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Cleveland looks to link lakefront and downtown with soaring pedestrian bridge

Cleveland looks to link lakefront and downtown with soaring pedestrian bridge

Cleveland’s lakefront attractions and downtown have long been estranged neighbors, not easily accessed from one another without a car. The city and Cuyahoga County plan to fix that, offering a 900-foot bridge for pedestrians and bicycles that will hop over railroad tracks and The Shoreway, a lakefront highway built in the 1930s.

The $25 million bridge takes off from the downtown Mall, touching down between the I.M. Pei–designed Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Great Lakes Science Center, designed by Boston’s E. Verner Johnson.

Another Bostonian is heading up design duties for the new bridge. Miguel Rosales’ firm Rosales Partners hatched three design schemes with the help of Parsons Brinckerhoff. The final design has not been selected, and regional officials say it will come down to community input.

Construction is expected to begin May 2015, wrapping up by June 2016.

But before that, public authorities are seeking comment from the bridge’s eventual users by hosting a free public meeting from 6:00 to 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, November 13, in the County Council chambers on the fourth floor of the county administration building, 2079 East Ninth Street, Cleveland.

All the options are visually striking. Whether suspension, cable-stayed, or arched, the bone-white bridge wends through renderings made public last week, framing the Cleveland Browns’ lakeside FirstEnergy Stadium. As the Cleveland Plain Dealer‘s Steven Litt wrote, the bridge fulfills a longtime goal of planners and urbanists in northeast Ohio:

Creating a bridge from the Mall to North Coast Harbor and lakefront attractions including the Rock Hall has been something of a holy grail in Cleveland city planning for nearly two decades.

Yet until now, the city has been unable to mobilize support and fund the project. The city failed three times in recent years to win a federal grant for the project under the TIGER program, short for Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery.

But now, Litt wrote, the city and county each agreed to kick in $10 million, which led the state to close the $5 million gap. A 2013 city-county partnership and the news that Cleveland would host the next Republican National Convention apparently provided the incentive they needed to take on the project, which officials said will be complete by the convention in 2016. The three design options are as follows:

The suspension bridge option:

The cable-stayed option:

The arch option:

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