Sunday, September 12, 1999
Mother Nature retakes coliseum land
BY THOMAS J. SHEERAN
The Associated Press
RICHFIELD, Ohio — The sunrise now peeks earlier into Ernestine Cushing's sitting room, and neighbor Dan Emmett is starting to watch for the return of predators that would eat his sheep.
The changes are signs of progress — environmental progress — that have come about with the demolition of the 20,000-seat Coliseum of Richfield, where the Cleveland Cavaliers played and Frank Sinatra crooned.
Next year the ryegrass and saw grass should be thriving where the arena once stood and the first aspen shoots should emerge in what was an expansive parking lot.
In an era of unrelenting urban sprawl, the Coliseum site has become an oddity. Instead of giving way to bigger, more commercialized development, it is returning to nature.
As far as the Sierra Club knows, that's never happened before with a major sports venue.
The undevelopment of the Coliseum site ranks among the nation's biggest back-to-nature efforts, along with the recent removal of an Augusta, Maine, dam on the Kennebec River, the evacuation and conversion of dioxin-contaminated Times Beach, Mo., into a park, and plans to make an Arkansas nuclear power plant site a 21st-century park.
On a less dramatic scale, disused rail lines and logging roads around the country have been restored to their natural state and turned over to hikers, and thousands of acres of surface mines have been reclaimed around the country and in southern Ohio's Wayne National Forest.
Some will miss having the excitement of the Coliseum close by.
“It's mixed emotions, basically,” the 68-year-old Mr. Emmett said as he considered the rise of the Coliseum in virgin woodlands 30 years ago and the decision to demolish it and add 327 acres to a forest preserve.
While wistful about the Coliseum's role attracting crowds to 200 events a year, Mr. Emmett said losing the biggest neighbor on the block to parkland was preferable to seeing it converted it into a shopping center.
“None of us wanted to see a megamall,” he said. “Nobody wanted to see an influx of 12-hour-a-day mall traffic.”
Mr. Emmett, who raises 240 sheep on a 150-year-old family farm adjacent to the Coliseum site, expects the restoration of the land to its natural state will mean more sheep predators, including foxes and coyotes.
The demolition over the past few months has already made a difference for Mrs. Cushing. Sometimes she had to wait until midmorning for the sun to break over the arena. Now the sunrise arrives on time.
But when the wrecking ball arrived, “I felt terrible. It was a waste,” she said. “All the money and to see it torn down. I thought it was terrible.”
Not that the Coliseum didn't cause headaches.
While fans of the National Basketball Association's Cavaliers were polite, Mrs. Cushing won't miss the unruly rock music fans who sometimes asked to park in her gravel driveway. Telling them “no” sometimes got an obscene gesture in response.
Saving the Coliseum site from developers was arranged by the nonprofit Trust for Public Land, a San Francisco-based organization that has protected more than 1 million acres of land in 44 states.
“It's really going to make a nice piece of property,” Christopher D. Knopf, head of the trust's Ohio office, said while spotting a red-tailed hawk overhead during a tour of the site.
The trust paid more than $7 million for the Coliseum, which had been vacant since the Cavs moved five years ago to Gund Arena in downtown Cleveland. The trust resold it to the National Park Service for $9 million, adding the demolition cost to the price.
In effect, the trust served as a middleman to help add the Coliseum site to the surrounding Cuyahoga Valley National Recreation Area, a 33,000-acre preserve located between Cleveland and Akron.
The Coliseum was sold by the Gund family, which owns the Cavaliers and whose foundation helped underwrite the cost of opening a trust office in Ohio.
Mr. Knopf said saving the Coliseum site was important because of its location between two big cities in heavily developed northeast Ohio.
“It's a different type of park. It's not a Yellowstone. It's an urban environment,” said Mr. Knopf, whose words were underscored by the whiz of truck traffic on Interstate 271, barely visible through the trees.
The demolition was planned to make sure the Coliseum would be dismantled in an environmentally sensitive fashion:
• Steel, parking-lot asphalt and some of the masonry were recycled.
• Some masonry blocks, none larger than 1-foot cubes, were dumped with dirt into the hole that had held the below-ground portion of the arena.
• Seats and most building fixtures had been removed earlier.
• Wood went to a jail where inmates make toys for needy children.
• Four inches of topsoil and leaf compost will be spread during the fall.
On a recent summer afternoon, a demolition crew was busy grading the 92-acre site to approximate its original contour. In the fall, 21/2 tons of native grass seed will be spread.
Some previously manicured lawns have already given way to milk weed and thistle, a testament to nature's ability to regenerate, said park service landscape architect Kim Norley.
Trees won't be planted. Instead, plant life will spread naturally from adjacent woodlands and seeds in bird droppings. Aspen, a “pioneer” tree, typically shows up first.
“That's about it to go back to nature,” Mr. Norley said. “Let Mother Nature do her work.”
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