Picture a ski lift on steroids, running from the municipal parking lots near Burke Lakefront Airport to Edgewater.
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View full sizeJon Stahl, the president of LeanDog, stands next to a cable car he purchased and had shipped to Cleveland. The cable car, which sits on a strip of grass near LeanDog's floating offices, is one piece of an elaborate campaign Stahl has launched to bring a gondola system to the downtown lakefront. CLEVELAND, Ohio -- As public officials and private developers consider plans for Cleveland's lakefront, a local tech executive has a fanciful suggestion: Run a cable-car system along Lake Erie and the Cuyahoga River to bridge gaps between attractions and bring attention to the city.
Jon Stahl, whose LeanDog software company occupies the old Hornblower's barge moored in North Coast Harbor, has spent four months building buzz for his Cleveland SkyLift. At his floating offices, a team of eight employees is working on the project full-time.
Convinced that Clevelanders needed to sit in a cable car to get a feel for his vision, Stahl recently persuaded gondola manufacturer Leitner-Poma to sell him the one that sat in front of its American headquarters in Colorado. After a democratic process -- two-thirds of employees approved the acquisition -- LeanDog spent $14,000 on the cable car and roughly $6,000 on a trailer and shipping.
"My wife was like, you're not paying for that yourself," said Stahl, a 45-year-old transplant from Pittsburgh who lives in Kirtland with his family, two bulldogs, chickens and goldfish. "If this doesn't fly, I'm going to have the coolest tree house."
With a slick online presence and active social-media campaign, the Cleveland SkyLift concept might seem more grounded than it is. Stahl readily admits that his site plans are just that -- sketches of the idea that has overtaken his schedule and the walls and whiteboards in his office.
Yet LeanDog, a successful software start-up, is $150,000 into the project -- with few prospects for a return on that investment of cash and time. And Stahl's passion is so contagious that he's captured the imagination, and potential support, of some key business leaders and real estate investors.
"I don't think there's anything yet we've learned that makes it not legitimate," said Joe Roman, president and chief executive officer of the Greater Cleveland Partnership, the local chamber of commerce. "The question is in doing enough due diligence. ... It's hard to believe that people wouldn't want to get on this thing at Edgewater Park and ride it over to Wendy Park and Whisky Island."
Whether you call them sky lifts, gondolas or aerial trams, the concept is the same: A stretch of elevated cable lines supporting enclosed cars that travel between stations. Picture a ski lift on steroids, running from the municipal parking lots near Burke Lakefront Airport to Edgewater.
Outside of ski resorts, cable cars are a relatively rare form of transportation, particularly in the United States. But proposals for urban gondolas are popping up across the country, in cities ranging from Austin, Texas, to Chicago to Seattle.
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View full size "You can still call it a niche," said Nicholas Chu of the Gondola Project, an offshoot of a Canadian urban-planning business called Creative Urban Projects. "We're seeing the industry grow, and it's gaining a lot more attention nowadays than before. A lot of it can be accounted to the worldwide trend of people moving into cities."
In Cleveland, discussions about aerial trams date to at least 2004, when a lakefront plan -- one that has since been replaced -- showed a cable car linking the convention center and the grassy downtown Malls to North Coast Harbor and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum.
In Stahl's imaginings, cable cars could navigate two significant barriers: The bluff that separates much of downtown Cleveland from the lakefront and the river that divides the Flats.
"To me, the starting point is our biggest obstacle, and where we need connectivity the most is over the river," said Will Friedman, president and chief executive of the Cleveland-Cuyahoga County Port Authority. "I don't know that it would work, but it is intriguing."
Cities are turning to cable cars as iconic experiences for visitors and novel, cost-effective transit options, said Chu, who helped write a guide called "Cable Car Confidential." But most urban projects die early because advocates can't effectively explain the technology or garner community support.
That's one reason Stahl is so focused on building buzz. He holds court several times a week in LeanDog's eight-person gondola, which sits on a scrap of grass near Burke. He rides his motorcycle to restaurants and bars and buys drinks for patrons who are willing to look at his website.
He just launched a fundraising campaign, on crowd-funding website Indiegogo, to amass $500,000 for consultants and a feasibility study. The Greater Cleveland Partnership is talking to LeanDog about acting as the fiscal agent -- the conduit for donations -- for the campaign.
"I would just really like to help him think through the cost side," Roman said. "We do that for big projects all the time."
The total cost of the analysis might be $700,000, Stahl said, while the full project -- 11 stations and 5.25 miles of cable, as it's drawn -- might cost $185 million, based on his conversations with companies that design and make cable-car systems. For LeanDog, the only financial upside would come from incorporating digital displays into the cars and designing software for them.
Anything about dollars is just a guess, though. At this point, everything is in flux. And everyone Stahl talks to has different suggestions for how many stations he should include, where the system should stop and how the cable cars might fit into broader plans for lakefront development.
"Right now, we basically have a sketch and no details, and clearly there are all sorts of issues that have to be looked at," said Chris Warren, regional development chief for the city of Cleveland. "I'm not going to comment on something that is so embryonic at this point."
City officials said they have not seen a formal presentation about the sky lift, though they have talked to Stahl about ideas including additional floating offices off the coast of downtown.
But the city is pushing for waterfront development. The Geis Cos. have an option to lease city-owned land near Burke for an office-park project, and the city has asked developers who are interested in other lakefront sites to submit initial proposals by Thursday.
"From our standpoint, ideas are good things," Warren said of the sky lift. "The notion of an exploration of an idea, even one as out there and creative as this? Go to it. Meanwhile, as the mayor, says, the best plan is the one you're doing."
Though gondolas face real estate and engineering challenges, they're often less cumbersome than building railroad tracks or roads. Designed for the brutal weather of European mountain ranges, the systems can withstand strong winds and snow.
In Cleveland, Stahl's plan certainly will encounter questions about blocked views, airport flight patterns, reflections and submerged land leases -- city-state agreements that outline the control of lakefront land.
Those aren't insurmountable obstacles. But money might be, in a city with a long list of potential investments and limited resources, both public and private.
Joe Calabrese, general manager of the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority, believes Stahl's proposal isn't a "pure" enough transportation project to qualify for federal funding.
As a mix of transit and entertainment, the Cleveland SkyLift might have the best shot at securing both public and private support if it was built for an event -- such as a 2016 political convention or the Great Lakes Exposition-style event that Cuyahoga County Executive Ed FitzGerald has mentioned.
Real estate developer John Ferchill said he is helping Stahl evaluate potential funding sources that don't hinge on public or philanthropic support. Ferchill joined the discussions because of his friendship with Fred Geis, another developer who was charmed by Stahl's enthusiasm.
"I can't help but be supportive," said Geis, who is considering a personal investment in the sky lift. "I think it says a lot about the new breed of citizen in Cleveland. They're taking on projects like this without any public assistance whatsoever and trying to make their way forward. My guess is that he's at a personal limit in terms of what he's able to do, and now some of the other corporate citizens need to step up. We've certainly invested in projects that are a lot more risky than this one."
Stahl 's Indiegogo campaign went live Friday. On Tuesday, he plans to meet with representatives from Leitner-Poma, who are traveling to Cleveland to see the proposed lift station sites and his presentation. When they step into the LeanDog offices, they'll see images of cable cars taped to the walls and television screens showing aerial video of the potential Cleveland SkyLift route.
If Stahl's past meetings are any indication, he'll tell his visitors a story. It's about a group of Cleveland schoolchildren who come downtown for a day.
Their bus parks at the Muni Lot, and they climb off. They take the sky lift to the Great Lakes Science Center and learn about lakefront history and attractions during the ride. After a day at the science center, they're whisked to Wendy Park for a picnic. Then they head home, with a new perspective on the city.
"If he wants to do that along the lakefront, I say more power to him," City Councilman Joe Cimperman, whose ward includes downtown, said of Stahl. "I've worked with a lot of crazy people, and he's crazy effective. He comes up with these ideas, and he figures out how to do them."
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