Ray Petro had the kind of idea you could argue could only be pulled off in a city like Cleveland.
He’s a remodeler by trade and an avid mountain biker, but that’s hard to do during Cleveland’s snowy winters. So, a few years ago, he came up with a plan.
PETRO: I just happen to look in the paper and I’d kinda given up on the idea.
What he wanted was a big warehouse to build an indoor haven for mountain bikers when it’s too cold to ride outside.
PETRO: And I saw this little ad that said “clean space, low rent.” I phoned it up and I said can I speak to whoever has the space, and they’re like, well you want to speak to Suzy. And, I’m like, man, Suzy is not going to get this.
REMER: So I said sure, I talk to crazy people all day long.
Landlord Suzy Remer did get it. Ray Petro wanted to fill her vacant and sprawling industrial building with ramps and jumps made of wood and concrete. It looks like an unfinished basement.
PETRO: You’re in this old building and there’s all this crazy pipes and steel and everything. And when you’re in here, it almost reminds you, in this weird sense, that you’re out in the woods with big oak trees and weird things over your head that don’t make any sense.
THOMAS: I said, Ray, can I see the blueprint for this space? When you created it a couple of years ago. He said, there is no blueprint.
Jennifer Thomas has become one of Ray’s biggest supporters. She runs the foundation-funded Civic Innovation Lab which gave Ray’s a $30,000 grant once he was up and running. The money professionalized the operation and made it more of a real business.
THOMAS: Ray really understood his customer before he built the park.
Only a few years since he maxed out his credit cards to get it started, the park is a success. 20,000 riders came last year. Eighty percent of them from out of state. Ray’s is profitable, even though it only costs about twenty bucks to spend a day there. And, it’s spreading success to nearby hotels and restaurants.
Meanwhile, in downtown Cleveland, Vicky Poole had her own wild idea for transforming a struggling mall.
POOLE: Doesn’t it smell awesome? This is basil and this has all been harvested last week. That’s why…
Poole is the marketing director for the Galleria at Erieview, a huge glass structure only a few blocks from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Name brand retail stores pulled out eight years ago and it’s not much more than a food court now. But Poole sees food as the Galleria’s future. Since the mall resembles a greenhouse, she decided to turn it into one.
POOLE: Now that’s got a full section of the lettuce. That’s a romaine that’s growing right now…
She calls the project Gardens Under Glass and it’s quickly becoming the mall’s main attraction. In hydroponic beds, she grows lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, cilantro. She has dreams of vertical gardens on the mall’s glass sides. For now, it’s just a pilot project, and the first few crop turns sold out quickly as restaurants and the public snatched up the fresh produce.
POOLE: My ultimate goal would be to utilize every square inch that I could to demonstrate growing.
Like Petro, Poole received a grant from the Civic Innovation Lab to expand this urban farm. And, the project is showing signs that it could revitalize the mall.
POOLE: I’ve talked with a company that carries green cleaning supplies. We had a girl who has a recycled gift shop. So they’re all coming and they’re interested.
Dan Kildee of the national nonprofit Center for Community Progress is an expert on revitalizing vacant and abandoned properties. He says city leaders tend to ignore the little projects like a mountain bike park or an urban garden, instead focusing on huge, splashy plans.
KILDEE: Build a great big casino complex. Build a great, big convention center.
Cleveland has advanced plans to build one of each.
But Kildee says cities need lots of little projects to turn around former manufacturing capitals like Cleveland and Detroit. Some ideas will fail, others will take off.
KILDEE: They don’t have the sort of overnight effect that a major investment has. But what we’ve learned, and believe me, I come from Flint, MI, that as exciting as it is to see one of those big projects show up, it’s devastating when they leave just as fast.
Meanwhile, Ray Petro is doing so well that he’s getting ready to open another mountain bike park in the snowy Midwest. This one in Milwaukee.