Cleveland Street reopens with celebration event | SLIDESHOW

Published 4:11 pm Thursday, March 26, 2015

After more than a year of various road closures, Cleveland Street in downtown Redmond has reopened to traffic.

Since January of 2014, the street has been under construction as part of the city’s efforts to turn the neighborhood into an urban center.

Cleveland Street — between 161st and 164th avenues northeast — is Redmond’s new main street and was designed to encourage its use for 18-hour days.

“We’re trying to make it like a living room for the people who live there,” said Lisa Singer from the city’s Public Works Department and project manager for the Cleveland Streetscape.

Redmond Mayor John Marchione added, “Cleveland Street’s transformation will provide residents, employees and visitors with more opportunities to walk and bike, enhancing the vitality of the downtown core. Cleveland will now be the city’s main street, with both Cleveland Street and Redmond Way becoming two-way streets very soon.”

Singer said while the road is now open to traffic — as of March 11 — crews still have some minor clean-up work to do before the project is completely finished. The whole project cost $5 million and is funded by a $3.37 million Surface Transportation Program (Urban) federal grant and the city’s Capital Improvements Programs budget.

STREET FEATURES

Some of the features of the new Cleveland Street include catenary lights that will encourage evening activity and provide a connection between the Redmond Central Connector (RCC) and Downtown Park. Singer said these lights are located above crosswalks at 161st and 164th avenues northeast.

Singer said the street also features landscaped areas and benches as well as wider sidewalks. The latter, she said, will help to encourage outdoor seating for the restaurants located along the street.

In addition, the newly re-designed Cleveland Street is curbless and made from concrete. With the former, Singer said it allows for flexibility if the city wants to hold any sort of festival, outdoor market or other event — or to expand an event from the future Downtown Park.

She added that because the street is curbless, the city worked with The Lighthouse for the Blind — a not-for-profit organization focused on providing employment, support and training opportunities for people who are blind, deaf-blind and blind with other disabilities — to ensure that those who use canes to guide themselves will also be able to use the street safely since there won’t be a curb to help them detect where the sidewalk ends and the street begins.

“It’s unusual,” Singer said about this extra measure the city took.

UNEXPECTED DELAYS

Singer said the city decided to use concrete instead of asphalt for the street because concrete has a longer life and it gives the street more of a plaza-type look and feel. She added that when they initially poured the concrete, it wasn’t up to the quality the city wanted so they had to redo some of the work, which led to a bit of a delay in the project’s timeline as this work was dependent on the weather. As previously reported, the original timeline was for the project to be complete earlier this year.

Something else that slowed things down a bit, Singer said, was the construction of Old Town Lofts, an apartment complex on Cleveland Street located between 161st Avenue Northeast and Leary Way. She said the building was still in development when the streetscape construction began and so they had to coordinate some of the utility work with that project.

“You find things you don’t expect,” Singer said. “We worked with their contractors closely.”

A LONG TIME COMING

Construction on the Cleveland Streetscape project, began in January of 2014. The project follows 10 public and private development projects in the historic core in just the last seven years.

“Everybody’s been under a lot of strain,” Singer acknowledged, referring to the businesses and residents in the area.

Jill Smith, business resources manager for the City of Redmond, added that they tried to keep regular communication with the businesses through weekly updates on the construction schedule as well as daily visits.

One of those businesses has been U.S. Nails, located at the northeast corner of Cleveland Street and Leary Way Northeast.

The nail salon will mark its 14th year at that location next month and owner Kim Thach said she has seen fewer customers since construction began — mainly due to the fact that the project made it more difficult to find parking in the area. Fortunately, Thach said, she has many regular customers who still came in to her salon.

“They didn’t mind (about the limited parking),” she said.

One of those customers is Judy Bitonio, who has been frequenting U.S. Nails every three to four weeks since Thach opened her business.

“Parking was the main disturbance,” Bitonio said about the construction work.

However, the Education Hill resident said in the long run, businesses will benefit.

“There’s going to be a lot of foot traffic,” she said. “It looks like it’s going to be good.”

Smith agreed.

“Hopefully it’ll benefit all these businesses,” she said.

Another person who has seen the potential of the Cleveland Streetscape is Ben Friedman.

As a co-founder of Homegrown Sustainable Sandwich Shop, he opened his latest store location across the street from U.S. Nails in August 2014 — right in the middle of all of the construction.

“The construction was a challenge, but the main reason we chose this location is because it’s a beautiful historic building that needed to be restored and we wanted to be a part of the process – it’s one of the oldest buildings in the Redmond,” he said.

Friedman said their foot traffic was affected by the construction, but they were “lucky to be supported by the amazing Redmond community.”

“We’ve had an awesome response despite the construction,” he said, adding that business is ramping up for them now that Cleveland Street has reopened.

A GRAND OPENING CELEBRATION

On Wednesday evening, the city held a grand opening event of Cleveland Street.

“The Cleveland Street opening celebration marks another milestone towards our long-time vision,” Marchione said, “established in the 1990s, to create two urban centers in Redmond — downtown and in Overlake.”

In addition to celebrating the new Cleveland Street, attendees tried samples from local restaurants.

Smith said they were also introduced to Redmond’s new Moving Arts Center, an art piece and mobile art center that will be used to display art and host various types of performances.

“It’s a way to experiment with activating the streets and bringing people downtown,” Singer said.

For more information about Cleveland Street, as well as other downtown projects, visit www.Redmond.gov/Downtown.