, Ohio City, the Flats East Bank, Shaker, and Lakewood all by using the RTA. You can walk pretty much anywhere downtown because you're right there. You could possibly walk to work without going outside. No matter how drunk you are and where, you should always be able to find your building. You can live above a casino, a mall, and a movie theater. You can have city, lake, or river views. You can live in the most iconic building in a city where conversions of old commercial into hip residential is "the thing" since the cost of building is astronomical...well to us mid-westerners anyways. This is (again) a no-brainer.
I truly believe that if you're going to call something "Tower City" it should have everything that a city compressed in a tower would have including residents. Take a few floors and try it out even. I just can not see this failing as long as it's done at least half right. You can't wait for the glory days to come back. You have to go out there and make things happen in this economy, if you want to survive. Don't think because you're an icon that you'll never become an old laughing stock. This needs to be done for a city that's looking for a leader, an organizer, a legitimizer (ole W would be proud of me for that word!) Show that this city is committed to outside of the box residential in it's downtown!
If the Eiffel Tower can be a huge radio antenna, urban explorers, then a building can be used for anything no matter how iconic. Just set it up to succeed!
Leave me your thoughts
on any of this
in the Comments Section below.
Get my blog posts sent right to you!
Put your e-mail address under
FOLLOW BY EMAIL
on the right menu and click Submit.
Like, Share, Star, and +1 the blog on Social Media by
clicking either the Buttons below after Posted by or
the Icons below the comments at the bottom of the screen.
Click on the ads on this page and
make me a couple of cents!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment