Downtown Cleveland’s lakefront will be much more vibrant and publicly accessible year-round without the massive Huntington Bank Field blocking its use to the public on the public’s schedule. This unofficial rendering also assumes that Burke Lakefront Airport would be closed so that high-rise structures could be built on or near the lakefront (Ardoonave). CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE THEM.
I-X Center events, stadium reuse to lift downtown
A downtown is a horrible place for a National Football League (NFL) stadium. It’s why half of the 32 NFL teams don’t play their home games at downtown-based venues. And when the Cleveland Browns leave downtown for suburban Brook Park, it will be Downtown Cleveland that gains the most their move, not Brook Park. The reasons for this are many.
For the record, I don’t care where the Browns go as long as it’s not Downtown Cleveland. Thankfully, even before the Browns leave, Cleveland city officials have hedged against their departure by recently making a brilliant move to support the repurposing of at least 1 million square feet of the International Exhibition (I-X) Center into a new use, reportedly a data center.
Only 400,000 square feet of the I-X Center is available to host shows. The rest is subleased by Industrial Realty Group LLC (IRG) to warehouse users or is vacant. IRG will repurpose the remaining exhibition space in that 2.2-million-square-foot facility with a needed use and an investment that will create a small amount of new jobs…