University Circle Cancer Moving Down East Boulevard... Is there an Urban Planner in the House?

The last two realneo headers are pans of a site I pass often, on my way between the East and West sides, which is bounded by East 105, Wade Park and East Boulevard, in one of the most important historic and cultural neighborhoods in America, where I was shocked to find a group of significant apartment buildings being demolished.

Being on the edge of "University Circle" and next to the Veterans Administration hospital, and knowing the lust around there for parking, my immediate thought was "these MFing "NEO-planners" are demolishing more of our scarce historic fabric to build a garage... and I was right. In typical cloak of NEO stupidity and sell-out fashion, many historic buildings were demolished without any public input or outcry I know of, days before the Plain Dealer printed the NEO PR machine's gushing announcements of plans for the by-then vacant properties... see the bullshit here [1]..

Gotta love the pathetic headline playing to the "Social Consciousness" bug in we morons who just allowed more important historic buildings to be destroyed and the fabric of our neighborhoods to be further demolished in the interest of sprawl and automobiles... er, sheltering homeless defenders of America and apple pie... "Veterans homeless shelter part of Wade Park project" God bless war and the Port Authority.

Of course, the great and powerful Port Authority has its fingers all over this one and surely has planned this demolition, as the PD reports: "A committee of the Cleveland-Cuyahoga County Port Authority recommended Tuesday that the port board approve issuing taxable bonds for the $125 million project". " The port will own the developed property." They have been planning this for a long, long, long time.

BTW... the demolition effort did not appear to recycle any material from the buildings as the picture below shows valuable windows and stone work - historically significant - just hours before reduction to land fill. So what is the environmental impact of this project and the over 2,000 cars that will park on this site in the future? Where is the TOD?

Your tax dollars, elected officials and community at work... demolishing this...