Hotel Bruce

Welcome to the Bruce blog—a weekly update on news, events and issues affecting life in Cleveland. Reporting as it happens on transit, development, planning, environment and arts & culture.

Basically, we write about creative ideas forming, talk to the people who have an inside track on the issues, and sometimes offer a commentary of our own. (For disclosure purposes, Bruce blog is a local, independent writer who also works part-time with nonprofit organization EcoCity Cleveland. The opinions expressed here are not necessarily those of EcoCity or any other organization).

GAP, Inc. has decided to pull their Banana Republic store out of Tower City. The reason for the decision isn't over sales figures, according to our source. Banana Republic has consistently met its sales goals, the source said, but Gap, Inc. decided it could no longer afford the rent at Tower City. The store’s last day of sales will be December 28th.

On the same note, J. Crew has decreased its space from two floors to one in Tower City, although it’s unconfirmed if it’s due to the rental rates. In addition, GAP, Inc. has also put on hold plans for a Banana Republic store located on the West side at Crocker/Bassett.

Whether or not you’re a fan of stores like Banana Republic and J. Crew, this doesn’t bode well for Tower City or Cleveland. Tower City lost its only anchor store when Dillards closed, leaving black doors that stare out at Public Square like blind eyes. With this latest loss, Tower City seems as if it’s on its way to becoming a second City Center – Columbus’ once beautiful, now abandoned downtown mall—a ghostly shadow of its former self.

As University Hospital continues to build out on a dwindling supply of land, the health system continues to look around for more parking—and some preservationists are getting nervous that the Cozad-Bates House on the south side of Mayfield Road, just east of Euclid, could be in UH’s sights. The mansion built in 1853 by Andrew Cozad is a beautiful structure that was purportedly a stop on the Underground Railroad.

The house is owned by UH, but does not currently have the addition layer of protection from demolition that the National Register of Historic Places affords.

At its most recent annual community luncheon, the Cleveland Restoration Society (CRS) shed some light on the situation by inviting two speakers, Dr. Spencer Crew, executive director of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, and Joan Southgate, an Ohio woman who retraced the steps of her enslaved ancestors from the south through Cleveland, which was known in the Underground Railroad as “Hope”.

CRS and Southgate are trying to mount a campaign to save the Cozad House and convert it into an interactive museum that celebrates Cleveland’s Underground Railroad history. Unless University Health System is willing to foot the bill, though, its unlikely that Southgate’s advocacy effort—known as Restore Cleveland Hope—will be able to go it alone.

She will need CRS to exert influence on UH or to attract a developer who can find a for-profit venture to be a co-tenant. Otherwise the Cozad House will not qualify for the historic tax credits that will help pay for 20 percent or more of the redevelopment. Rumors were floating around a while back about interest in converting the mansion to a Bed & Breakfast. With the Glidden House and Baricelli Inn thriving right around the corner, a market exists for B&Bs, but is there room for another?

The Dike 14 Committee is openly criticizing the city of Cleveland after a suggestion surfaced two weeks ago that the Port Authority is seeking to reopen the 88-acre piece of landfill for more dredge from the river and harbor. The Dike 14 Committee wants the land to remain a migratory bird habitat and for the city to chip in for a park filled with passive recreation such as wetlands, nature trails and scenic overlooks.

Last week, the committee circulated a memo urging citizens to write letters to Mayor Campbell to let Dike 14 alone. The state of Ohio owns the filled and submerged land at and around Dike 14 and the Port Authority has it leased until 2016. The Port needs permission from the state to decide any future use of Dike 14. Of course, the city owns the majority of seats on Port Authority board of directors—and even if city doesn’t own the land, questions remain about its ability to control the land use.

The city is trying to distance itself from a confrontation with the Dike 14 Committee by seeking answers from the Port about why it is considering reopening Dike 14. Allegedly, the Port is running out of options of where to cheaply dump dredge.

The Dike 14 Committee doesn’t empathize with the Port’s problem as perhaps the city does. The committee’s memo suggests that the reopening of Dike 14 for dredge is counter to “the Port Authority’s promise that as soon as Dike 10B was constructed, they would stop using Dike 14.” The committee, chaired by Barbara A. Martin, suggests that additional capacity for dredging exists at Dike 12 (which cannot be used for a public park since it is on the lakeward side of Burke Airport). Meanwhile, Bruce blog has learned that the city is seeking grant money from the state’s Coastal Management fund to help redesign Gordon Park to serve as step toward the Dike 14 park.

An interesting article appeared on the Web site of The Foundation Center, the resource center of the Cleveland Foundation, on December 2. The article titled, “Confidence in Nonprofits Lags,” reports on a survey in which people’s confidence in “charities” is still well below what it was before the events of 9-11.

The survey, which was directed by Paul C. Light of the Wagner School of Public Service at New York University and the Brookings Institution, found that approximately 18 percent of 770 people questioned in October said they had a "great deal" of confidence in charities, up from the 12 percent claiming such confidence in August. Both figures are well below the results of an Independent Sector survey conducted two months before Sept. 11 which found that 25 percent of respondents had "a lot" of confidence in nonprofit groups.

Light attributes the drop in confidence to "a steady drip, drip, drip" of negative media coverage of the (nonprofit) sector since the 9/11 attacks.

Click here to read the article

The flurry of online action alerts this week regarding Congress and the nation’s energy plan included a missive from the Alliance to Save Energy regarding The Senate’s Electric Reliability Security Act of 2003 (S. 1754).

The Electric Reliability Security Act of 2003 (S. 1754) is “an innovative and timely bill to improve electric reliability in the U.S., in large part through energy efficiency,” the Alliance writes. It was introduced on October 17, 2003 by Senator James Jeffords (I-VT).

This bill includes both a strong Public Benefit Fund, which would fund local energy efficiency programs via a small surcharge on electricity bills, and an Energy Efficiency Performance Standard, which would require electric utilities to meet customer demand in part through flexible measures to reduce energy use rather than by building more power plants. Each of these programs would do more to save energy than everything in the “comprehensive” energy bill combined.