…s had made many of its families wealthy, was on its way to becoming, by 1920, the fifth largest city in America. Large numbers of immigrants, arriving particularly from central and southern Europe, continued to pour into the city, attracted by the promise of employment in Cleveland’s booming factories. Many of these newcomers lived in squalor, as the city struggled to feed, house, educate and care for its foreign born. Thanks to the…
…A. Behnke Associates landscape architecture firm of ways to improve conditions in Cleveland’s municipal-run parks, the Cleveland Foundation led an effort to restore these invaluable recreational assets. Recognizing that the City of Cleveland could no longer afford to maintain all of its 3,000 acres of parklands, the foundation guided political discussions that led to the transfer in 1978 of responsibility for the maintenance and management of…
…the Cleveland Foundation and the Leonard C. Hanna Jr. estate, CDF focused first on building low-income housing, so that slum land could be cleared in preparation for redevelopment. Then, in 1960, CDF unveiled a $500 million citywide master redevelopment plan underwritten in part by the foundation. The plan, which was formally adopted by the City of Cleveland, included a massive downtown renewal project called Erieview. Conceived by…
…Awarding its first-ever discretionary grant in the amount of $17,070, the Cleveland Foundation helped the City of Cleveland and the Cleveland Board of Education keep open playgrounds that otherwise would have operated on limited summer hours because of lack of funds….
…lopment Corporation before taking the planning chief’s job in 1980. Civic Vision affirmed the importance of neighborhood redevelopment to the city’s future, presenting detailed land-use plans for each residential area of the city. Adopted by the City Planning Commission in 1989, Civic Vision influenced the direction of downtown redevelopment, calling for continuous public access to the waterfront, a pedestrian-friendly city center and the…
…in a national demonstration project undertaken by the Ford Foundation to increase the productivity of NDOs in selected test cities. With the Cleveland Foundation, the George Gund Foundation, the Standard Oil Company and the City of Cleveland joining forces to provide the required 2-to-1 match of Ford’s $300,000 grant, the $1 million Cleveland Neighborhood Partnership Program (CNPP) was launched here in late 1985. By early 1987, CNPP had…
…Sokol Hall, restoration, $17,671 1977 Cleveland State University, Cleveland Marshall College of Law library, $50,000 1978 Case Western Reserve University, School of Applied Social Sciences, renovation, $100,000 1979 Women’s City Club of Cleveland, Cuyahoga River waterfront improvement, $20,000 1980s 1981: Convention and Visitors Bureau of Greater Cleveland 1982: Cleveland Institute of Art 1982: The Temple 1986: Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and…
MyCom (My Commitment, My Community) may be the most ambitious effort ever undertaken in Cuyahoga County to provide underserved city youths with the kinds of life-enhancing, responsibility-building experiences that middle-class children take for granted: out-of-school enrichment activities, caring adult mentors, summer jobs. The planning for MyCom began in 2007, when some 250 community organizations, government agencies, faith-based groups, and…
…s the most important of the resulting capital projects was the rebuilding of bridges carrying traffic around the Terminal Tower. Without this improvement, Forest City Enterprises, the skyscraper’s new owners, would have been unable to proceed with a $200 million plan to develop new offices, a hotel and a shopping mall called The Avenue at Tower City at the site….
…ake possible such sweeping changes as the creation of the first publicly supported community college in the state, the integration of Cleveland’s near eastern suburbs and the overhaul of the management structure of Cleveland City Hall. After Stokes’s historic election as the first African-American mayor of a major American city, GCAF (which had by then combined forces with the Cleveland Foundation) worked hand-in-glove with the new mayor to…