“Is it safe?”
This is probably the most common question asked of people who live downtown. And when you bring children into the picture, the question is delivered with the intensity of Laurence
Olivier in “Marathon Man.”
The answer is a resounding yes.
When Tim Higgins and Laurel Beverley got married in 2008, it was never a question about what kind of environment in which they wanted to live and raise a family. It was always going to be a city. It could have been New York, Boston, Chicago, Milwaukee or some other urban setting. Luckily, they chose to live and raise their daughter, Casey, in Downtown Cleveland.
“We have no interest in lawn care or shoveling a driveway,” says Higgins, an Amherst native who walks regularly from his family’s apartment in the Warehouse District to his office at the Defense Department. Even though he lived in a house in Lakewood for 10 years, he prefers apartment living.
Beverley, an orthopedic surgeon for MetroHealth, works mostly at the Parma and Cleveland Heights hospitals, which requires her to commute by car. “I do not like to drive,” she emphasizes. “I really wish I had a job that I could get to by public transportation or biking or walking.” On the rare occasions when she’s at MetroHealth’s main campus, she takes the bus.
Since Beverley is out of the downtown area during the work day, she is quick to point to her husband as a role model for the city’s walkability: “Tim is the ideal.”
In addition to walking to work, he also travels by foot to the grocery store on the way home, stopping at House of Blues if there are concert tickets to pick up. “He runs all of his errands going to and from work. On foot,” Beverley says.
As a family, a favorite playdate is visiting the library with Casey’s friends, who live just down the hall with their mother. “We walk to the library, the kids do their thing, and then we’ll walk somewhere for lunch,” says Beverley, adding that, during the summer, a short walk to the splash pads in Public Square spells hours of fun.
On the long list of benefits to walking, including all the steps accumulated on his Health app, one of Higgins’ favorite advantages is never dealing with parking the car. “You don’t have to pay for parking anywhere.” And if they didn’t have Casey, Higgins says, they wouldn’t have a second car.
With such proximity to restaurants, the library, the Flats, sports arenas and the rest of downtown’s fabulous offerings, never having to deal with bumper-to-bumper traffic is another bonus. When U2 was in town, “traffic started backing up at 7 a.m. for a concert that night,” says Beverley. “You know how we got to the concert? We sauntered out the door.”
Whether it’s a work day, date night, playdate or chance to see Bono and the Edge, the Higgins-Beverley family is taking full advantage of Downtown Cleveland’s walkability.
