Four years ago, Cleveland State’s Esports program was formed and had about 20 athletes competing in five games. Now, esports has grown to about 45 individuals in the varsity program and over 100 people in the club portion.
With the growth at CSU (and worldwide) of esports, the HoriZone Roundtable spoke with the Director of Esports at Cleveland State, PJ Farrell, to get the rundown on the ins and outs.
Ready Player One?
CSU’s program was initially a part of the athletic department and competed in five different games: VALORANT, Overwatch, Rocket League, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, and League of Legends.
With numerous students who play each game, one might wonder how they practice for events.
“Our Smash Ultimate team will go to local events a couple days a week. There’s an event in Brunswick every Tuesday that happens for Smash Ultimate [where] a lot of professional players go.”
Each game has other people helping coach (some are even just the students), but VALORANT had some extra help recently.
“For our VALORANT team, they have not had a coach traditionally, but we did hire somebody from a Tier-2 organization that came and watched us online and we gave them a little bit of a fee for just helping us last month or so.”
Overall, there are a lot of ways they prepare but each game has unique challenges. “We kind of prepare them for the tournaments but most of the time they just “scrim” [scrimmage] online. They find scrims online against other schools who are Tier-2 organizations that are also trying to make it professionally.”
Level Up
With the growing interest around campus and the growing community around the world, Farrell expanded the game lineup this year.
“We have a lot of people on campus that are really interested in what we’re trying to do. We added another game this year. We added Street Fighter: 6. [It’s a] traditional fighter game and I know there’s a lot of interest in the community for that as well and a lot of the colleges are starting to pick up on it.”
The program has continued to expand not just in size and games, but also in talent. Better talents contributed heavily to the accolades CSU has started to gather.
“I think last year was probably our best recruiting year we’ve ever had. We brought in three freshmen for our VALORANT team[.] We also brought in a couple really good Smash Ultimate players last year and then this year was the year that we knew it was like the beginning of our window because those kids now have a year’s experience under their belt.”
With younger players, as in any sport, the actual events can have added pressure as opposed to practices. “When you get to be in person and you get to be on stage and people are going crazy, for new people that are young, sometimes that can be very shocking so I think this year they had that experience. We tried to take them to some different trips so they could kind of get the jitters out and they came to play this year.”
“GG” (Good Game)
Not only is esports growing on campus, they’re also winning outside campus. CSU competes in the Great Lakes Esports Conference (GLEC) which includes teams from Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, and Ohio. Farrell noted that Cleveland State is the only D-I school in the conference.
“What we find is that a lot of the D-II, D-III schools are the ones that are putting more money into esports programs, so the smaller[,] lower conferences are actually some of the better ones that are out there.”
Competing last year, CSU pulled out a great win against a powerhouse in Smash Ultimate. “Last year was our first year taking it to Manchester [University]. They were our big rivals in the Smash community and so we ended up beating them in a really close set for our very first conference win last year.”
This season saw CSU repeat as Manchester was knocked out in an earlier round. “[Manchester] lost to Illinois Wesleyan [University] and then we competed against Illinois Wesleyan, and we won 3-0 against them in the grand finals.”
In VALORANT, CSU also took down Tiffin University and got a bid in Texas at the CECC Nationals. “That was a big win for us. We were 0-5 against them the last few years. Their team was just really, really good.”
Each semester the GLEC selects three games to compete in, and CSU won two out of the three. “We are one of the first teams in the conference to win multiple game titles in the same season, so that was pretty cool for us.”
“Both teams really were dead set on trying to win the conference and take down these kinda juggernaut teams that have won the last few years, and so this was kind of their moment. This was their year for it.”
Continue?
With an established footprint at CSU, the future for esports is bright. They are connected to the Washkewicz College of Engineering and no longer with the athletic department.
Moving forward, Farrell wants to get even more of the campus involved. “I would love for people to know how they can get involved because we are like a mini athletic department within ourselves.”
“It would be really great if we had people on campus that could help us by just joining our club program or they can add by helping coach, running our website or our social media, or just participating and trying out for our varsity program.”
In the short term, Farrell wants to expand not just the number of people involved but also the space they have. He wants this larger space to contribute not only to the varsity program but the fun club experience. “You don’t have to play varsity. You can just have fun and just enjoy video games.”
In short, check out the program. It’s got plenty for everyone. “We would love for more people on campus just to recognize what we bring to the university itself and that there’s just so many different ways to get involved in how it can help you in your careers.”
Originally published by the HoriZone Roundtable. Republished here with permission.
There was probably no more invigorating undergrad semester for Luanne Bole-Becker’s than her junior year at Cleveland State in the spring of 1976.
Bole-Becker was studying accounting, but her heart was in music and thoughts of how it could connect the unconnectable. Come her third year at CSU, Bole-Becker was chosen to help oversee what would be a monumental switch: Converting its student address station, WCSB, into a full-fledged, publicly broadcast one completely run by students. What had only been heard around the cafeteria in Stilwell Hall would be listened to all across Northeast Ohio.
CSU’s board of trustees, its leaders—President Walter Waetjen and Vice President Arnold Tew—all chipped in. Turntables and microphones were bought. Records were donated. By May, Room 956 in University Tower was converted into a full-on studio. It aired its first broadcast on May 10, 1976.
“It was euphoric,” Bole-Becker, who signed the station’s first certificate with the Federal Communications Commission, recalled recently. “There was a keen desire to reach a broad audience that just wasn’t possible when we were only closed-circuit.”
Luanne Bole-Becker. Courtesy photo.
Led by general manager Paul Bunker and program director Bob Becker (who Luanne would later marry), WCSB made its public debut in 1976 embodying what college radio was at the time and what it could be in the future. There was a comedy show (“Big Lip Theatre”), poetry hour (“Dark Tower”), New Wave (“Import Invasion), bluegrass, classical, jazz, financial tips, college news, national news, Browns talk.
“It was always this raucous democracy of people trying new things,” Steve Wainstead, a WCSB DJ in the 1990s, told me. “And I see that even today.”
Today, of course, is over.
On October 3, which was World College Radio Day, a handful of WCSB DJs and managers walked up to the Cole Center off Chester Avenue, where the station’s been since 2005, to find that their key cards didn’t work. Cleveland Police had to let them inside the building, only to find out that, around two in the morning, CSU admins had effectively eliminated their jobs. Managers had a half hour, one told me, to tear down posters, obituaries, stickers. (The equipment, owned by CSU, had to stay.) By noon, its antenna would be broadcasting jazz full time, simulcast from Ideastream, the local NPR affiliate. WCSB, seven months shy of its 50th anniversary, was no longer run by students.
In the hours and days that followed, details of the switch were shared by those involved and further tendrils were reported out through public records.
Ideastream, looking for a terrestrial radio home for JazzNEO, had approached CSU about taking over 89.1 FM. (It had also approached John Carroll about WJCU, but was rebuffed.)
Cleveland State didn’t sell the FCC license, and in fact received no cash from Ideastream in the deal. Instead, it transferred management of the station for an eight-year term in exchange for a board seat for CSU President Laura Bloomberg and some 1,000 mentions of the school across Ideastream’s TV and radio stations and an additional 1,000 on-air spots touting the collaboration between the two entities. Records show Ideastream also received the right to match any offer to CSU to purchase the station during the term of the agreement, which has a provision for a pair of five-year extensions.
CSU, meanwhile, touted the part of the deal that said, “Ideastream will prioritize paid and for-credit internships, classroom-level projects and other opportunities for students enrolled at (CSU’s) School of Communication and other colleges within CSU,” documents said. “Ideastream will work cooperatively with (CSU) to provide student internships and classroom-level special projects in journalism, television, and radio production, marketing and graphic design.”
There were, however, no details about the number of said internships.
The former home of WCSB. Photo by Mark Oprea.
The decision to cut WCSB was not made, it must be said, in isolation. CSU’s lingering budget deficit, dovetailed with a Statehouse with diversity in its crosshairs, has led to an era of loss. In the spring, CSU slashed wrestling, softball and women’s golf. It sunsetted 22 majors, from French, to anthropology and its Doctor of Nursing Practice. It bought out four dozen faculty and staff. And by September, weeks before it switched over WCSB to Ideastream, CSU closed down its Mareyjoyce Green Women’s Center and its Office of Inclusion and Multicultural Engagement. It replaced its LGBTQ+ Student Center with a resource and hangout for veterans.
CSU President Laura Bloomberg, who moved to Cleveland in 2021 after eight years in Minnesota, has denied that axing WCSB was done so due to some political agenda. On October 14, Bloomberg joined Ideastream Director Kevin Martin and current and former WCSB DJs Alison Bomgardner and Lawrence Daniel Caswell on Ideastream’s Sound of Ideas to sift through—and trade barbs about—what had happened days prior. Bloomberg seemed anything but apologetic.
“I didn’t specifically set out and say, ‘Let’s end student radio,’” she told Sound of Ideas host Stephanie Haney. “That was not at all where the conversation started for us.” Bloomberg suggested the handshake with Ideastream was akin to others the university had made with institutions across the county—NASA Glenn, the Cleveland Clinic, Sherwin Williams. “My focus is always strategic partnerships in the community.”
Martin based his reasoning on a 2022 strategic plan the company had paid for to help steer programming after the pandemic. (The year prior, it had taken over WKSU’s signal in Kent, via a similar Public Service Offering Agreement.) “What the study told us was that the overwhelming majority—it was skewed towards older listeners—consume jazz through a terrestrial, analog broadcast signal,” Martin said. Ideastream had its classical station (WCLV), its TV station (WVIZ), its NPR radio (WKSU). Adding a permanent home for JazzNEO on the FM dial, Martin explained, was yet another win-win. “I just think it’s going to grow and yield wonderful things for the student body,” he said.
Later that day, Luanne Bole-Becker hopped on her laptop to type out her own thoughts to Martin. Her plea, like those from other alums of college radio, was foundational: She, along with her late husband, had seen WCSB as a base for decades in radio or TV. She worked media for the Challenger Center for Space Science Education. She founded her own production company. Her and Bob won a handful of Emmys.
Bole-Becker was wrecked. “It saddens and disappoints me that you have pursued this path,” she wrote Martin. “These actions dishonored a segment of Cleveland’s vibrant radio community that should have been celebrated and encouraged for at least another 50 years.”
And continued to give opportunities to those like Alison Bomgardner.
Like many a teenager, Bomgardner grew up in the southern Cleveland suburbs with an itch for music. A guitarist, she learned songs by Joan Baez, Tom Petty, The Beatles. (She has a Yellow Submarine tattoo on her left bicep.) By the end of her first year at CSU, as a politics and Spanish major, Bomgardner had tried out an on-stage persona, Nicole Otero, but didn’t feel sated. “I wanted something different in a community,” Bomgardner said. “I wanted to take it a step further.”
Alison Bomgardner on campus. Photo by Mark Oprea.
In February 2023, halfway through her second year, she found WCSB. A friend had pushed her to apply, so she did. “When I found out there’s an organization on campus that focuses specifically on playing cool music and giving you the opportunity to project your voice into a larger community,” she said, “I was immediately intrigued.” She chose Squirrel as her DJ name. By the following semester, Bomgardner was so enthusiastic about and involved in WCSB she was elected to be its general manager.
The thing about college radio, as Bomgardner found out quickly, is that it thrives inherently off its gift and responsibility of free speech. WCSB, as it was for 49 years, was not beholden to advertisers; its operating budget, roughly six figures, was almost half backed by donors. (The other half from CSU’s general fund.) With that FCC license and antenna, WCSB could pretty much broadcast anything it so desired—19th century gospels, a gay and lesbian hour, Iraq War critiques, grindcore metal, up-and-coming rock bands unheard on Cleveland airwaves.
The whole potential of leading such a channel, one that shunned any Hot 100 model, enthralled Bomgardner. “That was the best part about WCSB,” she said, sitting on a bench in the center of CSU’s quad, dressed in an oversized leather coat and pale-blue bellbottoms. Bomgardner seemed clear-minded despite an endless logjam of emails on her phone to reply to. “If there was something new that needed to be on air that iHeart Radio or any other station wasn’t covering, we were going to make sure as hell someone was getting the chance to do that.”
And the evolution of WCSB, and college radio, took on a different significance during the flourishing of the internet in the late 1990s, when radio stations tried tinkering with digital versions of their stations to compete with the climb of iTunes and Pandora, and into today’s digital world. Radio ownership dropped 20 percent come the mid-2000s, and by 2024 less than half of all audio listening came through an AM or FM signal. College radio has essentially gone the way of vinyl: no longer a technological necessity but adored for its intrinsic value.
Steve Wainstead, who helped put WCSB on the internet as general manager from 1995 to 1997, scoffed when I asked if keeping a digital stream would suffice. “Hey, you know my Apple Music library has more music than I can listen to in my life,” he said. “But to have someone live and curating, saying here’s this, here’s that—that has value. To take calls from people in the community—that has value. And that’s a lot of what WCSB was doing.”
College Broadcasters Inc., a member-driven organization supporting students in media, noted in a statement there are other salient reasons why the station was essential to students’ futures.
“Broadcast radio operates under federal regulation. Students learn FCC compliance, indecency laws, Emergency Alert System protocols, and station identification rules. Streaming has zero FCC oversight. Every radio station in America needs staff who understand compliance. You can’t learn this from podcasting,” it said. “On broadcast radio, there’s no pause button. Technical failures must be solved while on-air. Board operation happens in real-time with live callers and breaking news. Podcasts can be edited and fixed in post-production. Radio professionals like news anchors and sports announcers must perform live. This skill cannot be developed through pre-recorded content. Students at WCSB learned radio frequency engineering, antenna systems, and transmitter maintenance. They troubleshot real transmission issues affecting thousands of listeners. Streaming requires basic digital audio knowledge. Broadcast engineers are essential to every radio and TV station, and this technical expertise is specific to over-the-air broadcasting.”
Neither CSU nor Ideastream seemed prepared for the onslaught of criticism that followed the decision. Social media was flooded with outcry. A protest was staged on campus. Another was organized outside of the City Club of Cleveland last Friday during an event on the future of public media featuring Ideastream Public Media’s Kevin Martin. They held signs that read “SHAME ON CSU” and “JAZZ IS NOT A PUBLIC SERVICE.” They shouted “Shame on Laura!” and “Kevin Martin stinks” and “You fucking suck!”
Protestors outside of the City Club. Photo by Mark Oprea.
“I mean, jazz? It’s clear they’re trying to attract wealthy donors,” Alexa Howard, who ran a show called Girls Style Know said outside.
Nick, a CSU sophomore environmental studies major in a black peacoat, said the move to axe WCSB could cost admins their standing. “Honestly, I think if Bloomberg does more stuff like this,” he said, “people are going to call for her resignation.”
Even the city is now involved. On October 20, Cleveland City Council introduced and unanimously passed an emergency resolution expressing support for WCSB’s DJs and fanbase and urging “Cleveland State University to fully restore WCSB radio to its students.”
Ward 13 Councilman Kris Harsh, a self-professed WCSB superfan who wrote the resolution, told Scene he saw Bloomberg’s abrupt decision to silence a half century of college radio as if it was a closure of a wing of City Hall. It’s how, he said, the majority of Council feels. “They understand that students need access to expression and understand when powerful people try to silence those voices,” he said. “And that’s not something that any of my colleagues are okay with.”
As of the middle of October, the microphones, computers, headphones and some 50,000 records sit idle in a room on the third floor of the Cole Center. When I asked Bomgardner what plans she has to rescue—and preserve—a half century of CSU college radio, she seemed crestfallen. “What I was told recently was that the equipment and the music library are the property of Cleveland State.” (A spokesperson for CSU did not respond to a request for comment on the collection’s future.)
All of which has put Bomgardner in a tough spot: both the public face of nixed college radio (she’s flying out to a conference in Denver to speak about it) and one given the task of somehow bringing it back in some form. Almost right after WCSB’s signal went to jazz, Bomgardner started XCSB, a movement that could segue to an actual replacement, say on podcast or streaming services, maybe YouTube or Spotify.
Or, will Bloomberg listen? She did in August, when CSU decided to reinstate its U-Pass, the discounted transit card program, after students pushed back. It’s possible, even if it feels unlikely.
“Frankly, I don’t think they’ll do the right thing,” she said. “I think the only way they will is through community pressure and demonstrating that this community is upset. Everyone has a different way of thinking about the community. But we all come around to this one thing, this deep passion for music and this need to keep pushing the boundary of what should be on air. And, well, we’re not going to stop until we get some good guarantees about what’s going to happen to our station.”
What does that mean for Vikings basketball, and CSU as a whole?
Let’s start at the beginning. All the way at the beginning.
A Green and White Elephant
When the Wolstein Center – known as the CSU Convocation Center until 2005 – opened 34 years ago, it was the largest university arena in Ohio. Approved and built in the aftermath of the Vikings’ men’s team’s Sweet 16 run in 1986, the building’s 13,610-seat capacity was certainly influenced by a bit of hubris about the program’s future. Mostly, though, Cleveland State saw an opportunity to own a large indoor venue downtown, given that the region’s only major arena at the time was the old Richfield Coliseum, some 25 miles away.
That monopoly was short-lived, however, as the Cleveland Cavaliers’ present home, the building now known as Rocket Arena, opened in 1994. Regardless, the Wolstein Center still managed to lure plenty of high-profile events during its first decade and a half, including two turns with the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament (one of which saw Horizon League rival Milwaukee make their own Sweet 16 trip), the NCAA Wrestling Championships, a bevy of major concerts, and even a 2008 Democratic primary debate between eventual president Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. The Cleveland Crunch packed the building during its run of three indoor soccer league titles between 1994 and 1999.
CSU certainly did its part as well, at least for a time. High profile men’s opponents like North Carolina, Michigan, Michigan State, and Georgetown drew big crowds for Vikings home games, while the women’s team earned a visit from UConn in 2005.
However, despite those outliers, the Vikings’ men’s attendance average never topped 5,000 fans for a full season. By the mid-2000s, the mammoth green curtain that has become one of the Wolstein Center’s signature features showed up to slice the arena’s capacity to roughly 8,500 during Cleveland State games. Given the discrepancy between the venue’s size and interest in CSU basketball, alongside an event calendar that isn’t nearly as busy as it used to be, the fact that the building carries an annual operating deficit of at least $1 million is hardly surprising.
Dropping the Anchor
The notion of replacing the visibly-aging behemoth dates at least as far back as that impossible-to-miss green curtain, and maybe even further, though plans have never made it much past the “wouldn’t it be nice” stage of development.
Most recently, the university’s ten-year master plan unveiled in November of 2022 (and approved by the CSU Board of Trustees two months later) called for the demolition of the Wolstein Center and the construction of a replacement facility in the northeast corner of campus, on Payne Avenue, near E. 24th Street. The project, termed a “multipurpose arena” within the plan, was to include between 5,000 and 7,000 seats – perhaps still an ambitious figure for Cleveland State basketball, but one that would differentiate it from Rocket Arena and make it a destination for second-tier events.
Under the plan, the Wolstein Center site was vaguely re-imagined as a “partnership district,” potentially including research and development facilities, a hotel, or retail space.
At the time, CSU’s former senior vice president of business affairs and chief financial officer, David Jewell, told Crain’s Cleveland Business that the numerous projects included in the master plan would be financed one by one between then and 2033. The earliest construction, he said, would begin in late 2023, and accordingly CSU began soliciting and narrowing down proposals from developers.
Late 2023, however, brought entirely different news: a projected $34 million budget deficit for the university. Internal cost-cutting brought the number down to $11.5 million, and the board of trustees authorized the use of financial reserves to cover the rest. While that crisis was averted, the larger issue was that without a significant course correction, CSU’s reserves would be wiped out within five years.
Quietly, plans for a new arena were shelved at that point.
“Football” at Cleveland State
Cleveland State has continued to do the best it can with the Wolstein Center, which still hosts a decent number of events beyond college basketball. From 2021 through 2024, it served as the home of the NBA G-League’s Cleveland Charge and, beginning in January, a revived version of the Cleveland Crunch will bring indoor soccer back to the building.
At the same time though, the university has continued its efforts to make its $1 million per year problem disappear. In March, CSU published a request for qualifications, which was followed in May by a request for proposals, essentially inviting developers to submit their ideas for the site.
That process resulted in something quite surprising. On August 28th, the board of trustees accepted a proposal from the United Soccer League (USL) and USL Cleveland to transform the Wolstein Center footprint into a soccer stadium, with associated mixed-use developments. Formal talks between the sides are well underway.
The 15,000-seat facility would host a Cleveland team in a new league tentatively called USL Division One, which is set to begin play in 2028 and will sit next to Major League Soccer on top of the U.S. Soccer development pyramid. A women’s team, which would likely compete in the Gainbridge Super League (the USL’s highest women’s circuit) is also part of the proposal.
“This project is about more than a new stadium. It’s about transforming our campus, creating opportunities for our university community and contributing to the revitalization of downtown Cleveland,” CSU president Laura Bloomberg said in the school’s press release.
“The Wolstein Center has been a key part of our campus and the city for the past 35 years, and we will honor this legacy going forward. Our priority now is to continue providing our athletes, our entire basketball community, and the general public with state-of-the-art facilities and amenities.”
There is one possible impediment to the plan: another extremely-similar plan, one that had a head start.
In October of 2023, right around the same time that CSU was confronting the true horror of its budget situation, the Cleveland Soccer Group (CSG) announced its intent to pursue an expansion franchise in the top-tier National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL). A significant piece of CSG’s bid was a $150 million soccer stadium that was to seat 12,500 fans, located just beyond Interstate 90 from the Cleveland Guardians’ Progressive Field.
Cleveland lost out to Denver for the NWSL franchise slot late last year, but CSG’s contingency plan involves a scaled-back 10,000-seater that would host a women’s team in a new league called WPSL Pro, as well as a men’s team in MLS Next Pro.
It should probably go without saying that both projects will not be completed. As it is, both CSG and the USL will compete for public resources in a contentious political environment – to say the least – not only with each other, but with other sports-related construction like the Cleveland Browns’ future stadium in Brook Park.
Justin Papadakis, a 2015 CSU Law graduate who is the USL’s deputy CEO and chief real estate officer, is bullish on his side’s chances, despite a $350 million price tag.
“We do stadiums a lot,” he told Crain’s Cleveland Business last week. “Even though a lot of stadiums are being publicly financed, we think we can do this largely private, putting aside the state piece. Because you have an ancillary development, there’s a lot of ability to have those proceeds help with the capital stack of the stadium.”
In other words, Papadakis believes that developing the surrounding land will pay for most of the stadium. If he’s right, it certainly represents a strong selling point against the CSG efforts. Of course, if he’s wrong, Cleveland State will return to square one.
Ripple Effects
When Ernst & Young was called in during the heart of the budget crisis to guide CSU back to solvency, most of their proposed actions began with the 2026 fiscal year, which just opened on October 1st. Though the timelines given were strictly illustrative, the university seems to be following them fairly closely.
By the third and fourth quarters of 2026, the report suggested “[optimizing] campus space…to accommodate mothballing a building.” In terms of the Wolstein Center, that concept directly involves Woodling Gymnasium, the building it replaced, a relationship that quite possibly could be reversed in the near future.
Back in early 2023, Cleveland State began aggressively fundraising for improvements to Woodling ahead of its 50th birthday, seeking $1.2 million for an academic center makeover, new lighting and sound systems, and locker room improvements. Those efforts are ongoing, and several of the updated locker rooms, including for the Vikings’ fencing, track and field, and cross country teams, were completed in time for this year.
During the 2023-24 season, both Vikings basketball teams played Thanksgiving week games in their old barn, complete with throwback jerseys and merchandise.
That situation was required by a scheduling conflict (Cirque du Soleil had booked the Wolstein Center), but the sudden emphasis on a building mostly forgotten by the basketball crowd – at the time the games were scheduled, constructing a new arena was still the official plan – was a bit of a head-scratcher.
Now, though, it makes a ton of sense.
After all, if the Wolstein Center is redeveloped into a soccer stadium, or anything else, all of the offices, locker rooms, and training facilities presently housed in the arena will have to squeeze into Woodling. The old gym will abruptly become the epicenter of just about all of Cleveland State’s athletic activity, and in a competitive landscape like college sports, it will need to be as nice as possible. In that sense, the now-annual return trips to Woodling can be seen as pressure tests for basketball’s full-time relocation.
It also casts CSU’s decision to cut three sports teams at the end of the 2024-25 academic year in a new light, beyond simply being one of many attempts to shed expenses.
One of those programs, wrestling, used Woodling Gymnasium as its home base and competed during the winter sports season (as does basketball, of course). Eliminating it clears dates and space, both of which will be at a premium.
Further down the road, should the Wolstein Center be replaced by a soccer stadium, it’s reasonable to think that the Vikings’ soccer and lacrosse teams would begin using it, making Krenzler Field redundant. That implicates a second discontinued sport, softball, since its now-abandoned home field is adjacent to the present soccer and lacrosse facility.
Put those together, and it becomes a significant parcel of land along the north side of Chester Avenue that can be sold, redeveloped, or both.
All of that may or may not happen, but the possibilities are intriguing. If everything turns out to be wildly successful, it might even give new life to the idea of a new arena, with the second extended stint in Woodling Gymnasium akin to someone moving in with their parents until they get back on their feet.
For now, just about the only thing that’s certain is that basketball season unofficially gets underway on October 29th, when the Vikings women’s team takes on Findlay in an exhibition game. That contest will be played in the Wolstein Center.
Originally published by the HoriZone Roundtable. Republished here with permission.
From the perspective of a Downtown Cleveland optimist, the area spells promise for the near future as far as development is concerned.
A new Rock & Hall of Fame extension is coming. Bedrock just broke ground on its $2 billion riverfront neighborhood. And Mayor Justin Bibb’s Lakefront Plan’s likelihood got a boost after his Shore-to-Core-to-Shore tax-increment financing plan was passed earlier this year by City Council.
But, a group of students at Cleveland State’s College of Urban Affairs asked recently: What is to be done with Downtown’s prime piece of transit potentially linking—key word being potentially—all of the area’s newest points of interest?
That is to say, how do we ensure the Waterfront Line, the RTA’s two-mile line of track that hasn’t been in daily service since 2021, doesn’t miss out on Cleveland’s trajectory forward and serves as a reliable connector?
Such speculation was at the heart of the study released this week by a team of 16 graduate students, a plan detailing, in a highly-comprehensive 125 pages how the city, the county and the RTA could efficiently makeover the line and idling land around it. A plan that cried with a resounding voice: build housing, build housing, build housing.
“Right now, there are a lot of great opportunities, but there’s not a residential density that supports the Waterfront Line,” John Miesle, 29, a graduate student and member of 17th Street Studios, the moniker the CSU team gave to their cohort project, told Scene. “There’s not a commercial density that could support it. That could support 24-hour rail service.”
John Miesle, a graduate student in CSU’s College of Urban Affairs, helped, with 15 others, create a capstone class’ massive makeover plan for RTA’s flailing Waterfront Line.
Miesle’s lament, common amongst transit advocates, revolves around the cry to reopen the Waterfront Line to how it used to function before it went out of commission following the need for necessary repairs in the fall of 2021.
Although the RTA teased its comeback by running the line during Browns Sunday home games last season, the result—and ridership—was somewhat disappointing. Only 2,300 Clevelanders and Browns fans rode the line on average each football Sunday; twenty-two years ago, in 2002, the entire light rail system (including the Green and Blue lines) clocked about 259,000 riders per month.
Hence 17th Street Studios’ central thesis. The team believes that, like found in light rail systems in Denver and Minneapolis, the Waterfront Line could see a whopping comeback if large amounts of shops and apartments were built nearby it, primarily on the vacant parking lots built decades ago to meet a perceived demand for cars.
Like the actual feat of reviving the lingering waterfront in general, the students’ ideas are quite massive in both scale and financial heft.
Along with trails and bike paths up and down West 3rd and East 9th, the students suggest a new connection—with a line of townhomes—linking East 18th St. to the easternmost South Harbor Station. (Near where Noble Beast Brewing is.) Over in the Flats East Bank, redoing West 10th with a tree line and erecting a brand new Settlers Garage to consolidated parking demand left by new housing a few blocks north.
And, of course, the plan’s pièce de résistance: linking the South Harbor Station and the Tri-C Station with an on-street track line running down East 17th, a line that would link Historic Chinatown, Playhouse Square and Cleveland State with, for the first time ever, an actual route.
Part of the study suggested better connectors to Waterfront Line stations, like a bike lane linking West 3rd pedestrians to its station near Cleveland Browns Stadium.
The master recommendation from CSU’s year-long study: suggestions for housing in orange, and new or improved green space in green.
In urbanist parlance, that’s transit-oriented development, homes erected as close to transit stations as city permits will allow. Which should in theory lead to, the students believe, “increasing density, getting parking right, providing safe connections, fostering vibrant public spaces, and prioritizing affordable housing.”
“As the area becomes more livable, walkable, and connected, this will attract more residents and visitors and increase demand for regular light rail service,” it added. “This, in turn, will make the Waterfront Line an even more convenient and attractive option for getting around, thereby creating a virtuous cycle that benefits everyone.”
The key word being everyone. Though Downtown’s population has grown 41% in the past decade or so, the growth has been mostly composed of white people in their mid-to-late twenties and thirties. RTA’s average rider, which it has long catered to, is a carless Black woman in her twenties making less than $25,000 a year.
17th Street’s study, which echoes Bibb’s calls for equity on the lakefront, makes an attempt to bridge the gaps left by demographics and pure economics. (And those who can afford a car in the first place.)
Either near the Settlers Landing Station or the Muni Lots hugging the North Coast Station on East 9th, the students suggest, based on housing data, that there’s “unmet demand” for some 1,840 apartment units. And units of varying rent levels. In one analysis of the Historic Flats, the students found that 400 units clocking $456/month would be worthwhile to build—just as some 500 units charging renters $1,902/month.
But, as 17th Street’s shiny renderings give off, anything is better than barren concrete lots. In the Muni Lot West, they imagine a shipping container park and mid-rises. In “The Pit,” the gargantuan lot south of the Browns Stadium, some 70,000 square feet of day cares, pet goods stores, apartments and restaurants.
Both the demand and promise for defeating RTA’s, and transit in general, oldest stigma as lesser than car trips comes straight from 17th Street’s survey of hundreds of Clevelanders, about half of which claimed they would ride the Waterfront Line even if they didn’t own a car. A little more than half called the line “not convenient”; two-fifths found the train cars took “too long”; twenty percent couldn’t find the RTA sufficiently safe.
“The Flats have lost their color,” another stakeholder wrote. “Everything is gray.”
“Public transit has a stigma,” another said.
Thomas Hilde, a professor who co-teaches, with James Kastelic, the “Planning Studio” graduate course that produced the study over the past two semesters, told Scene that his students came to the typical conclusion that planners have long arrived at: defeating RTA’s “unsafe” perception and increasing its riders are parallel goals.
“I think that’s the biggest challenge, just getting more people” on the line, Hilde said. “Like Jane Jacobs said in the 1960s—eyes on the street, just having people present. That’s the best way of changing that perception.”
But could the city actually build all of this? Will developers, often skeptical observing rising construction costs and steep lending rates, see the vision promulgated by a series of optimistic planners in their mid-to-late twenties?
Hilde thinks so, to some extent.
“Many of these planning studio projects have influenced real outcomes in the city,” he told Scene. He cited “Balancing Broadway,” 2022’s study of Lorain’s Main Street. “They’ve taken off! I mean, not as they’re written, but they’re influential. And they contribute to the conversation.
