Greyhound may soon be leaving its longtime home in Downtown Cleveland. The 75-year-old bus terminal on Chester Avenue was purchased by a Connecticut real estate company earlier this year. Clevelanders have mixed feelings about the future of the terminal.
“If they move the Greyhound bus station to another location,” said taxi driver Mahmoud Jaafar, who parks outside daily, waiting to pick up arrivals. “I’ll be affected economically.”
Speculation on the future of Cleveland’s Greyhound station isn’t lost on Jaafar. The bus station is just a block away from the headquarters of his taxi business.
“We are here in the middle of Downtown. Very accessible location. I’m not going to Strongsville or North Olmsted or to Crocker Park” or any location, he said, that isn’t Downtown.
Like Jafaar, Allecia Creighton, agrees on the importance of the location.
“They should keep it in the Downtown area,” Creighton said as she waited for her boyfriend to pick her up following her trip to West Virginia. “It don’t have to be right here on Chester. A lot of people are not familiar with the West Side, and a lot of people on the West Side are not familiar with the East Side. Make it accessible to the whole city of Cleveland.”
Built in 1948, the exterior of the bus terminal was designed with long horizontal lines and curved corners — a Streamline-Moderne style, similar to Art Deco. A vertical marquee, reminiscent of New Deal-era theater houses, spells out Greyhound in block letters.
“It is a massive and really incredible structure,” said Chris Roy, a volunteer historian for Cleveland State University’s Cleveland Historical project.
“It’s kind of like a little city, and that’s what it was designed to be,” he explained. “It had a drug store. It had a soda fountain. It was also approximate to a tremendous amount of density in the immediate area.”
That’s no longer the case. The food counter is gone. Food options have been reduced to vending machines. As Roy describes it, there are now more preferred forms of transportation. Pairing that with a mass migration to the suburbs, the Greyhound station is not what it used to be.
“It does just give you this vibe of, ‘I’m past my prime,’” he said, “and it’s particularly evident because it is such a cool building. I would imagine that even to this day as people pass by it, they may on the one hand note the lack of activity, that there’s simply no buzz around it. But they should be struck by what a neat looking building it is.”
Even with its reduced amenities, Cleveland’s bus depot provides something others in Ohio no longer provide — ample space and plentiful indoor seating.
That’s how Michael Crawford, who was in town visiting family, described the Greyhound station compared to the bus depot in Lima.
“Greyhound in Lima is like – ok, if you got the Greyhound and the RTA hooked up. Combined it into one small building and the building ain’t that big and the chairs are outside of it just to sit down and wait for the bus. For those who got to travel in the wintertime, I’d hate to see that place being crowded.”
Bus travel is convenient and affordable for Crawford. A different location for the bus station, he said, won’t keep him from riding the bus back to his Cleveland hometown.
“I’m gonna still take it because I know the bus routes, or I can have someone pick me up like I always do,” he said.
A new location doesn't worry Aaron Connor, either. He lives and works Downtown and doesn't own a car.
“As long as they’re not getting rid of it entirely, as long as there's still a way for people to access it, I don't think it’s the end of the world,” Connor said, after arriving by bus from his hometown of Buffalo. “As long as it’s somewhere near some kind of train, rail, bus line, it’s not the end of the world.”
Twenty Lakes Holding, the real estate company that owns the building, said in a statement its immediate plan is to operate the property as a bus station. It doesn’t have a plan for the site beyond that.
The city of Cleveland said it doesn’t have any additional information about the future of the bus station at this time.
