The mood of Clevelanders in the early 1970s was bleak. The hope that Cleveland’s first African-American mayor could turn around the city had faded after a deadly confrontation in 1968 between police and an African-American street activist whose “youth development program” had been funded by the Stokes administration. The spontaneous ignition of the Cuyahoga River in 1969 made headlines around the country and gave rise to national derision of the city as the “Mistake on the Lake.” A great number of demoralized Clevelanders accepted this verdict.

Fate handed the Cleveland Foundation a means to help the community re-envision itself. In the fall of 1972, foundation director James Norton participated in an annual gathering of approximately a dozen members of the world’s intelligentsia aboard the luxurious yacht of a Greek shipping magnate, Nicolas Doxiadis. There Norton met and was impressed by Lawrence A. Halprin, a noted urban planner whose redevelopment projects included Ghirardelli Square on San Francisco’s waterfront and Nicollet Mall in downtown Minneapolis. The following February the foundation invited Halprin to Cleveland for a two-day visit during which time he conducted what was dubbed an “urban diagnosis.”

Halprin’s informal prescriptions for Cleveland’s recovery were later turned into a slide presentation that the foundation screened for the newly created Downtown Council of the Greater Cleveland Growth Association and other interested civic groups. Pleased by the favorable reception given Halprin’s preliminary ideas, in 1975 the Cleveland Foundation and the Growth Association commissioned his firm to conceive a master redevelopment plan for downtown Cleveland.

On Halprin’s next visit to Cleveland, he met with the mayor and private developers in addition to foundation and Growth Association officials. He also toured the city with Norton and a Plain Dealer reporter, who conveyed Halprin’s optimistic assessment of the city’s potential for renewal. A grassroots campaign was just under way to restore Playhouse Square’s gilded but abandoned vaudeville and movie theaters, and the planner affirmed that the quest to bring the city’s theater district back to life was achievable and valid, bucking up the small cadre of believers in this massive undertaking.

Halprin also recognized that the city’s industrial valley was ripe for mixed-used development. He called the “Flats” a “tremendous resource,” adding: “This is neat down here. If I had an office in Cleveland, this is where it would be.” Halprin’s enthusiasm for the Flats sparked a renewed interest in this undervalued section of town and paved the way for the creation of a restaurant and nightclub district along the industrial riverfront.

Halprin’s formal master plan remained largely unexecuted, but its farsighted support of an embryonic concept called the “Euclid Transit Corridor” that would link the city’s two major employment centers—downtown and University Circle—influenced the continuation of planning for rapid transit along Euclid Avenue. Thirty years in the making, the HealthLine, a $200 million reconfiguration of a 6.8-mile stretch of Euclid to accommodate rapid transit buses, finally opened in 2008 and has since attracted $5.8 billion in investment along the HealthLine route, confirming Halprin’s perception of the undertaking’s merits.

Even before the major redevelopment projects endorsed by the so-called Halprin Study came to fruition, the Californian’s positive assessment of the city’s future served to uplift the spirits of Cleveland’s business and civic leadership, which had been seriously demoralized by the many confrontations of the Stokes years, culminating in the mayor’s abrupt decision to abandon Cleveland for a new career as a television journalist in New York City. “Cleveland’s whole image was just so rotten,” foundation trustee Gwill York later said of the Halprin Study era, “but now there was a sense that we could be a great city again.”