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, the Bruce blog should mention it works part-time with nonprofit organization EcoCity Cleveland).

Apparently Cleveland planners are sniffing around the West Shore Trolley idea proposed by EcoCity Cleveland and others—looking into where it might go and identifying problems on that potential route. The proposed route could run on the (soon to be abandoned?) Norfolk-Southern line through Westlake and Lakewood. Among the myriad of questions is how to cross the river bridge in the Flats with electric cars; the future of the Port Authority’s home, which seems daily to be heading closer to Whiskey Island; and is there a future for freight rail on the Norfolk-Southern line?

A second option is being floated by Ken Prendergast of the Ohio Association of Railroad Passengers. Prendergast proposes using the Norfolk-Southern line from Lakewood, but instead of crossing the river at the mouth of the Cuyahoga, he envisions a short link from W. 28th Street to the lower deck of the Detroit-Superior Bridge where trolley tracks for the old Cleveland subway still exist. Once it gets to the other side, the idea gets more than a little dicey because of a lack of track. The Prendergast proposal would find funding for a new system of track running downtown on Frankfort (the side street where the Little Bar & Grille is located). Frankfort runs parallel to Superior Avenue the length of downtown and could connect to RTA’s proposed downtown trolley at E. 17th Street. The problem, besides finding funders for the line, are a number of right of way constraints. Right now it seems like a lot of "what ifs" wrapped around a good idea.

Advocates of banning pesticide spraying scored a victory in Lyndhurst last week, but it was just the first step in the larger battle to control the fate of spraying in Cuyahoga County. The (widely reported) good news is that Lyndhurst passed a resolution banning the county from spraying synthetic pyrethroids like Biomist, which kill a few mosquitoes while potentially causing nerve cell damage to humans and other invertebrates. Emboldened by its win, The Ohio Coalition Against the Misuse of Pesticides’ strategy now is to take the fight directly to the Cuyahoga County Board of Health. OCAMP director Barry Zucker told Bruce blog that he wrote a letter to the board a month ago requesting that it hold a public hearing on spraying and, surprise, didn’t hear back. Now he’s asking County Commissioner Tim McCormick, who has indicated that he might support a review of policy, to hold a hearing. "If [McCormick] agrees to hold a hearing, then that’s huge," Zucker says. "The Board of Health doesn’t like to hold hearings with my people, because they lose."

The Lonely Planet is not your father’s tour book—it and Rough Guide are gaining a rep with the hipster jet set as the go-to guides. So it surprised the hell outta Bruce blog—on ‘holiday’ recently in Montreal—when a glance at Lonely Planet for the Great Lakes revealed a very lame take on our Cleveland. Aside from the fact that we don’t rank with LP’s editorial staff to earn our own pocket guide, the paltry pages devoted to C-town warned the wary traveler to avoid all of our neighborhoods at night and gave a run of the mill listing of entertainment options including The Flats (C’mon!). All of the usual suspects made the list, but none of the swank spots that appeal to hordes of young travelers such as Tremont and Ohio City’s resto-bars, The West Side Market, Little Italy, Cleveland Heights’ Coventry Road and Cedar-Lee) appeared. Hey Lonely Planet, if you’re looking for a writer with an insider’s take on Cleveland, Bruce blog is willing to help.

Observations from Montreal: The city’s extensive, curbed bike/inline skate lane system should be the envy of most cities because it’s used by dozens of commuters and families tooling around at all hours of the day, connects great commercial districts to neighborhoods and urban parks. Festivals are running constantly, with a weeklong African festival featuring free live music performances and movies in the park running at the same time as the Festival of Laughs. The Plateau area is jam-packed with so many well-dressed hipsters, beautiful people, cool resto-bars, cafes, and clothing stores that it might put the East Village and SoHo to shame. The Village is a wonderful gay-friendly neighborhood filled with awesome people and places, like Le Spirite Lounge on Rue Ontario. It’s like stepping into a dream, with its walls completely wrapped in tinfoil, mirrors, antique lights, home-made leopard print booths, French soul on the stereo and Patrice et Roz-man running the show. It is one of the most divine dining experience on this earth. It's organic and vegetarian and the height of sustainability— if you don't finish your entree, there's no dessert.

I gotta kvetch for a minute about trucks, especially city trucks, parked with engines on. If the City of Cleveland is looking for a positive PR move and to vastly improve the air quality in this region, Mayor Campbell’s office would send out a memo to all heads of departments to mandate that city service crews cut their engines when they’re on the job. If the mayor doesn’t want to face the ire of the unions, then council can draft an anti-idling law. Other cities have done it. There’s no reason —no reason— for workers fixing gas or water lines or waiting for cement to dry to have their F350s idling for an hour. Anti-idling laws may not be macho, but they can have an immediate impact on our already lousy air quality.