Category: Cleveland, Ohio Local News

It has long been a mystery to Brent Zimmerman how dozens of people could threaten him over a parking lot.

In the fall of 2020, that’s exactly what happened.

Zimmerman, a developer of apartments and townhomes in his early forties, had for three years been eyeing a desolate lot off West 14th Street and Kenilworth Avenue in Tremont. His proposal to build 29 units housed in a contemporary four-story building centered around residents who didn’t rely on cars. Bike storage would welcome dwellers home. Curb space would give room for Ubers and DoorDash.

But there had to be some allowance for vehicles: Lincoln Park Flats was required, by law, to add a lot of 20 parking spaces, which would—because of the tight space—require the razing of the rectory next door.

The Cleveland Landmarks Commission said the church couldn’t be touched: Zimmerman’s parking lot was a no go. In November of 2020, he sought a parking variance with the Board of Zoning Appeals, which would allow him to construct Lincoln Park Flats without its originally required parking. There were roughly 76 on-street spaces in a block radius, which Zimmerman thought would be enough for incoming tenants, if they had cars in the first place. “Hey, we did studies,” Zimmerman recalled. “There are so many open spaces on that street.”

Matt Moss, a City of Cleveland planner, was in favor of the variance. The city needed new housing. “If the cost of that is having to walk a little further to your car that’s parked on the street,” he recalled, “that was an acceptable trade off to us.”

The resulting public feedback was something resemblant of a mob.

“In ten years of representing this block club, we’ve never had the activity and the interest as with this project,” Kate O’Neil, head of the Auburn-Lincoln Park Block Club told BZA at the November 20 meeting. “It’s overwhelming, the opposition to this project. It’s a severe, adverse effect.”

“Would you want to walk three blocks to get to your car? Bring groceries that far? Late at night?” one resident argued. “If you grant this variance, you’re setting a precedent for other developers to come in and want to build projects with no parking—that could create a real nightmare.”

The nightmare was eventually Zimmerman’s: BZA denied his parking variance. The lot at West 14th and Kenilworth remains empty today.

It may be a stretch, but parking may be the most controversial and overlooked problem in American society in the past eight decades. If we’re to use cars, we have to figure out the endless problem of where to store them. And then there’s the issue of where. Our Targets and Walmarts can’t seem to exist without the ocean of asphalt before them. Our stadiums without their five-story garage neighbors. Our single-family detached homes without fifty-foot driveways, or ample room along the street directly in front of the house.

And there may be no better place to observe this problem play out than a midsize city like Cleveland. Since the 1960s, any single thing built in its borders was ordered by city code to include space for cars. The most glaring headache for developers—other than extending build time —is that parking lots and urban garages are, and have always been, insanely expensive: your average eight-foot-wide parking space costs about $5,000 to $10,000; put it in a concrete garage, $30,000 a spot. (And $4 a day in taxes and upkeep.) And, as one might guess, that financial pain is passed along elsewhere: in the cost of your rent, the theater employee’s wage, the price of that omelet.

“There’s literally been no return on parking in the history of mankind,” Zimmerman recently told Scene. Getting rid of the necessity of building parking is, in Zimmerman’s mind, “the difference between doing some projects and not doing them.”

Yet, eight decades after parking requirements were first drafted, a sea change spells a different future for builders like Zimmerman. Last August, City Council passed an update to the city’s zoning code that will now put the decision about parking spots in the hands of developers to an extent not seen in the last half century.

The suite of new laws will eliminate parking minimums within a quarter-mile radius of major transit corridors, like Detroit and Lorain Avenues in Ohio City. (Most of Ohio City in general will be covered.) And, in lieu of minimums, developers would be influenced instead by a new transit-demand management scorecard for build outs: ten points for “parking supply reduction”; six points for running a shuttle service; eight points for handing out complimentary RTA passes to residents.

“Look, all we’ve done is say that through policy, that building for the car first and foremost is no longer going to be a requirement,” Moss said. “It used to be the law that you had to do that. And all we’ve done is say it’s no longer the requirement. Instead, we’re working on incentivizing people to build more walkable, transit-oriented buildings and spaces.”

Moss added a caveat, as if preempting backlash: “Don’t worry. At the end of the day, it’s still going to be easy to drive around.”

In a way, Moss has grown into the face for the diehard urbanist intelligentsia and a looming threat to the Cleveland status quo for others. (“He’s just pretentious,” one Ohio City resident told Scene. “It’s disgusting what he’s doing to the city.”) The emotional reaction to Moss’ creed, and City Planning’s new laws, do however reveal what’s increasingly obvious as the city of Cleveland tries to inch away from car dependency. That parking, whether on a surface lot or curbside, touches every centimeter of our daily lives. As do laws engulfing it.

And the conversation around how we plan Cleveland, unsurprisingly, has only furthered the current parking debate binary: on one side, progressive builders and city planners overjoyed to no longer see cities devoted to paradises paved. On the other hand, nail-biting residents and business owners that see parking as a vital and scarce resource—Cleveland is a driving city, after all—they themselves have to fight to protect.

You see it in Glenville, where architect Kevin Oliver fought BZA about parking spots around a new complex in University Circle. (Most Case students don’t own cars, Oliver argued.) You see it in on Lorain, where a massive transit-oriented development project has run into complaints from neighbors. You hear it at every block club and from every anxious suburban soul descending downtown.

But where do we park?

“The whole thing is crazy. It is absolutely crazy,” Jeff Eisenberg, a west side landlord and owner of a beauty salon on Lorain Ave. in Ohio City, told Scene. “We have a lot of young guys that think this place is Chicago or New York. It’s not gonna happen. It’s not a big city. It’s never going to be a big city.” Eisenberg recalled a recent failed tenancy deal as an example. “If you don’t have off-street parking, it’s okay, thanks, bye-bye.”

When Angie Schmitt was growing up in Hilliard, a suburb of 37,000 situated off Columbus’ Outerbelt, she felt plagued by a distinctly American type of discontent. Schmitt liked to walk. The problem was that, like most if not all post-war suburbs, Hilliard in the 1990s—despite pockets of Main Street and Cemetery Road—was a car town. “I was a very adventurous girl, so I hated it,” Schmitt said. “I finally figured out, like, if I cut through a yard, walked along a ditch, I could walk to this one retail area. If I walked a really long time, I could hop on a bus to Ohio State.”

Years later, as a reporter in her mid-twenties, Schmitt discovered a way to marry her two loves: writing and walking. In 2009, piqued by demolition of a building in Youngstown, Schmitt pivoted and signed up for planning school. She soon became one of the most outspoken contributors to Streetsblog USA, a site dedicated to pedestrianism. Though Schmitt oversaw bloggers in Portland and Chicago, she often turned to her own backyard, in Lakewood. A friend had emailed her an aerial view of Dallas’ overwhelming asphalt devoted to cars; Cleveland’s Warehouse District came to mind. She conjured a derogatory title for what she saw: parking craters.

“It’s a depression in the middle of an urban area formed by the absence of buildings,” Schmitt said in the 2013 mini-documentary of the same name. Standing in the Warehouse, she has the camera tilt to seas of cars off St. Clair and West 6th. “We’ve got parking behind us. Parking there. Parking over there.” She sighed. “This is a gem of Downtown. And sadly, right across from that, we have a really big parking crater.”
Depending on what side one’s on, the oceanic lots and aging garages that occupy twenty-eight percent of Downtown Cleveland are either a necessary convenience or a scar of past urban planning’s foibles.

The problem is that parking, by its design, is always at battle with the Law of Convenience. Since the invention of the paved driveway, a silent hunger has been brewing in the bellies of drivers, a zero-sum game at the end of every car trip: The less I have to walk, the more prized the space. City planners have long wrestled with this theory—Americans in general don’t like to walk—since the 1940s, a decade when car ownership doubled, while weighing the cost to their city centers. Ultimately, as Schmitt’s “Parking Craters” documentary in 2013 made visible, the winner was convenience.

“We created that world,” Donald Shoup, a professor at UCLA who specializes in parking reform, told Scene. “We created a world where you have to have a car, because parking is free in most places you go. Things are spread far apart. And with all the traffic, it’s not pleasant to walk. And biking is dangerous.” He added, “But no one wants to sacrifice their car for the greater good.”

Shoup, who’s so respected in his field that some planners dub themselves “Shoupistas,” has been promoting an antidote to the cars-in-cities issue since at least 2006, when he published the wildly-popular High Cost of Free Parking. Though the book’s 733 pages long, its premise is easily digestible: every place you go, whether it be that Bob Evans off I-71 or that Key Bank on West 25th, has been designed and dictated by guidelines and parking space requirements that date back to the early 1970s. And those requirements, Shoup has long argued, are based on arbitrary pseudo-math: seven spots for each lane of a bowling alley; three for each doctor at a hospital; and so on.

These are laws that have long acted as, Shoup says, a “fertility drug for cars.” He expanded the metaphor in a recent article: “Removing off-street parking requirements resembles birth control for parking spaces,” he wrote. “There will be no more unwanted ones.”

What could be directly tied to Shoup’s advocacy in San Francisco has led to a parking reform zeitgeist across America. In 2017, Buffalo cut code forcing developers to build parking lots. Berkeley and San Jose followed. By 2022, fifteen U.S. cities had either greatly reduced or vaporized laws requiring parking to be built, replaced with more promising legislation. “There won’t be pushback,” Shoup told Scene, “because there’s nothing to push back against.”

***

If Angie Schmitt devoted her life to the culture of walking, then James Lister committed himself to a life of driving.

Born in Cleveland in 1907, and raised in Twinsburg and Lakewood, Lister grew up intrigued by the architecture of the Beaux Arts modernists. He graduated from Harvard and Cornell with degrees in landscape architecture, and was so good at what he did that a Prix de Rome scholarship sent him to Europe for two years. In 1949, after a decade on the newly created City Planning Commission, Lister was tapped by Mayor Frank Loche to grow the mayor’s burgeoning response to city decay, to its aging tenement buildings and “crowded slums.” As history knows it, this was the birth of Urban Renewal, the glorious plan to modernize American downtowns. Or, as Loche apparently once put it: “People expect you keep the good, and eliminate the bad.”

Lister, who had done a good job nursing the $700 million in federal money as head of Cleveland’s Freeway Planning Bureau—chief among the projects at the time: building Interstate 71—was chosen by Mayor Anthony Celebrezze in 1956 to lead the city’s formalized Department of Urban Renewal. By then, Lister had forgotten what he’d seen in prewar Europe, and was sold on the promise of the American automobile. He had traveled to cities like Detroit and Los Angeles to survey state-of-the-art parking garages with bathrooms and lounges, those that would, he believed, help reverse the city’s car dilemma. We need “a program that would recognize the maximum, and best use of the land in the entire city,” Lister said, according to Cleveland: City On Schedule. “And do this in a way that was arranged by logic, rather than by chaos.”

Lister’s logic was, you could say, data-driven. From 1948 to 1950, he oversaw the city’s first parking survey—entitled “Our Downtown Parking Headache, And How We Can Cure It”—which would act as the bedrock for parking policy for the next five decades. And it was a policy of fear: 29,146 spaces existed downtown; the study, seeing families buy cars at a feverish pace, recommended over 6,300 new ones. “Piecemeal,” mom-and-pop lots sprouted up, the report read, but no survey had “accurately” detailed such demand as a whole.

The study was a bat signal to businessmen disguised as a lifesaver for fleeing suburbanites. “A lot of Clevelanders will someday be saying to their friends, ‘Remember when it was worth your life to park downtown?’” the survey surmised. “‘Well, you ought to see it now! Parking spaces wherever you need them! Why, the way they’ve got things fixed, it’s just as easy to park downtown as in your own driveway at home!” A sequel to the survey, published in December 1956, was way more alarmist. “The avalanche is coming!” it cried. “The avalanche of private automobiles, trucks, buses and taxis—and Cleveland should be prepared!”

It was a perfect storm. With Urban Renewal subsidies coming from Washington, City Planning’s parking requirements installed in city code and Great Depression-era property costs looming, building owners went into a kind of survival mode. Parking, after all, was now big business. One estimate in the late 1970s predicted, at most, a 13 percent return in investment for the owner of a 300-space lot. And so, buildings—no matter how historic, useful or aesthetically-pleasing—went down, and went down fast. From 1951 to 1986, just in the Warehouse District alone, 106 of its 175 buildings, from the Terminal Theatre to the Academy Building to the Weddell House, were bulldozed to eventually make way for parking.

The city, drunk on the promise of Urban Renewal, was there along for the ride. A 1959 Building Evaluations survey detailed the hunger for better profits over the apparent financial gamble of rehab. “Rear facades not good,” it noted about the ten-story Hotel Auditorium on East 6th. “It has not been a success as a business venture.” Or, for what would be the garage at 1421 East 9th: “Land value almost nine times the value of improvements.” Parking was an out, even if it was seen as a temporary solution.

“Oh man, you could make a lot of money in that business,” Lee Stevens, the city’s last parking commissioner until his retirement in 2013, told Scene. “I mean, I’m a parking guy. And the thought always was, ‘Do you want to serve the public? Or, do you want to make money?’”

And money was made. By 1978, Downtown possessed 618 facilities with 53,912 spaces, triple the number of parking spots since Lister came to town. New construction, like the Justice Center and the Federal Building, after all, demanded storage for workers’ cars. The effect was a little like using hot sauce to cure an open wound. By 1980, Cleveland’s population had been halved since the city’s first parking study that attempted to save it. Moreover, even after the roaring Cleveland 1990s, the 197 lots and garages around by 2004 never reached more than 80 percent capacity in a year. “Given this level of utilization,” the “Downtown Cleveland Parking Market Study” concluded that year, “there’s an effective surplus of approximately 4,600 parking spaces throughout Downtown.” Cleveland had built too many.

By then, the city appeared to have come to its senses. Most of Downtown’s remaining buildings were covered under local landmark protections. A newly added part of the parking code, Section 394.12, was intended to “preserve the urban architectural character of Downtown by limiting the establishment and expansion of surface parking lots” within those districts. That is to say, do away with parking requirements.

Today isn’t much different. One-third of Downtown’s 128 lots and garages, according to a 2016 survey, never clock above 80 percent capacity. (And half are in “fair” or “poor” condition.) On a Monday in August, Scene walked through a series of downtown garages and lots just after rush hour. The 900 Prospect Garage, across from the County Building, had 70 spaces filled of its 800. The lot of the Greyhound had two, out of 209. And at the U.S. Bank garage on East 14th, there were 24 cars, out of 700 total spaces. “Most of the garage is empty at night,” its attendant told Scene from inside her booth, as she scrolled through TikTok. “The ones that are here are the ones that stay.”

***

It’s 11 a.m. on a Tuesday in late September when members of the Cleveland Parking Association assemble their monthly meeting in a shared room on the ninth floor of The Athlon. And there, sitting among the industry veterans and CPD lieutenants eating turkey sandwiches, is Joe Zeffer, a 64-year-old bald man dressed in a black Under Armour polo and loose khakis. The topic for today’s meeting: cars stolen out of downtown garages. About 100 people were invited. About 20 showed up.

“It’s all about feeling and safety,” Zeffer told the room, in a booming bass that sounds unmistakably like actor Brad Garrett’s from Everybody Loves Raymond. “People want to feel like they’re okay. Their cars are okay. And they want to be as close as possible to their venue.”

Zeffer, as those in the industry know him, is as synonymous with Cleveland’s parking world as LeBron James is to basketball. “The guy probably works, like, 360 days a year,” Troy Mayer, the president of the Parking Association, told Scene. “He knows everyone. He knows the homeless people. The building owners. The lot attendants. I can’t get him to go home if my life depended on it.”

Zeffer’s hustle in the industry is, especially these days, completely warranted. Ever since the pandemic pushed everyone indoors in 2020, and sped up a work-from-home phenomenon, parking analysts have been trying to figure out how to compensate for the drop in customers. Since the parking boom of the 1970s, lot owners and managers—the APCOAs, Platinums and Shaia’s of the world—catered heavily to the commuter, especially those that paid three figures for a monthly swipe card. It’s sort of like a handshake agreement Urban Renewal helped usher in: You bring me employees’ cars; I’ll figure out how to store them.

But then, in March 2020, employees stopped parking. Mayer, who is also Platinum’s general manager, said they once had “about 1,500” monthly passholder parkers that filled their 3,500 spaces across Downtown. Two months later, that May, they barely had 200. And today, the demand still isn’t hot: “Maybe six, seven hundred,” Mayer said. “We’re still only at about half.”

A week before the association’s September planning, Zeffer took Scene on a walking tour of two of the 22 lots and garages he’s been overseeing in some capacity for the past 47 years. The sky was clear, so the sun had made touring the Theater District somewhat of a chore; Zeffer had anticipated, it seemed, a tour by car. But there was a Guardians game that night, and Zeffer needed to prepare his mind, and his auditors and attendants, for the upcoming rush. (Customers who would pay $10 to $40 to park.)

The conversation shifted to the two pillars of Zeffer’s current business: the residential population growing slowly around Zeffer’s facilities; and the “special events crowd” that spends a fourth of a 24/7 monthly pass to store their car for a few hours. “You have to understand that this whole entire industry has always been based on demand,” Zeffer said, stopping for a break in the middle of his lot off Huron and East 12th, in the shadow of the Hanna garage. “And you have to have something in the area to make it worthwhile to park around.”

“What about Progressive Field?”

“That’s way over there,” Zeffer said, nodding west.

“What do you mean ‘way over there’? It’s a block down.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. He nodded to a lot a block east on Prospect, which was charging $10 less. “If I’m paying $40, I’m going to park as close as I can. If I charge $40 here? They won’t pay it. They don’t want to walk.”

This psychology, the commuter’s perspective distorted by the cramped space of the city, may be even more fascinating to Mayer, who at first took the job as Association’s president last January with an apathetic shrug. “It wasn’t like I raised my hand and said, ‘Hey, I’m here. I want to do this,’” Mayer said, sitting at Restore off Huron in October. In his plaid business casual and jeans, Mayer gave off more clean accountant vibes than parking attendant. “It was more like, ‘Troy, you’ve been in parking for 20 years. You come to our meetings. You’re the best fit for this.’ And I said, ‘Okay.’”

Besides the obvious reasons for tackling the summer spike in car thefts—mostly Kias and Hyundais—Mayer said, like Zeffer posited, safety and feeling are key in luring Downtown residents to monthly passes. That is, to make up for the loss in the office workers of a fading era. It’s almost a funny irony that stems from the effect of new apartment complexes being able to build as much parking as they see fit: Mayer’s there to take those left over. He pointed to The Athlon as a prime example. “Quite frankly, that’s what’s keeping us somewhat alive,” he said. “They only have, like, 100 parking spaces, but have about 300 units.” He smiled. “So they have to find parking elsewhere.”

Mayer’s mind jumped to the parking business’ natural rival: on-street parking. The city was teasing its Smart Parking makeover—paying for your spot with your smartphone. Its parking revenue could double. (Advocates have long pushed to eliminate free on-street parking as a remedy to both stir revenue and balance the demand.)

“The only problem is that no one pays for parking,” Mayer said, point blank. He turned to Huron Road, which was full of cars lined against its curbs. “Seriously. Go out there right now. See how many of those meters are red.”

At that, Mayer grabbed his coffee, and walked east on Huron, pointing out fourteen vehicles that were, according to their meters, parked illegally. “See that? ‘No Parking Fire Zone,’ ‘No Parking Anytime This Way.’ And that car right there,” Mayer said, signaling with his coffee cup to a white Transit Connect. “Him? He’ll never get a ticket.”

***

About a decade after he was embedded in an infantry battalion in Afghanistan, Zach Cooper found himself in the university town of Bradford, England. He was 32, and had a full ride for a masters degree in conflict resolution. In his down time, Cooper toured Europe, and always stopped in bespoke clothing shops stocked with specialty suits and flat caps.

But it was one in Bradford that left the biggest impression. While ringing up a keepsake hat to take home to Cleveland, Cooper watched as one shop tailor pulled a secret hatch behind the counter. “And behind it was two beer taps,” Cooper recalled. “That was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. I honestly fell in love with it instantly.”

In 2020, back in Cleveland, Cooper set out earnestly to try and recreate the spirit of that Bradford shop. It became for him a new sense of purpose. A year-and-a-half later, with the help of a mentor, Cooper sought real estate. Twelve properties later, he found it at 3929 Lorain Avenue, a faded-yellow, Art Deco funeral home abandoned since 2010. “There were needle caps all around the floor upstairs,” Cooper recalled. “Squatters lived in the basement. I mean, it was bad.”

The following year, Cooper followed the typical developer path. He drafted a five-year business plan; he signed a Veteran-approved SBA loan. He chose a name for the suit-shop-slash-speakeasy, Sartorial, and posted its details on CoUrbanize, a forum for design plans. “Ninety-eight percent of the feedback was positive,” Cooper said. “People just wanted to see the building renovated.” Cooper had his plans greenlit by the Ohio City Design Review, then by the Ohio City Historic District Landmark review—the funeral home was historical—and then by City Planning and the Board of Zoning Appeals.

It was the last entity that was the most important in Cooper’s timeline. Because the Bodnar Funeral Home was zoned as a Local Retail Business District, he had to get four variances from BZA to operate Sartorial for “live entertainment and amusement use.” Which meant, according to the city’s code, Cooper had to build 27 parking spaces to accommodate, “per standard, unreduced formula,” his eventual bargoers.

Cooper panicked. Building a lot with 27 spaces would cost, at about $10,000 a space, somewhere in the ballpark of $300,000. Cooper found the whole notion ludicrous. “There’s no world where I could make that happen,” Cooper said. Fortunately, BZA, in late February of 2023, granted him variances—he, unlike what was normally forced into existence by city law, no longer had to build a lot.

That is, until David Ellison sued the city a week later. “The Cleveland Board of Zoning Appeals exceeded its legal authority,” his appeal read, “arbitrarily, capriciously, unreasonably and without support of a preponderance of substantial, reliable and probative evidence when it granted the parking variances.” Or, as Cooper put it, “David accused the city of breaking the law.”

Ellison, an Ohio City-based architect in his sixties with the look of a late career Ernest Hemingway, was not a stranger to fighting variances. He had sued the city back in 2022 for granting them for 41 West, a luxury apartment complex under construction across the street from Ellison’s studio on Lorain. (He keeps a folder on his computer called “Neighborhood Issues.” “Not all are lawsuits,” he said.) The string of protests over the years has shaped Ellison’s reputation as a stickler for rules, which some Ohio City residents see as anti-progressive.

“I really wasn’t surprised when I heard who it was,” Whitney Anderson, a 37-year-old interior designer originally lined up to rent out Sartorial’s upstairs space. Ellison’s lawsuit dragged out so long Anderson looked elsewhere. “Maybe this is me thinking that I have more influence than I do, but I wanted to have a conversation with David, and let him know that he was hurting two legitimate, hopeful business owners.”

A block down, over at Ellison’s two-story studio, which is pristinely organized and decorated with drawings of Ancient Greece and century-old planning texts, the architect repeatedly reaffirmed that he wasn’t trying to harm Sartorial. A lot of Ellison’s ire, if you could call it that, seems to stem back to the fact that he himself was forced, back in 2013, to build a parking lot for his own building.

“I don’t actually have anything against Zach,” he said, sitting at a roundtable in front of three massive bookshelves. “I think he’s an optimistic kind of guy that wants to create this thing for the community.” Ellison’s tone shifted. “But what he has in mind, the way he’s described it, is not allowed by the law. So, the question is, do you violate the law and grant variances that are unjustified? Or do you change the law?”

***

The two-mile stretch of Lorain Ave. from the Hope Memorial Bridge on West 20th to the Michael Zone Rec Center on West 65th has been pretty much untouched for 50 years. It offers curbside parking for 335 vehicles on both sides and welcomes, despite the 25 MPH speed limit, cars going far faster. And its two miles of sidewalks have, with their tree grate defects and tilted telephone poles, have deteriorated.

The street is also, according to those who prefer two wheels to four, a life threat. At least ten pedestrians have been hit and killed, a recent study found, on Lorain in the past five years. It’s on Cleveland’s High Crash Network of roadways because of this. “Oh, it’s horrible,” Jacob VanSickle, the head of Bike Cleveland, told Scene recently. “People drive recklessly. And a lot of times people aren’t parked there, so they treat it like four lanes.”

In January, the city presented its updated plan to refashion the street with the Lorain Midway, which would build a multi-use protected path, install new curbs, traffic signals, tree beds, RTA bus stops and, most importantly to those who gathered at Urban Community School to get a first set of eyes on the design, eliminate somewhere between a quarter and half of on street parking.

Though the project still needs millions before it’s fully funded, and despite construction being years down the road, business owners freaked. Those spots, many of them cried, are revenue. “As respectful as I am of the bike community, I think removing those spots is really going to hurt us badly,” Karen Small, the owner of Juneberry Table off West 41st, said recently. “I mean, there are very few people that are willing to walk in zero degree weather.”

“Oh, you can tell it’s a 10-year-old project,” Jonah Oryszak, the owner of Heart of Gold off 41st told Scene at the event. “I think the neighborhood has grown so much that it really doesn’t need a project like this as it’s drawn.”

Though he supports a general street redesign, Oryszak can’t help but consider the “realities” of how his clientele order food in 2024, whether it be through DoorDash or from a curb-lane pickup. He fears the Midway being constructed—and removing hundreds of on-street spaces—without plans to add a parking garage, or two, would be disastrous.

“Seventy percent of my customer base is from the suburbs,” he added. “I get calls all the time: ‘We’re coming here. Where’s your parking lot?’ ‘Well, we don’t have one.’ And click.”

(Many of the same concerns have been voiced over the fully funded Superior Midway project, which will trim that road’s six lanes to four while installing a median and bike lanes.)

City planners like Matt Moss and Sarah Davis said that future iterations of the Lorain Midway will consider drop-off zones and parking agreements with private lots (like the one at McCafferty Health Center off 42nd St.), along with meeting one-on-one with folks like Small and Oryszak to consider more of the immediate retail view.

“One thing we hear a lot is like, ‘If you take away the parking here, how am I going to be able to run in and grab something quick and leave?’” Moss said. “And again, that’s why we’re trying to figure out how to maximize street parking while still achieving all the other goals of the project.”

And maybe the parking demand isn’t as steep as businesses believe it is. A study of Lorain last year found the street hit its highest occupancy – 47% – on a weekend. During the week? Below 30%.

That hasn’t stopped the backlash.

But, to Moss, that’s to be expected.

“Hey, we’ve been building for driving for over a half century,” he said. “You get the behavior you build for.”

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