CLEVELAND, Ohio - Chances are fading that the new Opportunity Corridor boulevard being built on the city's East Side will turn into a wasteland of payday lenders, fast-food joints and gas stations.
So says planner Marie Kittredge, who just finished a two-and-a-half year contract as executive director of the Opportunity Corridor Partnership, the civic group overseeing the three-mile, $331 million boulevard and development of the land around it.
At a May 2015 meeting of the corridor's 35-member steering committee, Kittredge warned in essence that without energetic planning, land acquisition and rezoning, the boulevard could become a squandered opportunity, and a mockery of its name.
Nineteen months later, she's more optimistic.
"We are definitely not moving toward our nightmare vision," she said Tuesday after an hour-long drive through neighborhoods the boulevard will traverse.
Financed by Ohio Turnpike revenue bonds, Opportunity Corridor is designed to provide a smoother traffic connection from the interstate highway system to economically vibrant University Circle, four miles east of downtown.
A map of Opportunity Corridor highlights land within a half mile of the three-mile, 35 mph boulevard, intended to connect I-490 at East 55th Street to East 105th Street in University Circle. (Opportunity Corridor Steering Committee)
Critics have said that the project, heavily supported by Gov. John Kasich, is pointless because the city's East Side already offers multiple routes to University Circle from East 55th Street.
Others - including Kittredge -- say that without the boulevard, it's unlikely that the so-called Forgotten Triangle, once packed with factories and communities of Romanian, Hungarian, Slovenian and Italian immigrants, will ever revive.
What it will do
The three-mile boulevard will extend from the stub end of I-490, which now ends at East 55th Street, and curve northeast across the Slavic Village, Kinsman, Buckeye and Fairfax neighborhoods.
The road is scheduled for completion in 2020, but redevelopment around it could take many years.
The Ohio Department of Transportation, which is building the boulevard, has nearly completed reconstruction of East 105th Street from Euclid Avenue south to Quincy Avenue as the first mile of the project.
Work is underway on the second phase, from Quincy Avenue to East 93rd Street, and bids for the third phase, costing roughly $200 million, will be reviewed early in 2017, Kittredge said.
Accomplishments
Kittredge, who previously led the nonprofit Slavic Village Development Corp., has coordinated community engagement around the boulevard since 2014 in a position funded by the Greater Cleveland Partnership, the city's chamber of commerce.
Deb Janik, a senior vice president of the partnership, praised Kittredge's work, but said the organization doesn't plan to hire a successor. Instead, it will continue to oversee corridor redevelopments in-house.
Kittredge said she's proudest of having worked with ODOT and the Cuyahoga County office of Ohio Means Jobs to train and employ residents in areas affected by the road construction for new jobs.
To mitigate negative effects of construction, ODOT spent $500,000 on the employment project, which placed 655 residents of Wards 4, 5 and 6 in jobs in health care, social services, general labor, manufacturing and other fields, Kittredge said. Some 159 residents also received job training as part of the program.
Design changes
On her watch, Kittredge oversaw community efforts to improve the boulevard design by narrowing traffic lanes by a foot to calm traffic, and to modify a recreational path by separating tracks for bikes and pedestrians.
Kittredge also led plans for a landscaped greenway along the corridor, and for public art.
The city's planning department, meanwhile, established a design review district for Opportunity Corridor, and launched plans for redevelopment on East 79th and East 105th streets.
The cross streets will intersect the future right-of-way and connect development sites to the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority's rapid transit lines.
City-state conflict
Planning for redevelopment around the boulevard hit a snag earlier this year when the city of Cleveland said it would withhold $3.1 million in matching funds for the project to protest what it called the state's dilution of minority hiring goals and its refusal to provide $10 million the city said the state had promised for a brownfield cleanup.
The city also stopped attending meetings of the steering committee, which hasn't gathered since a trip to Milwaukee in June to study how that city redeveloped aging industrial corridors.
Kittredge and officials from ODOT said that hiring of city residents and local companies in the second phase of the boulevard construction exceeded those in the first section.
"ODOT hit a grand slam on diversity and inclusion," Kittredge said.
She and Janik said they expected the city and the state to settle their differences soon, and that steering committee meetings would resume.
A spokesman for the administration of Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson did not respond to an email requesting comment.
Proof of potential
Despite the slowdown in planning efforts, Kittredge sees evidence of Opportunity Corridor's potential in impending development projects such as IBM Corp.'s 43,000-square-foot, $11.1 million home for Explorys, a health-care data analytics company.
Developers plan to break ground in 2017 for the Explorys building, to be located on the southeast corner of Cedar Avenue at East 105th Street.
The project will keep 170 jobs in Cleveland and help leverage other new developments in the 17-acre New Economy Neighborhood planned by Fairfax Renaissance Development Corp., said Denise Van Lear, the agency's assistant executive director.
A map of the proposed New Economy Neighborhood and Innovation Square, which will be developed around Opportunity Corridor in the Fairfax neighborhood.
This spring, Fairfax also hopes to break ground on a new park that will become the centerpiece of a residential redevelopment west of Opportunity Corridor, Van Lear said.
After a circuitous ride Tuesday on rutted, icy roads that traverse the Opportunity Corridor zone, Kittredge pointed out that without the new road, numerous chunks of vacant land would likely never be redeveloped.
"If you drive through this area, you can see that the streets are not functional in the grid, so they don't support the business we are hoping to attract," she said.
Railroad lines and valleys also make the area hard to navigate. The barriers include Kingsbury Run, where the notorious Torso Murders took place in the 1930s.
Bridging gaps
Opportunity Corridor, which will be paralleled by a recreational path, will bridge the Kingsbury Run valley, creating the first direct pedestrian connection between Slavic Village and the Kinsman neighborhood since the 1960s.
The boulevard will offer a view of the rusting skeleton of the Sidaway Bridge, the city's only suspension bridge, which used to link Slavic Village and Kinsman.
When she took the Opportunity Corridor job in 2014, Kittredge had visions of new developments popping into place as sections of the road were finished.
Now she thinks the redevelopment will take longer. But with at least half of the development sites along the future right-of-way in the hands of the city or community development corporations, she's not as worried as she was that lowest-common-denominator development would swamp the project.
"We are taking smaller steps than I would have liked," Kittredge said, "but definitely small steps in the right direction."