Ever-Changing Classic Radio. Cleveland Clinic Expands: CLE Daily

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⚾ Cooperstown Calling: After 43 years covering Cleveland baseball, Plain Dealer beat writer Paul Hoynes heads to the Hall of Fame this weekend to receive the BBWAA Career Excellence Award — the highest honor for a baseball writer.

🍺 Today: Great Lakes Brewing Co. taps a fresh batch of Christmas Ale at 11 a.m. for its annual Christmas in July party, with a pig roast starting at 4 p.m., a DJ and a toy drive benefiting Providence House.

ICYMI: PNC Bank is investing big in its Downtown tower, with upgrades that include new Euclid Avenue storefronts — a rare bright spot for downtown's office market. 

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Trivia Question

This Cleveland native and Baldwin Wallace alumnus won four Olympic track gold medals.

Music: WNCX Celebrates 40 Years of Cleveland Classic Rock Radio.

By Annie Nickoloff

What defines the “classic” part of “classic rock”? Cleveland’s classic rock radio station would know. WNCX 98.5-FM has been showcasing the genre for 40 years.

• The classics stay classic. The station’s mix today still rotates ’60s and ’70s songs that frequented the airwaves decades ago. A Friday morning show hosted by WNCX program director Dom “Nard” Nardella features songs by Tom Petty, Foreigner and Led Zeppelin, plus a fitting inclusion of Ian Hunter’s “Cleveland Rocks.”

• But there are also the new classics: a crop of artists that have slid into the genre, who all became established after WNCX debuted its classic rock format. That same Friday morning show also mixes in songs like Pearl Jam’s “Alive,” Metallica’s “Enter Sandman,” Collective Soul’s “Shine” and 3 Doors Down’s “Kryptonite.” 

It all blends together into one continuous mix of well-loved rock tunes. Yet, the host occasionally fields listeners’ frustrations in phone calls: “Why are you playing this new stuff?”

Dom "Nard" Nardella: “I hate to break it to you. I mean, it's hard to admit, but Nirvana and Soundgarden and Pearl Jam are classic rock. That's from 1991. That's a long way back. Not putting a label on the era, but '91 — that's classic rock.” 

Read more about WNCX and modern shifts in classic rock.

Talk of the Town

he Humongotron may be headed for retirement. The Cavs are seeking a new scoreboard, video board and audio system for Rocket Arena at a cost of $37 million, a request now before the Gateway board.

Urban Meyer's Pint House won't be coming to downtown after all. Saucy Brew Works founder Brent Zimmerman scrapped plans for the sports bar in the former Winking Lizard space, citing "the project's overall financial outlook" — the Columbus original opened nine years ago.

Sherwin-Williams is pushing back. The paint giant says a recent cleveland.com investigative series about the company's former lead paints  "contained several inaccuracies."

A quiet land deal on Lorain Avenue. A holding company created just one day before the deed was signed bought more development land for Urban Community School, extending the school's growing footprint on the near West Side.

The Centennial has suitors. Despite foreclosure, needed repairs and a soft market, there's healthy buyer interest in the vacant landmark at 925 Euclid Ave. in Downtown Cleveland.

Highland Square businesses are taxing themselves. Property owners in the Akron entertainment district approved a special improvement district to fund extra security and beautification projects.

Development: Cleveland Clinic's $1.1 billion plan for its main campus works like a slide puzzle.

By Ken Prendergast

If you’re a health system earning $18 billion per year and you want to build a new bed tower where your aging Central Utility Plant sets, you move the utility plant. But if the place where you want to build a new utility plant has a police station and a neighboring multiple sclerosis care center, you move those uses, too.

Such is the slide-puzzle real-estate world of the Cleveland Clinic Foundation. For the Clinic to be able to move those puzzle pieces around, they have to be moved in the proper order with the right amount of planning, patience and, of course, money.

The moves:

• The Clinic began building its $1.1 billion Neurological Institute three years ago, and it is due to open in early 2027.

• Before its opening, the Mellen Center for Multiple Sclerosis will relocate its care services to the new Neuro building. That would leave the Cleveland Clinic Police Department as the only occupant of the building.

• The police station will be moved, too. Plans were submitted to the city Building Department last week to renovate a closed Rite Aid drug store as the new Cleveland Clinic Police Department.

• Once the Mellen Center and the police station are vacated, they will be demolished so construction can start on a new, larger, more modern Central Utility Plant.

Looking ahead:

• Sources say that, given the long time horizon between moving the Mellen Center/police station, demolishing them, building a new utility plant in their place and demolishing the old utility plant, a new hospital bed tower may not see construction until the early 2030s at least.

• Sources said the new plant will need to provide thousands more pounds of chiller capacity, more than 100,000 pounds per hour of steam capacity, and additional megavolt-amperes of normal and emergency electric power.

• In a recent news release, the Clinic noted that a new utility plant was in the works but didn’t say where it would be built. “Cleveland Clinic is evaluating a range of opportunities as part of this planning effort,” the Clinic’s release said.

Read more about Cleveland Clinic's plans.

Yesterday's Trivia Answer

This college in Canton was initially founded in Cleveland in 1892 as the Christian Workers Training School. Malone University

Check back tomorrow for the answer to today's question

From the Editor

Classic radio. I am still trying to figure out when the music I grew up listening to became "classic radio." I know when I was young, classic radio was everything in the 1950s and '60s — The Beatles, CCR and Elvis. 

I guess that is considered the oldies now. Or maybe I am considered the oldies now.

I just know when I turn the dial over to WNCX and Def Leppard or Bon Jovi plays, I just shake my head. 

I guess the better way to look at it is not that we are getting older but that the music we like is “Classic.”

— Ron Ledgard

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