Cleveland’s Ward 1 neighborhood has had its challenges in recent decades. Yet, the struggling southeast side enclave turns up when it counts.

About 300 residents recently attended five public meetings to discuss a potentially transformative Lee Harvard Community Master Plan that encompasses new housing, mixed-use development, a community center, and recreation space.

The long-in-the-making proposal is finally gaining traction, with a passionate citizenry a key facet of the process.

Richard Goudreau, community development corporation director of the Harvard Community Services Center“The plan is not us telling the community what we’re doing, or a group of old white guys coming in to save the neighborhood,” says Richard Goudreau, community development corporation director of the Harvard Community Services Center, which serves neighborhoods including Lee-Harvard, Mt. Pleasant, Seville, and Miles. “We know the importance of reaching all the people and doing a deep community engagement.”

Ward 1 is 90% Black, featuring bungalow-lined streets with one of the highest home ownership rates in the city of Cleveland. However, a decades-long cycle of disinvestment has driven up poverty rates as well as attendant crime, business closures and outmigration.

It wasn’t always this way, note residents and stakeholders like chef-entrepreneur Kolnita Riggins-Walker, who owns Classic Cuisine Catering and soon-to-open Doc’s On Harvard Restaurant & Lounge.

Lee-Harvard was a bustling thoroughfare in the early 1960s and beyond, with the Lee-Harvard Shopping Center at 4071 Lee Road billed as the country’s largest Black-owned commercial complex. The surrounding streets were populated by middle-class Black families—an influx of high-earning African-American professionals that catapulted Lee-Harvard’s median income to more than double the city average.

Numerous block organizations, a community association, and even an auxiliary police force, further exemplified the neighborhood’s liveliness.

Decades of hard times have resulted in growing blight—Lee-Harvard’s poverty rate is 21.6%, while Lee-Seville stands at 23.8%, according to nonpartisan think tank The Center for Community Solutions.

A dwindling population and other setbacks have not stopped supporters from investing in the community. Riggins-Walker says she wants to build on the legacy of Black-owned businesses she remembers from her childhood, when restauranteur Ulysses Dearing opened an energetic eatery on Harvard Avenue; and Gardell’s offered one-stop shopping for everything from candy to dill pickles.

“There was a popping, lively, beautiful scene here in Lee-Harvard,” says Riggins-Walker. “Even as a girl I remember my mother, who attended John F. Kennedy High School, saying it was the place you wanted to be. As Black folk, we had ‘moved on up’ like in ‘The Jeffersons.’”

Chef-entrepreneur, Kolnita Walker, owner of Classic Cuisine Catering and Doc's on HarvardA look ahead

Riggins-Walker is part of that hoped-for resurgence with the pending opening of Doc’s on Harvard, an upscale eatery housed in the former dentist’s office of her father-in-law, William Walker.

As a chef and catering company owner, Riggins-Walker is readying soft launches for a new home for contemporary American cuisine—a mouth-watering selection that includes fresh fish, prime rib, and homemade breads and desserts.

“Community engagement is the goal—we want to be a bright spot that brings back the Black excellence that’s already here, and elevate it to another level,” Riggins-Walker says.

Charesha Barrett (left) hosted the first-ever Lee-Harvard Block Party last SeptemberCharesha Barrett, a community activist and former teacher, is another neighborhood advocate who sees a bright future for Ward 1. Her grandparents moved to the region 62 years ago, buying a home that remains in the family today.

Neighborhood love and loyalty brought Barrett to the recent Lee-Harvard Community Master Plan meetings, where residents shared opinions on projects like the soon-to-be-demolished JFK High School.

A blend of residential and commercial components would be an ideal use for the 13-acre JFK site, says Barrett, who says she also yearns for an expanded library along with equity loans for home refurbishment.

Barrett adds that additional green space and small Black-owned businesses and boutiques should be on the master plan to-do list, as long as planners don’t lose site of the community’s character.

“The biggest thing you see with these redevelopments is gentrification, so let’s make sure we’re adding something new while preserving Black history,” she says. “The master plan tries to cover that, but we’re talking about creating sustainability for the next generation. [Sustainability] where kids say, ‘this is the place I want to settle in.’”

A long overdue spotlight

The original Ward 1 proposal was finalized over a decade ago, languishing since its completion in 2013 due to lack of funding, says Harvard Community Services Center’s Goudreau.

The Lee-Harvard Shopping Center at 4071 Lee Road is billed as the country’s largest Black-owned commercial complexNow the neighborhood revitalization plan is back on track, after Ward 1 received $15 million in federal aid last spring as part of Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb’s longstanding goal of uplifting Cleveland’s majority-Black southeast neighborhoods.

The financial injection could kickstart assistance for home repairs alongside larger projects like the reimagining of the Glendale Avenue site of the former Gracemount Elementary School, which closed in 2011.

Surveys and a final community meeting in January showed that residents want sit-down restaurants and coffee shops instead of the usual lineup of phone stores and fast-food joints that are common in urban neighborhoods, adds Goudreau.

Safety remains an issue, as do calls for a police precinct or substation in the neighborhood.

Ultimately, residents want to pass down homes to their kids and grandkids, fostering a “suburbs in the city” feel cherished by many in the community, says Goudreau.

“Home ownership here tells me about generational wealth and that suburban way of life,” he says. “Residents developed a circular economy that sustained the area.”

Restauranteur Riggins-Walker is excited to see some real improvement in Ward 1 after years of talk and community meetings.

“People are starting to believe it,” says Riggins-Walker. “They’re saying, ‘Yes, now we’re doing this, and getting a spotlight that’s long overdue.”