What was can be again, albeit modernized with trains now being manufactured for the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority, left, and Amtrak, right. Tower City Center was built as Cleveland Union Terminal — the city’s local, regional and long-distance passenger rail hub. If Bedrock wants foot traffic and a vibrant Tower City Center, restoring that rail hub will do that for them (Methodicle). CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE THEM.
Ex-Cleveland Union Terminal starves for foot traffic, vision
A COMMENTARY
Like many who work in one of the dozen buildings of Downtown Cleveland’s Tower City Center complex, Nora Romanoff parks her car where more than 100 railroad passenger trains a day once pulled into or out of a labyrinth built as Cleveland Union Terminal. Just as rail travelers did from 1930-1977, she rides an escalator up into a grand railroad concourse that was significantly remodeled in 1988-90 to become today’s retail-heavy The Avenue at Tower City.
But what she sees these days is not what travelers saw in those days — a bustling train station or the transit-supported retail hub that followed it before dwindling away in the 21st century. Both uses faded primarily due to our over-dependence on the car but other factors were at play as well. Now, the 366,000-square-foot The Avenue is virtually empty and devoid of foot traffic.
“I walk through there every day to go to work and I kinda can’t believe it,” said Romanoff at a City Planning Commission meeting last month.
Romanoff, the vice president of business development at Bedrock Real Estate, owner of Tower City Center, was asked at that Feb, 7 meeting by commission Chair Lillian Kuri what should be done programmatically with Tower City, especially its Avenue shopping mall. Romanoff said she gets asked this question a lot. It didn’t produce an easy answer.
“It speaks to malls and shopping centers may be going away, and the importance and significance of Tower City as a place remains,” Romanoff said. “It does for me as well.”
In other words, Bedrock has this architecturally impressive space but hasn’t yet discovered how to activate it. Sometimes the answer requires the property owner to look beyond the scope of their property and influence the external policy and built landscape to affect the change necessary for their real estate to succeed. Bedrock owner Dan Gilbert did it in Detroit. He can and should do it here, too.
To say that Tower City Center lacks foot traffic is an understatement. Only during special events does it have much of a pulse. Yet property owner Bedrock has declined to consider adding major traffic generators that would make Tower City unique among all major retail properties in Greater Cleveland (KJP).
Yes, Bedrock is spearheading a massive $3.5 billion redevelopment of a 35-acre area between Public Square and the Cuyahoga River waterfront. At that Feb. 7 meeting, the planning commission approved Bedrock’s riverfront masterplan. It is an important change that will aid the fortunes of Tower City to an extent. But it’s daunting to realize this $3.5 billion investment isn’t large enough. Something was missing from the masterplan — an answer for how to structurally reactivate The Avenue. Both the question and answer are big.
“We are looking at ways to take an existing structure and to make sure that we use it to its highest and best use in terms of the current tenants of Tower City,” Romanoff said. “We’ve also tried to maintain what they need. And in terms of design, program and tenants, that is very much an ongoing conversation at Bedrock.”
She was rightfully proud of Bedrock maintaining The Avenue as a clean, well-lit and safe space that’s open 24 hours a day. It continues to be the main station for the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority’s (GCRTA) three rail lines — the Red, Blue and Green lines. But they have lost a lot of ridership since its two biggest sources of traffic have declined — commuting downtown from park-n-ride lots and downtown shopping, especially from the eastern suburbs.
With continued auto-dependent urban sprawl spreading farther away, fewer people want to commute so far into the city for work. And with online shopping and new suburban shopping centers that opened after Tower City did (Crocker Park, South Park Mall, Legacy Village, Eton Chagrin Boulevard and Pinecrest), they serve Greater Clevelanders who have moved from the inner suburbs to new outer suburbs, including into the collar counties surrounding Cuyahoga.
There are still a few commuters who ride the Rapid to work downtown, although based on the empty park-n-ride lots at stations, it is very few. Fewer still are the suburban shoppers who board the Rapid to go shopping at stores at Tower City or elsewhere downtown. And yet the Rapid and urban core residents are the largest sources of what little foot traffic exists at Tower City.
“So what has remained the same is that Tower City is the primary source of entry to this development,” Romanoff said of Bedrock’s riverfront vision. “It will serve as a connection to and from the rapid transit lines that we co-host together with GCRTA as well as the hub of Public Square. It also creates a primary backbone to not only our shore-to-core vision but also the mayor’s shore-to-core-to-shore vision that we partner with the city on.”
Amtrak’s proposed mini-hub and Cuyahoga Valley Scenic Railroad trains could converge at Tower City Center, once the Cleveland Union Terminal railroad station, at a cost similar to that of expanding Amtrak service on the lakefront and relocating freight traffic to the south side of downtown. Yet the benefits of restoring Cleveland Union Terminal could be greater than that of expanding Amtrak on the lakefront. All Aboard Ohio says an alternative analysis could verify this (Horton Harper).
Thus even if it can deliver everything it wants, it will take decades for Bedrock to develop all of the new residential, hotel, entertainment and yes, offices and retail, in its riverfront vision. In addition to 1.4 million square feet of commercial space, Bedrock anticipates constructing more than 2,000 residential units.
“What we are learning is the ability retrofit the space is an evolution,” Romanoff added. “We, just last week, pulled our full strategic team together to talk about how that continues to be a priority. Tower City, as indicated in the master plan, will serve as that promenade to the development and back.”
So it is not clear to Bedrock where the growth in The Avenue’s tenants and sources of foot traffic will come from. Sure, the existing and planned residential development in and near downtown will bring some new foot traffic to and through Tower City. Even if it happens within Bedrock’s decades-long development timeline, it won’t be enough.
It was frustrating to hear that Bedrock didn’t have a stronger answer on how to reactivate Tower City because, to me, the answer was at best not considered and at worst outright rejected. And I wasn’t the only one frustrated.
Planning Commission Vice Chair August Fluker said that a less car-centric connectivity piece was needed. Downtowns thrive not because of cars but because of walking, biking and transit — all of which are neglected in this city, county, state and country.
“If we don’t figure out how people move in and around downtown, and how we get people to Tower City as opposed to just driving, and it’s not just driving, then we have an issue,” Fluker said. “When we start looking at how this stuff connects, what’s that connective tissue that’s going to tie all this together? We have good parts. But what’s going to pull it all together? We need to be cognizant of that.”
Potential Cuyahoga Valley Scenic Railroad access routes into Tower City Center. Of all these choices, Bedrock urged that the least useful one, the green one, be adopted (AECOM).
GCRTA isn’t going to extend its rail system to new customers farther out. Nor is it going to provide better access to downtown, such as by building a Downtown Rail Loop — unless pushed. Since GCRTA won’t expand to reach more riders, GCRTA needs to do a more proactive job of bringing more riders to its rail system.
First, it is long past time that GCRTA aggressively redevelops its vacant rail station park-n-ride lots with dense, walkable, mixed, transit-supportive land uses. It is reacting to others who have found their way to GCRTA’s excess properties which, so far, GCRTA hasn’t included its paved parking lots among them.
Flaherty & Collins of Indianapolis is pursuing two single-use apartment buildings at long-inactive pieces of land at two West Side Red Line stations. The Depot on Detroit at the West Boulevard-Cudell station and an as-yet unnamed apartment building at the West Park station are in the works. It’s a start, albeit a very small one.
Bedrock and other major developers should encourage GCRTA and the Federal Transit Administration to issue a request for proposals (RFP) to offer up most of the property at GCRTA stations for sale or ground lease to private developers. Each station could be the subject of an RFP, with GCRTA offering to build a parking garage for its customers’ use and for that the RFP winner, designed to suit the needs of both.
Bedrock, as the owner of Tower City, could have the most to gain from this. Therefore it should be the most proactive in lobbying for it. Each station developed with hundreds of apartments, condos and townhomes would provide a customer base for current and future Tower City tenants, with station retail limited to neighborhood cafes, convenience stores, daycares and training centers.
In 2023, NEOtrans found that if GCRTA offered up the parking lots and landscaped areas at all 21 of its park-n-ride rail stations, it could turn their 80 acres into more productive uses. If developed at transit-supportive densities, that acreage could host from 2,000 to 2,800 housing units for 4,800 to 6,720 people with 112,800 to 157,920 square feet of neighborhood retail. For those transit villages, Tower City could be their go-to retail destination.
In a presentation to Bedrock representatives, Cuyahoga Valley Scenic Railroad showed this option with their passenger trains, possibly operating as short shuttle trains, running like street cars in into riverfront station below Tower City Center. Bedrock considered it to be inconsistent with its riverfront vision (CVSR).
Is this too much different than Gilbert being one of the leaders in the development of Detroit’s QLINE streetcar? Since 2017, it has run along 3.3 miles of Woodward Avenue to connect and support Bedrock’s many developments in Detroit. In 2023, the year of the most recent data in the National Transit Database, Detroit’s QLINE streetcar carried 2,569 riders per day.
It eclipses the 1,812 daily riders carried on GCRTA’s Blue/Green Lines in the same year. The Shaker Rapids could certainly use a boost from transit-oriented development at more than a few of its stations. While GCRTA’s Red Line Rapid carried five times as many riders in 2023, it has more empty park-n-ride lots that are screaming for new development to foster more ridership than twice-a-day commuters did.
But where the real frustration lies is in Bedrock’s refusal to recognize that they own a former railroad station and the potential foot traffic opportunities it can offer if exploited. All Aboard Ohio and graphic designer Methodicle are organizing support for restoring Tower City Center as a railroad station by creating a new rendering showing GCRTA’s and Amtrak’s new trains serving the terminal.
Dan Shinkle, the city’s principal planner for Major Projects & Public Realms said that, of the 57 public comments received by Planning Commission about Tower City’s riverfront plan, half of which were about CVSR, with a desire to extend the line to downtown Cleveland and into Tower City Center.
But he merely chalked it up to being the issue of the moment, as CVSR and the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency have been studying the extension.
While Bedrock laments The Avenue’s inactivity, Bedrock refused to invite tourist line Cuyahoga Valley Scenic Railroad (CVSR) to extend its trains from Rockside Road in Independence to Tower City. What retail landlord refuses to welcome such a high-profile anchor tenant like that?
Instead, Bedrock suggested a downtown station site for CVSR’s projected 75,000 to 150,000 annual passengers one-half-mile away from Tower City via a difficult pedestrian routing that would negate any benefit to The Avenue or Bedrock and reduce potential ridership for CVSR.
A track and station platform arrangement for transit and all railroad passenger trains at Tower City Center, utilizing the pre-1990 track alignments of Cleveland Union Terminal. This is concept was drawn by the author on an original Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority graphic (GCRTA/KJP).
And CVSR isn’t the only potential rail tenant. To my knowledge, Bedrock representatives did not reach out to intercity passenger railroads Amtrak and Brightline to see if they were interested in sparking a commercial rebirth of Cleveland Union Terminal as part of their expansion plans. Had they, Bedrock reps might be surprised at what they would likely hear.
Sources close to Amtrak tell NEOtrans that if Bedrock had reached out to Amtrak and the city, it would likely lead to an analysis of whether a passenger rail station on downtown’s lakefront or at Tower City Center made more economic sense. That analysis would identify and compare the costs and benefits of either station location for hosting Amtrak’s proposed addition of a dozen daily trains to and from Cleveland, from and to Detroit and Cincinnati.
Both routes are the subject of state-funded service development plans by the Ohio Department of Transportation and its Ohio Rail Development Commission (ORDC). The first phase of the Cleveland-Columbus-Dayton-Cincinnati plan is likely to be done in May and the first phase of the Cleveland-Toledo-Detroit plan is due to be done in July.
Based on ridership at other Midwest cities like Milwaukee, St. Louis and Detroit, each route would generate hundreds of thousands of boardings and alightings at a Cleveland station. Combined, it would be like having a small- to medium-sized airport at Tower City.
With bipartisan support from Gov. Mike DeWine and the Ohio General Assembly plus the business community led by Ohio Chamber of Commerce, ORDC this week advanced the plans into the completion stage. And it’s not just Amtrak who is interested in running passenger trains to Ohio.
With the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority changing to a new, standardized light-rail fleet, it no longer needs its existing, larger, dual high- and low-level platforms at its Tower City Station. Instead, all lines could serve a smaller station that exists at Tower City — the old Shaker Rapid station that GCRTA uses during major construction projects. GCRTA’s existing station could remodeled into a four-track station for Amtrak, Brightline and/or Cuyahoga Valley Scenic Railroad (KJP).
Brightline, operator of Florida’s Miami-Orlando higher-speed train service and builder-operator of a new Las Vegas-Los Angeles high-speed line now under construction, wants to expand to the Midwest. The first Midwest route out of Brightline Founder/CEO Wes Edens‘ mouth recently was “Cleveland to Columbus and whatnot.”
Brightline stations are a real estate magnet. They are essentially podiums on which new development soars with new high-rises, both commercial and residential. The station podiums themselves are basically shopping malls with trains. They have grocery, gift and clothing stores, restaurants, cafes and more.
The trains make the real estate accessible and attractive and the rents from the real estate help cross-subsidize the trains, just like Clevelander Henry Flagler did in building the Florida East Coast railroad — on which Brightline’s trains run at more than 100 mph today.
Wouldn’t that be amazing thing for Tower City Center and for Cleveland today? Tower City would have a hook that no other retail center in Greater Cleveland could offer.
Rebuilding our cities isn’t just about new housing and businesses. It’s improving the connectivity within the city and to other cities by more than just the car. The hub for that in Cleveland’s greatest years was at Cleveland Union Terminal because its links were unparalleled. The hub for that in Cleveland’s next greatest years should be no different.
END
