Spent this summer and fall having the extraordinary opportunity to work with people in the Cleveland neighborhoods of Stockyards, Buckeye-Shaker-Larchmere, Glenville, Central and Mill Creek to design out how they wanted to make the places they live be more inviting, beautiful, creative, and inspiring. This was a pilot year for a project called City Repair (which originated in Portland, OR) in Cleveland. The dedication people showed over the course of 6 months-- to making meeting after meeting, drawing in new people and putting in a huge amount of hours and brain-power to get projects implemented-- was pretty unbelievable. The photo above is of Newark Court, an alleyway in Stockyards about 850 feet long. The long-term plan is to paint the entire length of the alley as a stream (since a stream actually does run underneath the street). Because the actual painting of the pavement has to wait until City approval comes through, neighbors came up with a Plan B of getting permission of every single property owner on the alley to pain their fences and garages as the streambed. It came out gorgeously. But more importantly, I have maybe never seen any other project pull together so many people in such a short period of time as new friends, and collaborators in re-envisioning our world together. I am so excited to see where this goes from here!
