It’s been so long since I’ve been inside, I can’t say much about the science center. About 10 years ago there was talk of moving the Crawford Auto museum down there, but that appears to have permanently fallen through. It’s no great loss. University Circle is such a better setting for a museum anyways.

Any urban designer who has ever taken a serious look at Cleveland would have advised against programming the heck out of the lakefront with these entertainment venues. A significant green space would have been the best way to go, not that rinky-dink George Voinovich parks and whatever else is passed off as a park down there). Environmentally speaking, it’s wise to keep the built environment a little distance from waterfronts. I am aware that the site is a landfill, but contless landfills have been converted into better uses. I am highly skeptical of anyone who claims that environmental hazards of the site make it unsuitable for a park but compatible with a stadium. Also, the oppotunity to deploy a stadium as a neighborhood stimulus-the Gateway effect, if you will-is lost when the neighborhood is, well, a great big body of water on one side and railroad tracks on the other.

Muni was originly called “the Mistake by the Lake” for a good reason. Clevelanders have chanted this phrase hundreds of times and, astonishingly, repeated their mistake. I am not sure how this happened. There were several other sites considered. I’ll see if I can dive through the microfiche the next time I’m in Cleveland.

But it didn’t have to be all bad. The one advantage of the lakefront site is the obvious proximity it has to that crumbling “Convention Center”, which I believe once hosted a Republican National convention 90 years ago. That very well might have been the last major event held there. What an opportunity! This would have dovetailed nicely with the Hopkins runway expansion plans of the time, which proposed runways in the path of the I-X center. The city of Brookpark had raised a stink about it, naturally—but this project would have killed their business and given them little choice.
In the meantime, Pittsburgh built a state-of-the-art (but very flawed) convention center that absorbed whatever market there might’ve been for one in Cleveland. Ours, in combination with the stadium, might’ve been better. The facility would have been used much more than the single use sport palace we have instead. Shoot, tt might have even generated enough income to eventually pay itself off, and it needn’t have cost that much more than what we actually built, coupled with the miniature Waterfront Line which has absurdly low ridership statistics. We probably wouldn’t be hosting any more Republican National Conventions, but at least we could aspire to host a Super Bowl or something.

So, in summary, we built a stadium on a site where there really shouldn’t be one, and we failed to take advantage of the natural opportunities that site presented. We made all of the worst possible choices.

Pardon the screed here.

Good people of Montreal: learn from our mistake.

I was thinking of something more along the lines of the domed stadium in St. Louis, built a couple years before ours, which is located very near downtown. Or maybe Atlanta’s in a more Urban setting. Detroit and Indy are good examples of what might’ve been.
The retractable roof is a pretty significant cost—it depends on the design, a telescoping shed like Bank of Ballpark isn’t terribly expensive, although it wouldn’t be as technically marvelous as the roof above, say, Miller Park. But that’s not a big deal. If Clevelanders are really so adverse to fixed domes, we could have pulled it off.
I understand the retractable roof concerns of baseball fans. I was not aware of that purist element in the minds of football fans. Even so, if we’re only talking about 8 + 2 contests a year, versus an entire year of other possible uses of the stadium, why should the football people have the final say in this?

I am very aware of the challenges with domes. The crane accident was an isolated incident where the general contractor screwed up. They got the engineering and the architecture right.
The Miller Park example is very different though. I bring it up only as an example of design excellence. I would argue that the roof wasn’t necessary in Milwaukee’s case—retractable roofs over baseball stadia are a little frivolous in almost every case. I’m not pro-dome everywhere, for everything.

But these are just challenges, not a fundamental miscalculation or a total lack of vision.