TEAM CONTACT
Anthony Giambroni
Managing Director of Community Development
agiambroni@midtowncleveland.org
216-391-5080 ext. 104
PROJECT DOCUMENTS
PROVIDE FEEDBACK
PROJECT
TIMELINE
2020-2023
Visioning: Resident-led gatherings celebrate history of venues on Euclid Avenue. E 66th TLCI initiative creates momentum for more community-centered development, community members take field trip to Memphis to envision a cultural district in Hough.
2024-2025
Team Building: RFP released in September of 2024 to hire a consultant team to develop a cultural district vision in Hough. In February of 2025, hired Rhodes Heritage Group, Third Space Action Lab, Interface Studio, and &Access.
2025-2026
Community Engagement: Over the course of 15 months, our team engaged over 800 Hough residents, business owners, and stakeholders across 35 engagement sessions.
2026-2027
Implementation: Finalizing cultural district framework and focusing on initial three strategies including establishing a governing board, developing a cultural district brand, and adopting a neighborhood wide communication platform.
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The Hough Cultural Preservation Project was born out of a decade of resident-led efforts to protect, celebrate, and share the rich cultural history of Cleveland’s Hough neighborhood. Hough holds deep history in its streets, homes, and gathering spaces. Along Euclid Avenue, black brilliance shaped the city as an entertainment hub from the 1950s through the 1970s.
PROJECT ROADMAP
Traditional planning analysis or studies are good at documenting conditions, analyzing options, and handing off recommendations for someone else to act on, Hough already has fifteen years of those. This roadmap operates differently: the community has already decided where it is going, and the only work remaining now is to map the route, identify who holds the wheel, and assess the road conditions.
The roadmap is focused on people as agents of change. While programs are owned by institutions, values, strategies, and actions belong to the community. The four pillars of this roadmap—People, Place, Power, and Prosperity—highlight four dimensions of a single, unified transformation happening simultaneously. Every strategy ties directly back HCPP Project Values and Guiding Principles. Where implementation asks, "What are the steps?" Impact asks, "What changes, for whom, by when, and how will we know?"
OUR APPROACH
CREATING ACTION AND IMPACT
While implementation produces activity, impact produces accountability.
For that reason, every strategy in this document is written to answer the impact question first. The People's Pathway, a three-stage navigation tool that provides guidance to institutional and resident stakeholders on how to stand up the cultural district through collective action. These 4 interconnected pillars include:
- People: strengthening resident leadership, cultural storytelling, and youth pathways
- Place: honoring and shaping the built environment to reflect Hough’s cultural identity
- Power: establishing structures for community governance and decision-making
- Prosperity: building economic systems that keep wealth within the community
RESIDENT INPUT
"To say it plainly, this is a vision that we all, as a community, need to buy into and refine. It doesn’t mean that consultants will tell you what you should do. We’re saying, this is a vision for what you could do. It’s time has come and there are examples of people who have done it in other places that Hough can take and reinterpret in its own unique way.”
"When you come into Hough,
you should know you have arrived."
Pictured : Proposed district expansion of the area surrounding historic League Park
SOUNDS OF HOUGH
As part of our effort to preserve and bring visibility to the stories that make Hough what it is, we have started a Hough playlist.
This playlist brings back the memories of Euclid Avenue entertainment, while also speaking to the broader cultural influences that have shaped, and are continuing to shape, Hough.
AN EXCEPTIONAL GROUP OF
PROJECT PARTNERS
