Sowinski Park
Location: Cleveland, OH
Completed: 2023
Collaborators: City of Cleveland, Famicos Organization, University Circle Inc.
Sowinski Park sits within Rockefeller Park, one of Cleveland's most significant public landscapes and one of its most complex. While Rockefeller Park is often defined by the Cleveland Cultural Gardens, Sowinski Park reveals a much broader story of the park as neighborhood open space, ecological corridor, civic commons, and contested public ground. The project introduces a new paved multiuse trail that reconnects neighborhoods to the park while creating a series of welcoming community amenities, including a pavilion, swing benches, a renovated playground, and new gathering spaces. It also contains an ecological restoration component along Doan Brook, stabilizing the stream corridor, restoring native habitat, improving water quality, expanding floodplain function, and reestablishing ecological resilience within one of Cleveland's most important urban waterways.
Community
engagement
Advocacy and funding
This work began during Andrew Sargeant's fellowship in Cleveland, where he led advocacy, community engagement, visioning, and funding strategy for the restoration of Sowinski Park and the surrounding Rockefeller Park landscape. Working through Cleveland Neighborhood Progress and alongside neighborhood organizations, public agencies, watershed partners, and residents, the effort helped to build the public and political support needed to transform a long overlooked section of the park. The advocacy contributed to securing multiple sources of investment, including State Capital Budget appropriations, Ohio Department of Natural Resources grants, and additional public funding that ultimately made implementation possible.
Storied
history
Reclaiming the narrative
The history of Sowinski Park includes the racial tensions surrounding recreation in Rockefeller Park, the decades long struggle for African American representation within the Cultural Gardens, and the story of the Sowinski 6: six Black teenagers accused in a 1963 case that became intertwined with the national Civil Rights Movement and broader conversations surrounding race, media, public space, and justice. Rather than treating history as something to overlook, the vision for the park sought to acknowledge these stories as an essential part of its future.
"Sowinski Park is a really powerful example of investment in one of our public spaces. We advanced both recreational opportunity and ecological function to achieve maximum benefit in a space that had historically been disinvested in."
- Elise Yablonsky, Chief Place Management Office, University Circle Inc.
"This project gives people the opportunity to express their culture and understand other people's cultures. It is a display of what's possible when you find out the secrets of a place."
- Khyrs Shefton, Director of Real Estate Development, Famicos Foundation
People
Practice
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