Letter to the editor
In response to “A land purchase CWRU would like to forget” and “Juniper police headquarters to be torn down, replaced with new alumni wing”
To the editor,
Case Western Reserve University is a murderer. Now that you’re reading, let me clarify. CWRU has torn down a host of historic Cleveland buildings in its pursuit of architectural blandness. One need only look to the Engineering Quad and notice the absence of buildings like Case Main or to North Side’s 1960s asbestos monstrosities known as dormitories to see what CWRU considers adequate architecture.
Against this already vicious attack on Cleveland’s urban fabric, the recent purchase of a Cleveland Heights home from disgraced Dean Mitchell is particularly cruel. CWRU apparently has the money to buy this home and consider renting it out. For some reason this particular house deserves CWRU as savior. The dozens of beautiful homes ripped down to build North Side and South Side as isolated pools of dead concrete and shabby grass, however, were apparently just collateral damage. Even the new North Side dormitory building carries on the same tradition.
On top of all this, it is even more ironic that CWRU claims to care about Cleveland at all. Its students disperse to suburbs like the Heights, or even to far corners of the nation. Its faculty often drives to work from places as far as Mentor-on-the-Lake. For every useful development, like Uptown, which finally fixed an embarrassing predicament of having acres of parking lots on historical Cleveland Main Street, we get buildings like Tinkham Veale. And beyond “The Tink,” we get news that CWRU wishes to tear down yet another historical Cleveland building to build an expansion to the Alumni Center—an isolated, bland cube of an expansion at that. But remember that home in the Heights, that one CWRU will preserve.
Cleveland proper apparently deserves none of the care a corrupt official does. Alumni will sit in their cube and wax poetic about “thinking beyond the possible” and then drive back to Lyndhurst in their SUVs past acres of destruction. We’ll pay for that home in the Heights through tuition or donations, and Cleveland will continue to be trampled over.
Sincerely,
Zak Khan, senior