KCRag Forum

Anybody have cool bars, restaurants, attractions in cleveland they can suggest?  I have already been to the rock and roll hall of fame.

there is a cool Natural History museum and botanical garden area in the University Circle area!  Huntington Park beach in Bay Village is a great place to spend an afternoon in the summer.

Little Italy, again, near the University circle area is a nice strolling area with good authentic Italian restaurants!

Oberlin, 40 miles west of Cleveland is a cute little college town with great art museum and usually some top name musical groups peforming some sort of concert!

Just for starters

I would love to go to cedar point but we are doing this trip sans auto. 

Thanks for the tips...neighborhoods/downtowns and good food/drink are my styles of travel.

We ate/drank on 4th street, pedestrian street chock full of places

Velvet Tango Room tops my list of destinations when I make it to Cleveland.

Michael Symon's restaurants (Lola--fancy, Lolita--more casual, Bar Symon--pretty new) are all the rage there...I gather he's the local celeb chef.

I encouage you to look at these threads for worthwhile explorations of Cleveland's more humble food scene:

http://www.lthforum.com/bb/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=19279
http://www.lthforum.com/bb/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=18270

A Must is The barking spider, so great & cool out of the way type of place. http://www.barkingspidertavern.com/

Lola is great, and is well worth the money.

Panini's Grill is a great late night sandwich, I wish I had one now! http://www.paninisgrill.com/

Little Italy I liked Gusto, http://www.gustolittleitaly.com/  and  La Dolce Vita Restaurant

James Garfield's Grave is in the coolest cemetery I have seen in a long time. Just up the hill from little Italy, perfect to walk off some good food. http://www.deadohio.com/garfieldmonument.htm

mayor_of_waldo wrote:
Panini's Grill is a great late night sandwich, I wish I had one now! http://www.paninisgrill.com/

Easily the best sandwich I have ever had. I still have dreams about their sandwiches.

Have you been to the ballpark?

Time for a drive up to roller coaster mecca at cedar/kings island?

Edit - oops just saw you already thought of this. 

I went last weekend for the DT Hall of Fame thing....fun trip...didn't really do much in Cleveland except eat and booze...and I was fine with that.  Pissed the Indians were out of town though.

I was looking at a building interior that some photographer posted on Facebook (Cleveland Arcade). I noticed that Cleveland seems to have a lot more downtown retail -- by a lot -- than Kansas City. Many of the retail businesses are in two arcades: the Cleveland Arcade, and the 5th Street Arcades. There is also some retail in the Tower City Center. This is in addition to street retail.

The Cleveland Arcade

http://www.theclevelandarcade.com/



5th Street Arcades

https://www.5thstreetarcades.com/

Directory

https://www.5thstreetarcades.com/directory/

Tower City Center

https://www.towercitycenter.com/

Tower City Center directory

https://www.towercitycenter.com/pdfs/directoryMap.pdf

Man, that arcade is beautiful! But most of the stores in 5th Street Arcade and Tower City Center are the crappy shops you can find in most downtown malls - local tchotchkes, local sports apparel, athletic shoes, dollar stores, etc. (not that some of those wouldn't be welcomed in KC). Aside from Morton's and Brooks Brothers, there isn't much there - no department store, no general apparel, etc.

https://www.news5cleveland.com/news/e-t ... r-shoppers

Even their Galleria had to turn to urban farming and a YMCA to remain viable - and one of the two retail spots listed is a Hungarian museum and gift shop.

I guess it seemed to me that they had a lot of restaurants in their downtown -- especially ones with outdoor seating. It appears that way on Google Streetview anyway. That was what I meant by retail.

More photos of the Cleveland Arcade that features more detail on the storefront level.





Here is an aerial view of the Cleveland Arcade building, which has entrances on both Euclid and Superior.



These are photos of the 5th Street Arcades, which are actually two separate arcades: the Euclid Arcade and the Colonial Arcade, that are connected. They have different glass roof structures.







Here is an aerial of the 5th Street Arcades, which has entrances on Euclid and Prospect Avenue East.



These two arcades are located across the street from each other -- one is just a few yards down the block from the other.

Google Maps showing both arcades from above.

https://tinyurl.com/ydcgx77a

That's a lot if arcades. Very European

So nice they've been able to maintain the glory of the golden years for a relatively struggling city. KC 'renewed' downtown with teardowns for surface lots. At least we saved Union Station from an actual desire for a teardown

I always tend to think of Cleveland as struggling more than Kansas City, so I assumed their downtown was in worse shape than ours. However, when I tour via Google Streetview, there seems to be a lot of streetfront restaurants and other small commercial shops; and a lot more outdoor seating along the streets than Kansas City seems to have downtown.

I don't think Cleveland is struggling more than KC. I haven't spent a great deal of time there, but I was there around 10 years ago and even then it seemed pretty nice. This was as P&L had just been coming online for a bit, and downtown Cleveland at that time seemed healthier than downtown KC. They had some BRT in place that made what we we had gotten with MAX look a little dumb, with articulated, kinda train-like buses. But it was pretty new and fancy at the time.

Economically Cleveland metro overall has been struggling for decades, among worst in Midwest while KC has generally been better than Midwest avg. But KC city core, especially downtown has probably struggled just as much if not more since the 70s. Cleveland has done a better job maintaining downtown since the 70s than KCMO has.

https://www.recenter.tamu.edu/data/popu ... yria%2C_OH

Wonder if a healthy Cleveland downtown has anything to do with denser inner ring suburbs? Cleveland has lots of decent sized suburbs all within 6-10 miles of downtown. It's much different here where some of our larger suburbs are all 15-25 miles from downtown.

Milwaukee is kind of the same way u have a somewhat healthy downtown but a lot of inner suburbs are an easy 10 minute drive into downtown

Cleveland has had more population loss than Kansas City.

Cleveland peaked at 914,808 in 1950.
Kansas City peaked at 507,087 in 1970.

Cleveland's population now in the City (not Metro) is 385,525.
Our City population is 488,943. (2017 estimate)

Cleveland's Metro population now is around 2,055,612.
Our Metro population is now around 2,159,159.

Cleveland, the City, is just 77.70 sq. miles in land area.
Our City is 314.95 sq. miles in land area.

Cleveland is now ranked 51 in population.
Kansas City now ranked 37 in population.

Cleveland's density is 5,107 people per sq. mile.
Kansas City's density is 1,400 people per sq. mile.

Cleveland's poverty rate is 35 percent.
Kansas City's poverty rate is 16 percent.

Cleveland has 156,956 employees working in the City, and is growing at a rate of 5.44%.
Kansas City has 249,734 employees within the City, and is growing at a rate of 3.76%.

Cleveland's median household income is $27,551, has declined 4.44%.
Kansas City's median household income is $51,235, and is growing at 1.94%.

Cleveland's median property value is $66,800, and is growing at a rate of 0.91%.
Kansas City's median property value is $146,300, and is growing at a rate of 5.71%.

Kansas City is likely to exceed its' 1970 population peak at some point in the next five years.

https://datausa.io/profile/geo/cleveland-oh/

https://datausa.io/profile/geo/kansas-city-mo/