Community Corner

Residents Consider City's Points of Pride, Problems and Identity

About 70 people attended the North Canton Master Plan meeting Thursday night inside the North Canton Civic Center. They brainstormed ways to improve the city and will get together again in two months for another public workshop

Nothing was out of the question Thursday night when North Canton residents brainstormed ways to improve their city.

Some wanted to turn downtown North Canton into a destination spot, where you could catch a performance at an amphitheater and grab a drink afterward. Others wanted to convey how proud they are of the Dogwood City with bigger “Welcome to North Canton” signs and maybe some arches over Main Street.

They also wanted to enhance what makes them proud — , the schools, , the and the square downtown, to name a few things.

About 70 people threw out ideas at the led by Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative inside the North Canton Civic Center that night. The meeting, spearheaded by the was the first of three to identify the city’s goals and problems in hopes of bettering the city.

How it works

“Please, give us your thoughts; we don’t have all the answers,” Terry Schwarz told the room full of people Thursday night.

Schwarz, director of the Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative, said the first meeting was mainly to go over existing conditions, which CUDC had spent the last several months collecting.

During the next meeting Sept. 20, everyone will use Thursday night’s information to define a vision for the city's future. And Nov. 16 will be about detailing a plan to make those changes.

David Jurca, urban designer with CUDC, showed a presentation covering several areas of the city, often road by road, and pointed out ways the city could be improved. Those suggestions ranged from addressing and fixing areas that are prone to flooding, increasing signage or access to Nimishillen Creek and making the more apparent to those traveling through the city.

He also showed areas of the city where development would be ideal and asked those there that night to think about what they would like to see in those areas.

Then the room broke up into three groups to create lists of improvements and problems.

What the residents say

Ted Paynter attended the meeting and said his feeling upon leaving was of “guarded optimism.”

“We’ve had efforts like this one where we’ve talked about changes and it hasn’t manifested in the city as quickly as we’d liked,” said Paynter, also a board member and participant at the .

There was much talk of North Canton finding an identity, and Paynter echoed that discussion, saying the city has been a manufacturing city for so long (speaking about the Hoover vacuum plant that closed in 2008). But now it needs to decide if it wants to be a manufacturing city or evolve into something different.

Stephanie Hester, also a member of the and treasurer for the Coalition for Animal Concerns, wanted to see the city take a more artistic direction.

“I feel like it is (possible), but whether anybody else would embrace it …,” Hester said. “It seems to be low on the priorities.”


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