Cleveland's three largest employers'Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland Clinic, and University Hospitals'sit just shy of East Cleveland, the most bombed-out part of town, where foreclosures and population decline have taken the highest toll. Also clustered around this section of Euclid Avenue, called Greater University Circle, are thriving cultural institutions. Severance Hall is home to the Cleveland Orchestra, arguably the country's best. Then there's the Cleveland Museum of Art, a 1916 Beaux-Arts building with additions by Marcel Breuer and, most recently, Rafael Vi'oly. The Cleveland Institute of Art, a college of art and design, will undergo a $5 million expansion to be completed by late 2014.
But a concentration of artistic and intellectual riches doesn't necessarily equal urbanity, especially if each institution exists on its own island. Over the last decade, the university and medical institutions, with help from the Cleveland Foundation and other local stakeholders, have been leveraging investments in and around the neighborhood to create a vibrant, connected center, with architecture and urban planning as the glue. One of the most recent projects is Uptown'San Francisco architect Stanley Saitowitz's mixed-use development, with 102 rental apartments, the area's only grocery store, a Barnes & Noble, restaurants, and other amenities on Case-owned land. Phase one was completed in August.
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