Today’s Report – March 29th

  • Cleveland Foodie: A Perfect Saturday Morning. Michelle heads to West 4th for breakfast at the new Erie Island Coffee. And she also stops by the still-not-completed Greenhouse Tavern. Both sound great. Lately it seems like all new restaurants are opening on W. 4th. I remember just a couple of years ago we went down to Ingenuity and they had many of the art displays in various abandoned storefronts on W. 4th. Those spaces are all now full of restaurants and assorted hot spots. (Of course, this being “zero-sum Cleveland”, the activity there has meant that the Flats are now pretty much closed down and even the Warehouse district is seeing much less activity. There’s just not enough folks around here to support this type of stuff.)
  • ODOT: As expected, ODOT is sucking up much of Ohio’s Economic Stimulus money, with the single biggest item being the Innerbelt Bridge at $200 milliion. And $20 million for more preliminary work on the Opportunity Corridor (i.e. a quicker way into University Circle).
  • Cleveland Foundation: This quarter’s awards. Mostly to University Circle, which is smart, especially if anyone actually builds that Opportunity Corridor thing. There’s also a pretty smart feedback response from reader “NEOKARMA” to the fact that the Foundation is giving half a million dollars to the Port Authority for more studies on how to move the port facilities to E. 55th St. I agree that Lorain is a far better location for a regional port. Fairport Harbor and Ashtabula are probably even better than that since it would be cheaper and easier to build the necessary infrastructure there. But since those ports are in other counties, I guarantee that nobody at the Cleveland-Cuyahoga County Port Authority is looking at them. Again, where is Chicago’s port? How about Houston’s? New York’s? Or the largest port in the Western Hemisphere, New Orleans’? (I’ll give you a hint: None of them are in the cities I just named. And one of them isn’t even in the same state. That’s regionalism.)

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