Posts Tagged Euclid Avenue
A Few Things to Get Off My Chest
Posted by Roldo Bartimole in Economic Development, Media, Politicians on April 21, 2010
April 21, 2010… Wait a minute now. I read where “public-private collaborators” have announced that University Hospitals and the Cleveland Clinic are telling vendors that they better locate in the Euclid Avenue Corridor.
I really don’t have an argument against trying to get more medical businesses to locate in the city. But the threats came over as a bit over the top.
And isn’t it a bit hypocritical of Steven Standley, chief administrator of University Hospitals, to tell vendors “You need to move into the city, or we will find somebody who will.” So he told The Plain Dealer. That’s a blunt threat.
It is an especially two-faced threat for a spokesperson from University Hospitals.
UH is building a brand new multi-million dollar hospital. It is not in Cleveland. Not on Euclid Avenue. So Standley isn’t taking his own advice.
Instead, University Hospitals is building a $230-million medical center in Beachwood, at the Chagrin Highlands development.
The 53-acre medical complex is being built on City of Cleveland land handed over to the late Dick Jacobs. It is virgin land that now is housing businesses – and a hospital – that should be in downtown Cleveland.
So much for that regionalism talk too.
We can thank the leadership of former Mayor George Voinovich and Council President George Forbes for this grand robbery of Cleveland. They did it in the dark too.
And UH has the nerve to threaten other businesses to locate in Cleveland “or else.”
By the way, The Plain Dealer – as in almost every single dirty deal as the Chagrin Highlands deal – fully supported it.
Now companies as Eaton Corp. flee downtown Cleveland for these virgin lands, made more enticing by Gov. Voinovich administration’s gift of more than $130 million in I-271 road improvements and a new exchange to serve the Beachwood location.
Do as I say, not as a do, I guess.
Here’s the Chagrin Highlands website:
http://www.chagrinhighlands.com/
EMBARRASSING MISTAKE
Plain Dealer Editor Susan Goldberg quickly on Wednesday corrected an embarrassing mistake from the Tuesday paper’s Health section.
The story was headlined: “Women learn to fight back against attack.”
The drawing, unfortunately, that dominated the top of the page – 10 by 8 inches – showed two figures, one a woman, the other a man choking her. Clearly, the drawing showed the assailant as black and the victim as white. Looking, you just had to ask “Why? What’s the message?”
I don’t believe it was meant to be racist. But that’s the way it turned out. About as clueless a rendering as I’ve seen.
You have to wonder where the editors were at The Plain Dealer. Maybe this is a perfect example of the cost of staff cuts. They sure weren’t giving a glance at their newspaper.
Goldberg obviously noticed also. “To avoid similar situations, a senior editor will approve every illustration that appears on our pages, taking particular pains to look for unintended imagery that could easily be misconstrued. We apologize.”
Well, thank you.
Goldberg wrote on the front page of a similar section that the “illustration on the Health section front Tuesday offended scores of Northeast Ohioans, and rightly so.”
Better believe it.
No mention was made of how many complaints were made to the paper. Surely not as many as were shocked by it.
CITY’S DECLINE CHECKED, SAYS LARKIN – OH, REALLY
It had to be one of the most misleading headlines ever in the newspaper – “Gateway checked Cleveland’s decline.”
Wouldn’t you expect that from an old buddy of Dick Jacobs? You have to wonder just how many freebies Dick gave Brent Larkin, past Plain Dealer editorial page director. You will remember that he took Brent on his jet to an All-Star game in New York City. Why Larkin wasn’t sacked then simply attests to journalism’s illness. Having him still spout his stuff further attests its condition hasn’t changed much.
Here we are 20 years later and what’s the worry – oh, the Cleveland Indians may be leaving town. Again. What can we give them this time?
Well, I guess we spent a billion dollars or more for these 20 glorious years.
Yes, we did get some new night spots. Not that we wouldn’t have gotten ANY development anyway. But Larkin should walk the downtown streets and see where he thinks Cleveland has been saved. Maybe it’s only the spots he’s taken to that he sees.
Then he can walk some of Cleveland’s neighborhoods and tell us what’s been saved there.
A hundred-yard dash down East 4th Street doesn’t make a saved city.
And you might read today’s Plain Dealer front page. The Cleveland schools – left out of the 1990s by tax abatements and exemptions – expect to have 40 students per classroom.
Unless, of course, teachers give back from their less-than-ideal pay checks. Oh, yeah.
Don’t, however, ask for a Brent Larkin column asking the team owners – past and present – to put up a dime for all the Comeback City they have enjoyed.
Does Cleveland Really Need a New $350 Million Road? And Who Says So
Posted by Roldo Bartimole in Economic Development, Media, Politicians on April 9, 2010
April 9, 2010… Tell me – of all the serious, debilitating problems of Cleveland – why has a $350 million – less than three-mile road – become a major MUST for our community?
For the usual reasons.
The private people in charge of our public agenda want it.
With other roads, streets and bridges crumbling all over the place – with public transportation shriveling and dying – a short road traversing to University Circle and our medical giants has become No. 1 on our list of priority needs.
I don’t think so.
But Mayor Frank Jackson and the subservient City Council 19 appear not to notice. The usual ostrich position is assumed.
It reminds me of the time I arrived in Cleveland – 1965. That’s when the effects of the city’s urban renewal program began to show devastating impact on the city. A weight, by the way, that deserves an urban study that will show what happened to Cleveland, when and why. Don’t expect any university to make such a study. They would have to critically take on the Establishment. It won’t happen. Only private citizens could do it.
The same institutional forces and the people leading the push for this road made the disastrous decisions that help cripple Cleveland with urban renewal plans. Plans that helped certain interests and devastated others, particularly blacks. They felt the impact of urban renewal, or as it was often called then, Negro removal.
Our leaders and The Plain Dealer have given the road the fanciful name of “Opportunity Corridor.”
Let me quote from a study done in the late 1960s, probably available at the library. It was called “The Cleveland Papers” by the Illuminating Company, an apt but tongue in cheek reference to the Cleveland Electric Illuminating Co. It was done by an ad hoc group of Citizens.
Here is how it starts:
“The notion of a local oligarchy may seem quaintly parochial or – worse – paranoid. Yet we contend that Cleveland, one of America’s great industrial cities, is dominated by a coherent, readily identifiable business oligarchy. Its power is not based in hereditary class prerogatives, but in direct control of the region’s industrial and financial corporations. It is a self-conscious oligarchy, capable of strategizing and of exercising collective authority in the pursuit of common interests. Just as its industries dominate the city’s physical aspect, the oligarchy itself dominates every phase of the city’s political and cultural life. And it is this oligarchy which is above all to blame for the city’s destruction.”
Pretty strong stuff.
If you read the entire report – examining particularly the roles of the foundations and the medical empire – you will get an education of how the power today functions in just the same way. The purpose: public decision making to enable a similar oligarchy to control events and decisions.
Anyone who wants to know how Cleveland got as it is should read this booklet. Indeed, make a copy of it. If you are a teacher of civics, history or politics, assign it to your students.
Gov. Ted Strickland, one guesses to bolster Senate candidate Lee Fisher, recently announced some $4 million to help fund some design work on the road. It goes from I-490 at E. 55th Street to East 105th street.
Why do we need this road? Do we need more land for industry? Hell no. There’s land wasting away all over the place. Do we need more land for commercial? Hell no. Commercial real estate is devastated. Do we need more land for retail? Hell no. Retail is languishing, dying all over the place.
Is University Circle isolated? Unreachable by transportation? Hell no. Didn’t we just finish a $200 million plus transit system right up Euclid Avenue from downtown to University Circle and the medical empire? Yes we did. Even as RTA dumped routes transit-dependent people really need. Yes, we notice who is important. And who is not.
So why do we need a $350 million, less than three mile road? Because the same leadership that said we had to do urban renewal throughout the city back in the 1950s said so. We know that the Cleveland and Gund foundations gave $100,000 each to push for this road.
They were mistaken then. They are mistaken now.
Tell that to Terry Egger, publisher of the Plain Dealer and co-chair of the committee for the “opportunity” Side Street to University Circle. Tell that to Chris Roynane, head of University Circle Inc., and a candidate for the new Cuyahoga County Council.
Tell that to Joe Roman and the Greater Cleveland Partnership.
We are allowing the same oligarchy of corporate/foundation leadership to send us further into the hole. They have divined that we need a $350 million Side Street. And if you think the price is set, wait until we get the full bill.
Learn something from history. You won’t find it in the Plain Dealer. Check out the Cleveland Papers for a taste of reality. And think for yourself.