Empty light rail through the woods does make for a cool ride, though.
1 Comment
Doug v
on July 25, 2024 at 9:53 pm
You are judging the system based on today criteria. The Shaker Rapid (blue & green lines ) was built in the ww1 era, when Cleveland was the 6th largest city in the country. It was basically part of a real estate development., to sell lots & posh homes to the executive class that ran Cleveland’s industries and worked downtown. They didn’t want high density development, that was for the working classes. They wanted to get away from the smoky crowded center city. The rapid avoided a long slow streetcar ride downtown, a great selling point to real estate customers. . Shaker even had a nice reverse commute business bringing domestic help from city out to the burbs.
the Van Sweringans who built the suburbs also built the Union Terminal / Terminal Tower (‘TowerCity’) as a Rockefeller Center type development: shopping, hotels, offices and the main railroad station. Very TOD. It was planned in the late teens – early 20s, it even had accommodations for the city’s interurban lines to run into it. By the time in was opened in 1930, The auto age had taken hold , no interurban made it into the terminal.
All the stuff you saw in Tower City was from the 80s-90s conversion of the derelict station into a ‘festival marketplace’ mall which was the urbanism thing then after Baltimore Inner Harbor. Well as you saw, it flopped, so the derelict station is now a derelict mall. It’s a heartbreaker not see the old town stagger from failure to failure. Best things we have are institutions like the orchestra & art museum funded by the old industrial wealth that built the city. Deindustrialization hurts. The high density areas of a century ago are pretty much Detroit style devastation.
It was insane when they rebuilt the terminal & the lines in the 80s that they didn’t convert to system where all cars could operate anywhere with a single fleet. But I think rta/Cleveland wanted to keep the ‘prestige’ of a heavy rail system like the other big boys. Even though there was no way to justify it financially.
One winter Sunday when I was a kid in late 70s I got my dad to take me on a ride on the Van Aken line. It was all PCC then. We got stuck for an hour at the end of the line, service was once an hour on Sundays. Cold weather, not much to do but admire a storage yard of PCC s waiting for the Monday rush. Lot more development there now. But everyone comes by car, that’s just how it is in a low density city. Keep up the good work!
You are judging the system based on today criteria. The Shaker Rapid (blue & green lines ) was built in the ww1 era, when Cleveland was the 6th largest city in the country. It was basically part of a real estate development., to sell lots & posh homes to the executive class that ran Cleveland’s industries and worked downtown. They didn’t want high density development, that was for the working classes. They wanted to get away from the smoky crowded center city. The rapid avoided a long slow streetcar ride downtown, a great selling point to real estate customers. . Shaker even had a nice reverse commute business bringing domestic help from city out to the burbs.
the Van Sweringans who built the suburbs also built the Union Terminal / Terminal Tower (‘TowerCity’) as a Rockefeller Center type development: shopping, hotels, offices and the main railroad station. Very TOD. It was planned in the late teens – early 20s, it even had accommodations for the city’s interurban lines to run into it. By the time in was opened in 1930, The auto age had taken hold , no interurban made it into the terminal.
All the stuff you saw in Tower City was from the 80s-90s conversion of the derelict station into a ‘festival marketplace’ mall which was the urbanism thing then after Baltimore Inner Harbor. Well as you saw, it flopped, so the derelict station is now a derelict mall. It’s a heartbreaker not see the old town stagger from failure to failure. Best things we have are institutions like the orchestra & art museum funded by the old industrial wealth that built the city. Deindustrialization hurts. The high density areas of a century ago are pretty much Detroit style devastation.
It was insane when they rebuilt the terminal & the lines in the 80s that they didn’t convert to system where all cars could operate anywhere with a single fleet. But I think rta/Cleveland wanted to keep the ‘prestige’ of a heavy rail system like the other big boys. Even though there was no way to justify it financially.
One winter Sunday when I was a kid in late 70s I got my dad to take me on a ride on the Van Aken line. It was all PCC then. We got stuck for an hour at the end of the line, service was once an hour on Sundays. Cold weather, not much to do but admire a storage yard of PCC s waiting for the Monday rush. Lot more development there now. But everyone comes by car, that’s just how it is in a low density city. Keep up the good work!