tRUST-lab

In early 2021, the tRUST-lab was invited by the Old Brooklyn Community Development Corporation and the City of Cleveland Department of Community Development to partner on a neighborhood design initiative that looked at Old Brooklyn through its position as a “middle neighborhood”. The semester’s studio focused on understanding Old Brooklyn’s unique history, its identity as a “middle neighborhood” in Cleveland, and its growth as a diverse, affordable, and vibrant place to live, work, and play. The goal was to envision a series of strategic landscape, urban, and infrastructure interventions for a particular part of Old Brooklyn – roughly between Pearl Road and W. 11th Street, from Brighton Park to Schaff Road – that reflected neighborhood, city, and community priorities. 

Located approximately 5 miles from downtown Cleveland’s Public Square, Old Brooklyn is a working class commuter neighborhood of Cleveland with a series of diverse commercial corridors – most importantly Pearl Road (Route 42), State Street, and Broadview Road. With the Cuyahoga River establishing its eastern boundary, the neighborhood expands to the west and encompasses a broad array of residential blocks and single family homes. Historically a white working class community that found employment in the nearby industrial zone along the river, Old Brooklyn is now Cleveland’s fastest growing Latino and Black neighborhood, with currently between 40-50% of school aged population from the Latino community. Critically – and reflecting the broader issue of wealth disparity in the US – it has suffered from an increase of more than 200% of residents living below the poverty level while increasing its share of population making more than $100,000 per year. 

During the past 20 years, unequal economic diversification and stratification of wealth has squeezed out those in the middle and at the bottom in Old Brooklyn. Over the past five years, however, the neighborhood has been successful in recruiting dozens of new businesses reflecting a dynamic future: Hispanic and Black owned restaurants, coffee shops, small retailers, and artists. In order to support this positive trend and attract a younger, skilled workforce and more families who may otherwise choose the suburbs, Old Brooklyn needs innovative visions to support minority businesses, to create welcoming and proximate new public spaces, and to recommend a diverse range of housing types at a mix of densities and incomes. 

Through critical analyses and awareness of community aspirations, students worked in teams and individually to first understand existing physical and demographic conditions in Old Brooklyn. These early explorations in parallel with stakeholder interviews led to proposals later in the semester for infill development (workforce housing) and adaptive re-use of buildings, green infrastructure, improved streetscapes, and a range of programmatic activities to address community needs. The findings from the study concluded that there was a need for: 

Promoting economic development in the form of mixed-income and mixed- use housing (market rate, workforce, and affordable) with ground-floor commercial uses to “fill in the gaps” and create more inviting, walkable and bikeable environments. This is especially true for the Pearl Road and Broadview Road corridors where underutilized single-story buildings, vacant parcels, and large surface parking lots contribute to an auto-oriented character. 

Reducing the visual impacts of vacant/ underutilized buildings and flipping the script on surface parking and through- traffic. Students explored ways in which underutilized buildings in Old Brooklyn could either be repurposed, adaptively re- used, or removed altogether to make way for more economically and programmatically useful building types. The location of these strategies is particularly important to mark key intersections (Pearl and Broadview, Pearl and State, Broadview and Spring, Broadview and Schaff) and to slow traffic to promote safe streets for families and children. 

Conceptualizing and finding funding sources and partnerships to implement streetscapes that enhance safety and connect people in residential areas to each other and to OB destinations. Economic development alone won’t provide the framework for safe mobility and movement throughout Old Brooklyn in ways that don’t include a car. The recent transformation of Pearl Road provides one guide for changing other key corridors, particularly Broadview Road. Other examples in Cleveland – specifically the in- process redevelopment of Lorain Avenue – offer more generous possibilities for adding dedicated bike lanes and wider sidewalks, while deemphasizing on-street parking. This can be done in areas where there are sites for both off-street parking and development, such as Broadview Road. 

Designing and implementing a “Neighborhood Greenway” where selected secondary and tertiary streets in Old Brooklyn’s residential areas become signed and branded as a safe and connected framework for pedestrians and cyclists. An initial leg of this greenway – from Brighton Park to Harmody Park (along Creston, 20th, and Fergus) is being considered by the city planning department. Additional streets could include Broadale, W. 11th Street, Tampa Ave, and many others. Painted cycle icons in green on the asphalt roadways alongside new signage designating the “Old Brooklyn Greenway” would provide a unique amenity and welcome gesture of connectivity and community activity. 

Designing and implementing two new significant public spaces in the Middle Neighborhood area of Old Brooklyn, specifically the existing play/parking area on Spring Road in front of Benjamin Franklin School and the abandoned landfill at W. 11th Street and Spring Road. These unique parcels have extraordinary potential that provide diverse student, family, and inter-generational programs while putting underutilized sites back into active use. The landfill site is one of Old Brooklyn’s “front doors” from the east off of I-176, while the school site is also along Spring Road and adjacent to the popular and community-oriented Benjamin Franklin Community Garden.