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Gordon Park, long split by a six-lane highway and suffering from neglect, will undergo major transformation in early 2025.
Like countless Clevelanders of her generation, Lorraine Bradley has always seen Gordon Park as the go-to place for softball and barbecue on the east side.
At least as it was in the eighties and nineties, when Bradley would accompany her husband for league games on one of the park’s five baseball diamonds. The whole trip, typically a short walk from her home in Hough, grew into weekly association. Sundays. Softball. Cookout.
“We always made it into a family affair,” Bradley, 75, told Scene. “The kids played. You’d go to the aquarium. All the families would gather. You know, we didn’t all live in the same community, but the park’s where we all met.”
And as it was for countless Clevelanders, the image and aura of Gordon Park as a vibrant gathering space hugging Lake Erie has all but eroded in recent years. Today, the park is a shell of what it once was: 48 acres of underwhelming grass and field comprising a mountainous island surrounded by highway and industry.
Gordon Park’s hopeful resurrection was the subject of a town hall situated in the Kovacic Rec Center on St. Clair Ave. on Tuesday evening, a public engagement procedure studded with the usual stickers and Post It notes nearby residents used to help direct the park’s future.
Spearheading by the Metroparks, which took over Gordon’s lease in October, and a smattering of architecture firms, including LAND Studio and the SmithGroup, that went through the idea-gathering phase used in just about every recent parks project in Cleveland’s recent history—from Irishtown Bend Park to the elusive and yet-to-be-fully-funded North Coast Landbridge.
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Mark Oprea
Chad Brintnall, an architect at SmithGroup, led discussions around Gordon Park’s redesign on Tuesday.
The ideas, discussed over two hours with some 25 locals, pointed to not just cleaning up and rejuvenating Gordon Park, but bringing one of Cleveland’s largest park spaces into the 21st century: add interactive art, butterfly gardens, food kiosks, playspaces, hiking trails, fitness equipment and restrooms.
In other words, the people spoke, reshape Gordon Park for everyone.
“I feel like the amenities have to be diversified. To where it’s just not basketball, or not just softball,” Rodney Middleton, 66, a trustee of the InterCity Yacht Club that’s rooted just north of Gordon, told Scene after the meeting sporting a sailor’s cap.
“And safe,” he said. “We have to be mindful of the age groups that utilize the park. It’s just not young people. It’s just not young Black men. You know, we’re talking about a space that families should be able to utilize.”
All entities involved in the info-gathering on Tuesday declined to say Gordon Park should be this, or should be that, yet promised that the ideas gathered would help produce a working plan for the park come early 2025.
The $8 million donation from the Mandel Foundation, which permitted Tuesday’s session, would also, said Chad Brintnall, an architect with the SmithGroup, be used for some public art installations—”a project that delivers significant impact to the community.” And, separately, 200 new trees on behalf of the Western Reserve Land Conservancy. Metroparks also reportedly put in new benches, tables and trash cans shortly after their lease takeover.
But at the same time, as Brintnall exemplified on Tuesday, hunched over a table with a marker in his hand, such engagement helps right the wrong of two ideas of park planning. Ideas that separate Clevelanders who use the park on a regular basis, and those that have, historically, shaped and planned a city from afar.
Those “who feel as if they’ve been left out of the conversation, who don’t feel the same attention. It’s vital that you have meaningful dialogue with those folks,” Brintnall said. “There’s so many empty and broken promises. How do you get over that?”
Which only somewhat appeases Bradley.
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Cleveland Memory Project
Gordon Park, shown here in 1927, was a bustling haven for east side parkgoers, until years of neglect and the construction of I-90 decimated it.
Because Gordon Park was split in two by the construction of I-90, and the extension of the CSX railroad line, an ongoing silo effect has only harmed access to the parkland. Gordon Park, to put it simply, is not easy to get to. Residents complain often, as they did Tuesday, about its poor signage. A tiny bridge over a six-lane highway is the only link between Gordon’s north and south ends.
“Honestly, I’d love to just see that bridge widened,” Bradley said. “So that we can go over it—safely.”
Safe may take two decades. To the northwest, in front of the East 55th Marina, will be the primary location of the Metroparks’ gargantuan CHEERS park build, which vows to create six bays of new lakeside green space all from dredged material. (Like Burke and the Shoreway itself.) CHEERS won’t be finished until 2042, at the earliest.
Kelly Coffman, an architect with the Metroparks involved with both projects, told Scene she sees Gordon’s future geographically intertwined with CHEERS, linked by a brand new bike trail on Marginal Road and, hopefully, a parasitic highway downgraded to a slower boulevard.
All of which makes Coffman call up old pictures of Gordon Park in its glory days, of postwar women in white one-pieces, lounging on a crystalline lakeside, near bathhouses and hotdog stands. Images destroyed by a highway and decades of neglect.
“I think it’s just of a previous era,” Coffman mused, regarding past planning. “Like those are the decisions they made, they dealt with in the past.
“I think we get so many more benefits out of the park now by building out, and just kind of working around it,” she added. “We can improve crossings, we can reduce interchanges. We can make it better.”
The coalition working to restore Gordon Park will meet again for a second engagement session, with early conceptual drawings, Brintnall said, in September.
