The Clifton Cultural Arts Center is still considering a new home in the neighborhood’s Burnet Woods, one of Cincinnati’s largest and most-loved parks. But the locations it is mulling and the dimensions of the building it is considering have changed.
The organization has been on the hunt for a new site since it lost the cavernous Clifton School building it leased from Cincinnati Public Schools last year.
But CCAC’s proposal back in May to build a 25,000-square-foot, three-story arts facility on the park’s Brookline Drive elicited some controversy fueled by those who oppose more construction in the park.
After feedback, CCAC commissioned preliminary concepts for a potential building in the park from design firm Emerson Design. It also shifted its focus to two different potential locations: one in a vacant field on the southwestern edge of the park where Clifton Ave. and Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd. intersect, and another location in the interior of the park south of its iconic bandstand just off Clifton Ave.
CCAC representatives Nov. 15 presented those initial plans, along with an outline for how it would pay for the estimated $8 million construction costs and its ongoing business plan, to the Cincinnati Board of Park Commissioners.
The CCAC will use about $1.5 million it received via a settlement with CPS, another $1.5 million in New Market Tax Credits and $5 million it plans to raise from private donors.
The Board did not vote on the plan, but Cincinnati Parks did provide some feedback on the early designs.
One potential plan on the edge of the park could have a facility with a footprint of about 14,000 square feet, with the whole location taking up 17,000 square feet. The other proposed facility in the park’s interior would be about 10,000 square feet, with the entire site there encompassing about 12,300 square feet. Both facilities would be two stories tall and would have 40 parking spaces around them, mostly on existing pavement.
CCAC would lease either site from Cincinnati Parks, though it’s unclear at this point what the lease price would be.
That’s pertinent because the suggestions come as Cincinnati Parks looks for ways to fund upkeep and improvements to the city’s parks. The system needs some $58 million in deferred maintenance, parks officials say, and it’s unclear where that money would come from.
“We don’t have any new buckets of resources falling out of the sky,” Parks Director Wade Walcutt said when first presenting options for additions to Burnet Woods in May. “I’m not interested in making changes for changes sake. But if there’s an opportunity for all of us to get more people into the parks, I think that’s worth exploring. If we have to do that by talking to different partners, that’s worth exploring too.”
Meanwhile, some Burnet Woods fans still aren’t happy with the idea of building there. A petition drive has garnered more than 2,600 signatures asking the park board to leave the woods alone.
“What remains of Burnet Woods is now a rare urban preserve, home to diverse plant and animal species,” the petition states. “The few structures within the park serve only to provide enrichment and enlightenment for park visitors. Since the middle of the last century, the Cincinnati Park Board has not allowed the construction of additional buildings proposed for Burnet Woods. Envisioned structures would have served the community, but their bricks and paved parking areas would have destroyed more of the surviving parkland.”
A new facility for the CCAC would be highly environmentally friendly, the art center’s representatives say, and much of the building would be built below grade and incorporate materials found in the park, limiting how much they would block views and their impact on the park’s character.
“These plans incorporated all of the community feedback we have heard over the past six months,” CCAC director Leslie Mooney wrote in an email to park supporters today. “Our goal is to create a highly sustainable design that not only has a net neutral impact, but that actually improves the park’s wildlife habitat and environment.”
The initial plans “generally meet criteria” for inclusion in the park, Walcutt wrote in a letter to the board, but “there are a number of concerns… that need to be satisfactorily resolved by CCAC as these design plans develop and evolve.” Those concerns include issues around where parking would be located at both sites, how the locations would impact traffic flow in the areas around them, the exact nature of either location’s building design, further details about the building’s environmental features and other issues. The Park Board should also look closely at the CCAC’s business plan as well as commission an appraisal of the roughly .75 acres either site would take up to determine appropriate lease costs, the letter suggests.
The missive concludes by recommending that park staff work with CCAC to further develop its plans so the board can make an informed decision on whether to allow the project to go forward.
“We realize we are still early in the process and look forward to working with area stakeholders and the Park Board if we are approved to move forward in the process,” Mooney wrote in the email to CCAC supporters today.
Changes to the woods have been touchy in the past. When it was initially leased to the city by wealthy Cincinnatians Robert Burnet and William Groesbeck in 1874, the park encompassed more than 170 acres. After the city purchased most of the land outright, it lopped off 74 acres that in 1895 became the home of the University of Cincinnati, which was then seeking to leave its crowded, hill-perched location surrounded by industry at Vine Street and Clifton Avenue.
Half a century later, the city gave UC another 18 acres now occupied by the school of Design, Art, Architecture and Planning and other buildings. Since then, fans of the park have been increasingly vigilant about proposed alterations. Voters in 2015 rejected Issue 22, a controversial charter amendment suggested by Mayor John Cranley that would have created a fund for big changes to the woods as well as many other parks around the city. Some of the suggestions for Burnet Woods in that proposal — a restaurant in the park, for example, thinning out trees and a Washington Park-like center area — were met with big opposition from residents of Clifton and others.
“Like many people in Clifton — and in the city — I am frustrated that Burnet Woods seems to be a magnet for construction proposals,” University of Cincinnati history professor and Clifton resident David Stradling told CityBeat earlier this year about the CCAC proposal and another plan involving a nature education center in the park. “We have a limited number of park acres, and we aren’t getting more. We should not use the current under-investment in the park to claim that a building represents an improvement.”
This article appears in Nov 21-28, 2018.