Ohio developer wants to go downtown

Ohio developer Robert Stark has created a new urban town center by the name of Crocker Park outside Cleveland. Now he is eager to use the ideas to revitalize the historic city. “I feel I am in possession of a great truth,” he told Cleveland Plain Dealer architecture critic Steve Litt. “If I were quiet, I’d be complicit in destroying the community.” Stark’s career began as a developer of conventional suburban shopping centers, Litt reports, but he switched gears with Crocker Park, a $420 million, 1.6 million sq. ft. town center with retail, housing, and offices in Westlake about 14 miles west of the city. “The architecture looks ersatz,” says Litt, whose architectural preferences run more toward Frank Gehry than traditional design. “But Stark’s effort to build a mixed-use urban center in a sprawl suburb is a huge, positive step for Northeast Ohio.” The report is significant because some new urbanists criticize town centers like Crocker Park as being little more than malls with the roof off. They can be a training ground, however, for developers, builders, and designers to gain experience with urbanism before trying it in more intensely urban — and perhaps more challenging — locations. Stark believes that lenders would be eager to invest in a major mixed-use project in the heart of Cleveland, which can certainly use the development. He has been talking to city officials and winning converts in the real estate industry, and was intending to take his ideas to the International Council of Shopping Centers conference — where huge deals are made — in Las Vegas. “The capital market is champing at the bit to fund this stuff,” he told Litt. “They know the answer to bums and pigeons and whistling winds and perceptions of a wasteland is active neighborhoods where people work and live, that are self-policing, urban, and safe.” u