An interesting development

When I was a kid, there was this place called the Richfield Coliseum, or, I guess it was more correctly known as The Coliseum at Richfield. It was a huge arena used for indoor sports (the Cleveland Cavaliers played there) and also for concerts. (And I think my family went to the circus there once, when I was a kid? I seem to remember that)

It's interesting to me in that it was built in my lifetime (1974) and it was also torn down not too long after I moved from that area (1999, ten years after my family moved away). It was a big deal while it was there. It does seem kind of odd now: this giant excrescence built in the middle of open farmland, but I guess the idea was that Cleveland was going to grow southward, and Akron northward, and they were going to form kind of a megalopolis.

One thing I vaguely remember, and which is referenced in the Wikipedia article: it was a nightmare to get out of there in bad weather, especially if it was snowy or icy, because the small country roads weren't designed for a lot of traffic. Now that I think of it, I remember a few times when we went to Cleveland Force (a short-lived indoor soccer team) games, we left a little early to try to avoid the bottleneck at exiting the parking lot - not always successfully.

I also remember the place as being the one that hosted things like monster truck rallies, so they had the SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY! blasting tv ads that are kind of iconic for those things. (I don't think we ever went to anything there other than Force games and the circus - well, maybe my dad took my brother to Cavs games a few times, but I wasn't into basketball, so I wouldn't have wanted to go)

Apparently at some point it stopped making money (the location was not so ideal) and the developers also built an arena IN Cleveland, and so it was to be torn down. By then, we were long gone from the area and I didn't really think of the place so much any more.

But they tore it down - and sold the floor to a Christian school in Virginia that was building a gym - and remediated the area and apparently deeded it back to the Cuyahoga Valley National Recreation Area Park. (I always think of it as CVNRA, because that's what it was when I lived there, but more recently, it's become a full-fledged National Park).

Yup, it did. Yes, it took restoration work (carting in large quantities of "healthy" soil), but the site is going back to prairie and woodland, which is amazing and cool.


Some time, I think I should go back to the area on a trip, just to see how much it's changed. I've had people who still live in the town where I grew up tell me the traffic there is awful now, because the in-town streets were not built for high volumes of traffic and there is no way to widen them....and also, so much has changed and been torn down....the house in which I grew up still stands (I checked Google Maps street view) but it's changed in appearance (different siding, different shutters) from what I knew.

I don't know. You can't go home again and maybe it's enough to look online at the changes - Ohio is far, far away from here and I'd need some reason other than "I just want to see where I grew up again" to go there....