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Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority (GCRTA) board members voted yesterday to hire a joint venture to rebuild Cleveland’s East 79th Street station on the Blue and Green light-rail lines. That follows last month’s board vote to hire another contractor to reconstruct the Warrensville-Van Aken Blue Line station in Shaker Heights.
Being on the same rail line isn’t the only thing these two station projects have in common. They’re also both designed to better integrate with their surroundings, provide riders with more comfort, and support station-area developments to spur new neighborhood investment, housing and jobs.
Hired to rebuild the decaying East 79th station as a modern, ADA-compliant facility was the R.L. Hill/Platform Contracting Joint Venture, comprised of R.L. Hill Management, Inc. of Solon and Platform Cement Inc. of Mentor. It registered with the Ohio Secretary of State in March for a period of five years. It won a $9,984,587 contract from GCRTA by offering the lowest of three bids.
There has been a light-rail station at East 79th for 105 years, but the current facility was last rebuilt in 1981 and has decayed much since. Just up the street, the 1955-built East 79th Red Line station was rebuilt in 2021.
The rebuilt Blue/Green Line station at East 79th will have something GCRTA has apparently never had before — a heated bus shelter. It will be located at a bus boarding area next to East 79th, route of the hourly, weekdays-only No. 2 bus linking Steelyard Commons with the St. Clair-Superior neighborhood. But it almost didn’t happen at all.
Although it was requested by GCRTA GM India Birdsong-Terry, station project manager Brian Temming said the shelter was a controversial project at GCRTA because of concerns about having people camping out there. So there will be a push button that will activate an overhead infrared heater for about 15 minutes.
“It was a request by India to try it out,” Temming said. “So we’re trying it out. Quite honestly, I mean, otherwise if the request never came up through that executive level, I don’t know if we would put in in there.”
“Coming from an area with very similar in weather to Cleveland, I grew up with those (heater) buttons in several different urban areas including places like Chicago,” Birdsong-Terry said. “It is a lifesaver at times when you’re waiting for the bus or the train and you’re in inclement weather and you’re hoping to have a little bit of warmth.”
She said GCRTA will monitor the use of the time-limited heater to see if the transit authority will want to modify its design and function and possibly expand its use to more locations throughout the bus and rail system.
“It’s not intended to be a place of respite and shelter aside from your public transit journey,” she added. “But I do think the creature comforts in making our system a little more comfortable for passengers, especially in times of delay and weather, is something that we should at least try and see how it fares and then we’ll take it from there.”
The station will also have bike racks, security cameras, police call buttons and new lighting along East 79th under the rail bridge. Temming said the lights under the bridge will have a color-changing aspect to them. But some GCRTA staff expressed concerns that it would confuse or distract drivers. Temming said staff can work with how they look.
There will be a provision for a walkway from the westbound station platform to future development north of the station but will be used as a service entrance to the station in the meantime. To support that development, Burten Bell Carr Development Inc. has secured city landmark status for the decayed, 122-year-old First Hungarian Reformed Church, aka Second New Hope Baptist Church, 2850 E. 79th.
“The reason we didn’t build that (walkway) out as part of this (project) is that we’re not quite sure what that development looks like, whether we want to take people from that location to the roadway or there could potentially be some kind of pedestrian street behind whatever development goes on that we’d want to connect to,” Temming said.
The East 79th Blue/Green Line station will be closed during its 12- to 14-month-long reconstruction, due to start in early June. An $8 million federal grant for the project was briefly put on hold by the Federal Transit Administration at the request of the Trump Administration. But the grant was released and executed with GCRTA two weeks ago.
Mike Schipper, GCRTA’s deputy general manager for engineering and project management, said the Blue and Green lines will be shut down for four weeks in July to undertake small-scale enhancements at 22 stations in Shaker Heights simultaneously, in addition to the major rebuilds of East 79th and Warrensville-Van Aken.
Last month, GCRTA’s board authorized hiring Mike Coats Construction Co. Inc. of Niles, OH for $6,702,676 to reconstruct the Warrensville-Van Aken station at the east end of the Blue Line in Shaker Heights. Coats had the lowest responsive bid among three competitors. The rail station will remain open during construction, except for the four weeks in July.
The station is a center piece of the Van Aken District whose first phase was completed in 2019 by RMS, delivering 100,000 square feet of new retail/commercial space, 65,000 square feet of office space and 103 new apartments.
Phase two, the 15- and 18-story Raye Apartments with a total of 226 residential units, was completed last year. A third phase, proposed to be a 100,000-square-foot office building is planned by RMS, has no schedule.
Across Warrensville Center Road, construction is underway on the Arcadia mixed-use development — 141 mixed-income apartments over 15,000 square feet of ground-floor commercial space. NEOtrans was first to report that Columbus-based Metropolitan Holdings Ltd. was getting construction underway.
“And then we have RTA’s piece here now that’s part of the puzzle to fit into the development and enhance the area,” said Matthew Marotta, a resident architect and project manager at GCRTA.
The new light-rail facility will have a comfort station for GCRTA employees, maintained by GCRTA, and a separate comfort station for the public, maintained by RMS, owners of the Van Aken District, Schipper said.
The station tracks themselves will be shifted slightly south so the new station and busway will integrate better with their surroundings. The busway is part of a transfer station to and from four GCRTA bus lines.
A separate but affiliated project at the Van Aken District is a public realm improvement effort. The city undertook it using $1.5 million in Transportation Alternative Program funds from the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency.
The goal of that project will be to unite GCRTA’s station investments with a streetscape and plaza site improvements off Tuttle Road. Construction on this element featuring signature artwork doubling as shade structures should be done in the coming weeks.
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