PUBLIC SQUARE LOW ON CLEVELAND'S NEED LIST

Steve Litt is back on the front page today promoting another supposed uplift for Cleveland’s despondent condition: this time another redo of Public Square.

 

He writes: “City planners have dreamed for decades of doing something to resolve the conflict between vehicles and people in the square and to restore the sense of the town commons implied in the 1796 street plan that gave downtown its form.”

 

I wish he’d name the city planners doing this dreaming.

I hate to break it to Steve but Cleveland even by 1815 was a village and hit a population of 500 only by 1824. Maybe these people, who likely knew most of each other, (and even lived in the city) could amble about a public square and find out the latest news and gossip. A true community public square. What Sunday fun!

 

But now we have the Plain Dealer, television news and something called an internet. They give us the gossip, insipid as it may be.

 

Really this another downtown plan by the same downtown interests as always. Their real interest is keeping certain people off the public square: Homeless people. Young black. Panhandlers. You know those people who interfere with the business of downtown interests.

 

It’s being pushed by two front groups of the Greater Cleveland Partnership (GCP) – Parkworks and the Downtown Cleveland Alliance.

 

The money – always available for these Establishment projects – comes from The Alliance and the John P. Murphy Foundation. Both occupy space at Tower City whose front door is Public Square. The Murphy Foundation has a fair market value of $40 million.

 

One proposal suggests a 76 feet mound of dirt. Now isn’t that clever planning. That must have taken imagination.

 

This is another Greater Cleveland Partnership project for the rest of us to finance. The Greater Cleveland Partnership, if you don’t know, is the representative of the top corporate people in Cleveland. It doesn’t represent the interests of ordinary people. GCP gets something as the Murphy Foundation interested and we’re off to the races.

 

All the usual suspects have usual trite things to say. City Planning director Bob Brown finds the ideas “fascinating.” Joe Cimperman Public Square is “pretty thrilled.” Chris Roynane is “excited.”

 

Is there anyone here who thinks for him or herself? Does everyone have to eat the pie served by GCP and its boosters?

 

In the mid 1980s we spent some $12 million to spruce up Public Square and I’m sure more than that (though I can’t find a figure) in 1975 when the wife of PD publisher and Editor Tom Vail, Iris Vail, headed up a beautification of Public Square.

 

Unfortunately, Litt, who has the PD morgue files, doesn’t tell us just how much we’ve already spent in “bettering” Public Square.

 

With all the problems that Cleveland has why is the PD pushing once again – at the behest of downtown interests, not the least the Tower City gang whose front door is Public Square – for another redo of Public Square.

 

Can’t they pay attention to the real problems of real Cleveland people? And then they grouse about “leadership” as they march in lock step to every task presented by the downtown business people.

 

Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Yes, sir.

 

The grandiose talk of turning Public Square into a Chicago Millennium Park is so farfetched as to be laughable. Litt should be ashamed of himself for putting this as even a thought. Chicago’s park cost $475 million, some $270 million from the city’s revenues.

 

Have you noticed that the city is supposed to be so hard-up that it has to charge $8 a month to collect people’s garbage?

 

I’ve walked across Public Square many times. I’ve been to demonstrations on Public Square. It can serve its purpose as it is. Let’s not get carried away with all this feel good stuff that’s being sold by the same old people.

 

“The project shows that a critical mass of leaders in Cleveland now believes that landscape design is essential to the success of the city and not a matter of added shrubs when a major building project or highway is finished,” Litt writes.

 

Please.