Открытие нового парусного центра в Кливленде станет сигналом возрождения восточного района города

The new Cleveland Metroparks Community Sailing Center, which opened last month at the East 55th Street Marina off Interstate 90, is a definite wow. Named for Patrick S. Parker, the longtime leader of Parker Hannafin Corp. and son of its founder, the sailing center is a first-of-its-kind year-round lakefront center for education, meetings, dining, sailing lessons and more. It’s a place to dine on crab cakes and walleye while savoring views of the Downtown Cleveland skyline and a beautiful public marina that shelters hundreds of boats from Lake Erie’s bad moods. But it’s no stretch to see it as an early signal of a brighter future for much of the East Side — a highly segregated part of the city long-starved for resources. Before unpacking the building’s full meaning, let’s consider the structure itself. Why it’s a wow The sailing center replaces a smaller, simpler, one-story concrete-block facility, built by the State of Ohio in 1986. Metroparks spent $2 million on the new, $18.5 million structure and raised the rest from philanthropy. The three-story, 20,000-square-foot building includes high-bay spaces for indoor instruction with real boats and one-person simulators. Designed in-house by the parks district, the center is modern, boxy and utilitarian, not fancy. From certain angles, it resembles a big vessel, with a three-story observation tower looming over it like the bridge of a ship. Its upper stories are sheathed in flat, white steel panels reminiscent of a ship’s hull; the ground floor has dark gray ribbed panels, making a crisp visual contrast. A playful touch is that a row of vertically proportioned windows on the south facade, facing the I-90 Shoreway, jog up and down, like buoys bobbing on waves. The building’s footprint is shaped like a giant letter “L’’ to shield its Galley restaurant and patio from the roar of traffic on the Shoreway, said Sean McDermott, Metroparks’ chief planning and design officer. “That’s of massive importance because the highway is deafening,’’ he said. The inner side of the “L” enfolds a spacious bar and indoor restaurant that can open up to an outdoor patio and seating with glassy, garage-style doors. Additional outdoor seating occupies a second-floor rooftop, just outside of a large public meeting room. Classes coming soon for young people Aside from providing a welcoming lakeside destination, the sailing center will bring a high-quality recreational and educational amenity within relatively easy reach of residents in Cleveland’s long-underserved, majority-Black East Side, particularly young people. Programs for children aged 6-12 will be offered later this summer by the non-profit Cleveland Foundry. The organization was founded 11 years ago by philanthropist and Foundry Board Chair Mike Trebilcock, CEO of the tech firm MCPC, and his wife Gina, who serves as the Foundry’s executive director. Since it opened in 2017, the Foundry has developed youth and adult rowing opportunities at a refurbished industrial complex on the Cuyahoga River at Columbus Road Peninsula, with sailing classes offered for children at the refurbished former Coast Guard station, owned by Metroparks, at the river’s mouth. At the new center, young sailors will ply protected waters inside the marina. A full menu of instruction and regattas aboard larger vessels will also be offered, after the upcoming completion of the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Boathouse, a storage and classroom building west of the main structure. Sailing has a long history as an elite sport enjoyed mainly by the wealthy. The sailing center could help change that reality in Cleveland, Trebilcock said. He wants the Foundry’s facilities on both sides of town to double the number of children it serves annually from 5,000 to 10,000. To that end, he and his wife, and MCPC, donated $3 million to the project to reach that goal. “I didn't want to be that guy with a big idea that everybody should fund,’’ he said. “I felt that if we had a big idea and we thought enough of it, we should fund it.’’ Why such a long wait? So why has the city’s East Side had to wait for decades to get something as classy and civic-minded as the sailing center? Infrastructure and geography help explain why. Edgewater Park on the West Side has long functioned as the city’s best beach, with a curving strand amply separated from the West Shoreway to the south and sheltered on the west by a natural bluff. Gordon Park, the East Side counterpart to Edgewater, has no such natural protection. It faces northwest into Lake Erie’s prevailing winds, and the lake’s bottom drops off sharply, as opposed to the gentle beach at Edgewater. The shoreline at Gordon Park, which no longer has a beach, is largely armored by bulkheads or riprap boulders. Worst of all, Gordon Park was cut in half by the Memorial Shoreway, now part of Interstate 90, when the highway was built from the 1940s to the 1960s. The divided sections are now connected by a pathetically thin walkway spanning 10 lanes of traffic and exit ramps. Burke Lakefront Airport, which opened in 1947, and which the city is now thinking of closing, has long created another massive barrier to Lake Erie, along with the CSX rail lines that parallel the Shoreway to the south. Embracing waterfronts It has taken time for Metroparks to tackle waterfronts and address the east-west inequity, but it’s on the case now. Founded in 1917, the parks district originally focused on creating the arc of Emerald Necklace reservations that rings Cleveland and its suburbs. Metroparks began to change focus in 2009. That’s when it partnered with the city, Cuyahoga County and the nonprofit Canalway Partners to extend the regional Towpath Trail five miles north from Harvard Road through the industrial Flats in the Cuyahoga Valley to Canal Basin Park near Downtown Cleveland. Since 2010, under CEO Brian Zimmerman, Metroparks has devoted new energy to waterfronts. The West Side benefited first in part because it had fewer natural and manmade barriers. Also, catalytic investments, including the Towpath and a revamp of the West Shoreway, were already in the works. In 2013, Metroparks leased Cleveland’s 450 acres of lakefront parks, taking over from the less capable Ohio Department of Natural Resources, which had managed the parks, not always well, since 1978. In 2014, Metroparks bought the 22-acre Wendy Park on the west side of the Cuyahoga River from Cuyahoga County. It also started assembling assets around its Merwin’s Wharf restaurant on the east bank of the Cuyahoga River on Columbus Road Peninsula. Improvements at Edgewater and Wendy Park soon followed, along with trails and a bike-pedestrian bridge connecting West Side areas to the Towpath Trail, completed in 2021. The last gap in the West Side network will be filled in late 2027 when parks system is scheduled to complete the Lake Link Trail at the upcoming Irishtown Bend Park. While that work is underway, the city expects by late 2027 to launch a $150 million revamp of infrastructure on the downtown lakefront. That work is aimed at teeing up redevelopment of 50 acres alongside North Coast Harbor and attractions including the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. Big changes coming With so much accomplished on the West Side, and with the downtown lakefront ready for serious improvement, Metroparks is now taking on manmade and natural barriers that have slowed progress on the East Side. The parks district has a “big hairy audacious goal for the next 30 to 35 years to create interconnected green space here creating more equity and access to the lakefront,” Zimmerman said. Near-term plans call for completing a new, 2.7-mile lakefront community trail from East Ninth Street downtown to the 55th Street Marina and the sailing center. It is slated to open by Labor Day. The project is a partnership that includes the city and Cuyahoga County. Also, this summer, a $10 million revamp of the southern half of Gordon Park is unfolding, with $8 million donated by the Mandel Foundation, the namesake funder of the new community trail from downtown. Looking further ahead, Zimmerman wants to create a stronger connection over I-90 between the two sections of Gordon Park. “I would love to see a less utilitarian bridge that would be a land bridge concept, but wider,’’ he said. He envisions substantial greenery and the ability for wildlife to cross, as well as people. “I know that's not without its very unique challenges,’’ he said, “but if you don't dream big you never aspire to grow.’’ A centerpiece worthy of 'CHEERS' The future centerpiece of the East Side lakefront will be CHEERS, the upbeat acronym for Cleveland Harbor Eastern Embayment Resilience Strategy. CHEERS will protect I-90 from Lake Erie during heavy storms and create an expansive new waterfront reserve for public enjoyment. Over decades, the project will use sediment dredged from the Cuyahoga River to create roughly 75 acres of new park land, with coves, beaches, hills, trails and public amenities, between the East 55th Street Marina, Gordon Park and the Port of Cleveland’s 88-acre Cleveland Lakefront Nature preserve. A grand alignment It’s significant that the East Side projects undertaken by Metroparks aligns with efforts involving the city, nonprofits and foundations. Those projects include investments in St. Clair Superior by the Mandel Foundation and in the Hough neighborhood to the south, by the Cleveland Foundation. Further south, the city and the Site Readiness For Good Jobs Fund are collaborating on the recently announced Midline, a project to assemble and clean hundreds of acres of abandoned factories to bring clean, 21st century manufacturing jobs back to the city, reviving its onetime walk-to-work communities. A new greenway will connect the Midline area north to the lakefront and south to the Opportunity Corridor redevelopment zone. Other upcoming Metroparks projects, include completing a trail from Slavic Village to the Towpath and Downtown Cleveland, with a potential future link to Opportunity Corridor. The 1.6-mile Slavic Village connector has been awarded $19.5 million in federal money, but Metroparks is awaiting final approval on drawing down the money to start work, McDermott said. The new parks and trails will address longstanding inequities on the East Side. They’ll also weave threads of green public space through a 2000-acre tax increment financing district and a Housing Innovation District, both proposed by the administration of Mayor Justin Bibb to rebuild neighborhoods that have been emptying since the 1950s. All of the potential new development will be within easy reach of a place where a child could learn to sail. That’s why the new sailing center is more than it may now seem. It’s a place to consider how a better future for large portions of the East Side is starting to emerge, at long last.