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Park, bike trails and apartments eventually coming to open field along Lake Erie near Downtown Cleveland

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CLEVELAND — The Cleveland Planning Commission agreed to a property adoption agreement that will allow a developer to build and maintain park amenities and a bike infrastructure on the plot of land north of North Marginal Road by East 55th Street.

Nearby, the Shoreline Apartments is one of the only options to live along Lake Erie near Downtown Cleveland in the 1929 Nicholson Cleveland Terminal building. The Landmark Companies bought The Shoreline in 2017.

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The Shoreline apartments are one of the few places in Downtown Cleveland where tenants can live along Lake Erie.

Plans show a new apartment complex and parking lot in what is today an open grass field. Some of the current parking lot would be changed allowing for a bike trail to connect to cycling future infrastructure that will eventually be built along North Marginal Road. That trail would connect to public park space along the water.

“We were able to go back and forth working with this development interest to ensure that public access was maintained,” said city of Cleveland director of city planning Freddy Collier. “It took a lot of back and forth but we do believe that we get some benefit form this investment, maintaining the waters edge sand linking up with our bicycles network in this geography.”

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Much of the grass field will be used for parking, park space, and a new multi-family building.

Part of the land will remain as it is for the sewer district, but a berm will separate where the public will be from that piece of the shoreline.

Before the pandemic, Landmark Companies planned on building The Shoreline Extension, which would have been a $51 million project, using 4.5 acres to add 214 apartments to the existing 167 across the existing parking lot.

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This open space could eventually be tied into a bike trail network that wound run from the marina nearby all the way to East 9th Street.

Landmark Companies Principal John M. Carney says this is a continuation of the effort to realize those prepandemic plans, but that they still don’t know the final timeline and cost for the project.

Developers say the chance to have public access and to tie into the regions bike infrastructure is a selling point for the project, eventually giving people access to the lake and various points in the community without a car.

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Part of the land would be kept for access to infrastructure that empties into Lake Erie. Much of the rest of the land is close to being available for future development.

The planning commission’s green light allows the process to move to the full city council. Once it’s officially green lit, Carney says the development group can start pulling together financing, go through the plan approval process, with the hope that they can break ground at some point in 2022.

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