Cascade Plaza

More than one plan in Akron's past has tried to connect the canals in Akron's downtown surrounded by trees and ravines with a park to the surrounding neighborhoods.

During the era of urban renewal, a highway paired with a park, plaza, and shopping mall was promoted as the promotional image for downtown redevelopment. In the mid 1960s, the city brought in landscape architect Lawrence Halprin to draft a plan. Halprin proposed a design that aimed to minimize disruption to residential and commercial areas by circumventing the plan around a neighborhood and capping the new expressway with open space. His vision imagined a sunken expressway built beneath a civic park and sought to preserve some pedestrian access and greenspace while reconnecting downtown to the canal by integrating it into new public space.

After decades of demolition, however, the final built condition diverged dramatically from this vision. The highway infrastructure was only partially completed, and terminates abruptly at the edge of downtown, while the envisioned civic plaza was never realized as intended. Rather than a lively public realm and cohesive superblock, the site today is defined by a federal office building, a central lawn, and surrounding buildings and parking lots that have long struggled with occupancy and activation.

Years earlier, in 1936, the renowned American landscape architect Warren Manning was involved in the initial design of a park that sits directly across the highway from Cascade Plaza, at the foot of the historic Glendale Steps. He worked with Gertrude Seiberling and the Akron City Women's Club on the project in their hopes that it would be a "beauty spot" in which to view downtown.

Cascade Plaza occupies the former convergence of movement, commerce, and water, marking a shift from incremental urban growth to large-scale clearance and redevelopment.