Landscape & Irrigation

22 April 2016 Landscape and Irrigation www.landscapeirrigation.com PROJECT PROFILE Cleveland, Ohio has been called The City of Comebacks and for good reason. But when it comes to the environment, Cleveland isn't so much in the middle of a comeback as it is a continuation. The latest example comes on the banks of the Cuyahoga River, where the environmental movement in the United States got its beginning. It's in the bricks and mortar and streets of a long-shuttered industrial complex. Once a tumble-down district of closed warehouses on the riverfront, the Flats East Bank development on the banks of the Cuyahoga River is a big part of Cleveland's reemergence. It's now the site of $750 million in waterfront development, including an 18-story office tower, a hotel, a fitness club and local restaurants. In Fall 2015, Phase II opened with a 241-unit high- end apartment building, restaurants, entertainment venues and an extensive riverfront boardwalk. A FIRE, AND A RESPONSE The Cuyahoga River attracted national media attention when it caught fire more than 40 years ago. The infamous fire that began on an oil slick in the middle of the shipping channel, and led to Time magazine's first column on the environment, is credited with beginning a chain of events that led to new federal regulations to protect the environment. To begin, Time got it wrong: the picture that ran with the story showing a ship engulfed in flames was actually taken of a fire on the river 17 years earlier. Second, historians at Cleveland State University point out that Cleveland's city leaders were already involved in cleaning up the Cuyahoga, because a $100 million bond issue for the river's cleanup was overwhelmingly passed before the 1969 fire took place. Attitudes had already begun to shift. Water pollution — once viewed as an inevitable consequence that came in exchange for the industries that had made the city prosperous — was no longer acceptable. As the environmental movement took hold in the 1960s, the problem began to resolve itself on two fronts. According to historians, industries began to close, which cut down on new sources of pollution. Civic activism also came to the fore. Cleveland Mayor Carl Stokes, the first black mayor of a major American city, pressed the issue locally, holding a press conference a day after the 1969 fire. Stokes and his brother, Louis Stokes, who represented Cleveland in Congress, played a part in the passage of the federal Clean Water Act in 1972. FLATS EAST BANK TODAY Jeremy Hinte, RLA, a landscape architect in the Cleveland-based landscape architecture firm Behnke Associates, which designed the hardscape additions in the latest phase of Flats East Bank, said that during the past few decades industrial land use has On the Banks of the Cuyahoga ■ BY WALT STEELE slowly transformed into mixed-use development of historic warehouse buildings. The improvements are a continuation of the work begun by commercial real estate developer and philanthropist Bert L. Wolstein, who with his wife, Iris, and son, Scott, worked for more than 25 years to transform the Flats East Bank area. Wolstein's family said today that although Wolstein, who died in May 2004, did well financially — and donated more than $40 million to local hospitals, colleges and other institutions along the way — the Flats East Bank project was both a labor of love and a source of great joy. "I know Bert is smiling on us now," said Iris Wolstein. "Maybe now, Cleveland will be known as The Legend on the Lake." Hinte said that the new additions have maintained the authenticity of the overall Flats District by emulating the historic ALL PHOTOS PROVIDED BY PINE HALL BRICK COMPANY

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