Cleveland City Hall is looking for a developer to reimagine the downtown lakefront without the Browns.
The city on Tuesday put out a call for firms interested in redeveloping 50 acres of lakefront space, including the stadium and parking lots to the north. Mayor Justin Bibb’s administration is pursuing this new lakefront vision even as it fights in court to stop the team from leaving downtown.
With $600 million committed from the state, the Browns are moving ahead with plans to build a new, roofed stadium in Brook Park. If the team leaves, the city expects the old stadium will be demolished in 2029, according to the request issued to developers.
Cleveland’s request said developers are welcome to propose repurposing the stadium but that the city does not assume the football field will remain after 2029.
“I have to be pragmatic and crystal-eyed about where we are right now, and with or without the Browns, the residents of the city deserve to have a lakefront they can be proud of,” Bibb told reporters recently. “We want to have a lakefront that speaks to the scale of our ambitions as a city and as a region.”
What would fill the 50 lakefront acres? Bibb said he believed in “letting the marketplace” help decide. The mayor said he could see food, recreation, fishing and boating on the key piece of Lake Erie shorefront.
Cleveland’s lakefront ambitions have long fallen short of the hype. Despite years of plans across multiple mayoral administrations, this stretch of prime lakefront real estate is currently home to a parking lot.
Asked what made his plans different, Bibb pointed to the $149 million in state and federal money that the city has assembled for a new pedestrian bridge to the lakefront. Plus, the city now can depend on the help of the newly created nonprofit North Coast Waterfront Development Corp., he said.
Bibb said North Coast Yard, the city’s pop-up park on a lakefront parking lot, showed what’s possible in the space. The mayor said he was impressed by the diverse group of people who have visited the yard.
“I think Clevelanders are excited about the fact that now we may have a chance to see what [the] lakefront could look like now without that stadium down there,” he said.
The mayor said developing the lakefront would be a “multi-decade effort.” He said he is looking to such examples as Domino Park in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. The park, once the site of a sugar refinery, hosts movie nights, music and yoga along the East River.
For now, there’s no dollar amount connected to the potential contract with a developer, a city spokesperson said.
Who would pay to tear down Browns stadium?
For Browns stadium to come down, someone has to pay the demolition bill. If the team leaves for Brook Park, Bibb said he hopes that the Haslam family, which owns the Browns, and Cleveland-area business leaders will help his administration in taking it down.
“It is my hope that the Haslams and the Browns will be good corporate citizens and make sure that there’s a smooth transition for them leaving our city to going to Brook Park,” he said.
In a statement, Browns spokesman Peter John-Baptiste told Signal Cleveland that the team had spoken directly with the mayor and his administration about the team’s “willingness to assist with the demolition of the current stadium” after the end of the lease.
According to the team, Bibb was waiting until after the state budget was finalized to keep the discussion going. With the budget signed, the team is waiting on the mayor to restart talks, John-Baptiste said.
“We have long expressed our support for a reimagined Cleveland lakefront, well before concluding that an enclosed stadium in Brook Park is the best long-term stadium solution for our fans and all of Northeast Ohio,” the statement read. “We have always been willing to continue to invest in Cleveland and our region but it requires collaboration from all parties to arrive at the optimal solution. We remain ready to have those conversations with the Mayor when he’s willing and we are hopeful that begins soon.”
Under previous Mayor Frank Jackson, the Browns hired an architect to draw up a lakefront vision. Together, the team and the city sought state money for their ideas in 2021, Cleveland.com reported at the time.
The Haslams presented the Browns’ plans to Bibb in 2021, before he took office, owner Dee Haslam told reporters at a news conference with team ownership in February this year. But as mayor, Bibb opted to hire a firm to develop a new master plan.
“We had some time to kind of think about, OK, what would be impactful and transformational and really give Northeast Ohio something to be proud of?” Dee Haslam said in February. “And that’s when we started looking around thinking, OK, we should build a dome.”
Bibb stood by his decision when asked about that difference in lakefront approaches. It was important for him, as a newly elected mayor, to have a “robust” lakefront planning process — one that included public input sessions — while negotiating potential stadium renovations, he said.
“Maybe that conflicted with what the Haslams wanted. We can agree to disagree,” he said. “But I thought it was important that the residents of this city knew that there was a public process, there was public input, to ensure we had the right buy-in to execute this vision, with or without the Cleveland Browns.”
Closing Burke and rerouting the Shoreway
Cleveland’s lakefront plan calls for turning the Shoreway from a highway into a boulevard between West Third Street and East Ninth Street. Rather than pass under East Ninth, the new road would intersect it, with traffic lights. Drivers would use West Third to travel between the western and eastern branches of the Shoreway.
Asked about pushback on that idea, Bibb said that world-class cities prioritize pedestrian-friendly spaces. Cleveland has a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” with the lakefront — one that was “worth an extra four minutes on a commute,” he said.
As Cleveland tries to get development started on one 50-acre stretch of underused land, an even bigger stretch of lakefront real estate sits just next door: Burke Lakefront Airport.
In the final months of President Joe Biden’s administration, the Bibb administration started laying out its case for closing Burke. Now the city must win over a Federal Aviation Administration controlled by President Donald Trump — as well as two new U.S. senators, Bernie Moreno and Jon Husted.
The mayor said he and his team “still have some work to do” with the senators.
“I want to close Burke,” Bibb said, “and we need our federal delegation to support this administration to get it done.”
Your turn. What do you want to see replace Browns stadium?
