Cleveland Public Square:
continuing research + speculation
Cleveland’s Public Square is an empty vessel.
It no longer functions as the community space that Moses Cleaveland set aside back in the early 19th Century. The Square has hosted some important events, like Lincoln’s funeral procession, the filming of A Christmas Story, and some very Cleveland-like events, like the celebration that followed the Indians losing the 1997 World Series. The Soldiers’ + Sailors’ monument is a very uniquely American structure, monument, and interpretive piece, unlike any other non-battlefield monument in the country. Yet in most part, Public Square has seen its better days.
Public Square and the Mall, the spatial progeny of the Burnham’s Group Plan, are flaccid relics of past urban design models. At one time each space constituted the democratic and green lungs of a thriving, dirty, and pulsing industrial city. No longer, though. Each space is devoid of relative meaning, use, function, or future. These organizing voids are merely vestiges of past planning strategies, socio-economic climates, and cultural mores that no longer unite. We must either re-use these spaces intelligently, provocatively, or hand them over to private interests to be ruthlessly developed.
Where is our imprint being left on this important urban space?
Here are some initial tactical suggestions for the re-calibration of Public Square:
1. Forget nostalgia + saccharin simulacra of past urbanism
2. Recognize ceremony, history, and tradition, but do not let it govern the design parameters of today
3. Recognize the flux of the space.
4. Maintain the perimeter
5. Unify the quadrants
6. Programmatically diversify the unified square.
7. Alter vehicular circulation.
8. Engage collective technology
9. Provide Protest Space
10. Embed Flexibility
11. Commoditize + Brand Public Square
12. Encourage Ad-hocism.
