Is Luigi’s in downtown Akron?
The Rubber City’s Italian stalwart opened on North Main Street in 1949 and hasn’t moved since.
People still line up in the shadow of the Y-Bridge for its crisp pizza pies and lush lasagna tucked under mounds of mozzarella. And the tiny arts, entertainment and living area that sprouted around Luigi’s has taken on its own name — Northside, a sort of sub-neighborhood.
But is any of it downtown?
It’s debatable — and can be controversial — and it’s among the tough questions Akron city planners are asking, not only about downtown, but about each of the 20 or so other neighborhoods that make up the city.
And, they want your help. They’re asking residents to visit a website (MyAkronNeighborhood.com) and redraw Akron as they see it.
How many neighborhoods does Akron really have? Where are the boundaries? And do the names that city officials use to describe those areas match whatever nickname residents use when referring to where they live, work and play?
Akron’s Director of Planning and Urban Development Jason Segedy said it’s important because properly drawn and named neighborhoods should reflect what residents already know to be true.
But it’s also important, he said, because officials can then use those neighborhoods to effectively gauge what’s going on — both good and bad — in smaller
sections of the 62-square-mile city and to figure out how those sections might better be served.
Welcome to West Hill
The parking lot behind West Hill Hardware was fairly busy on a recent Saturday.
Customers walked past a graveyard of about 20 old-fashioned toilets waiting to find new homes, up the steps and into the 85-year-old store’s back door where, inside, sections of the hardwood floors bend a bit under foot.
John Stigalt has worked here Saturdays for about 10 years, helping nearby homeowners maintain their homes, many of which are about the same age as the hardware store.
On Akron city maps, the hardware store is part of Highland Square. West Market is the neighborhood’s central spine on city maps, beginning just west of Our Lady of the Elms and stretching east to St. Vincent-St Mary School, which the city now considers the edge of downtown.
But Stigalt believes West Hill is separate from Highland Square.
“It’s its own unique community with a unique heritage,” he said.
Just north of the store, the railroad made an impact, he said. There was a saloon, some rooming homes and famous people, like big band leader Glen Miller, would sometimes stop and stay.
The railway traffic is gone, but the neighborhood that grew up around it remains, he said.
“It’s still a vibrant community,” Stigalt said. “People want to stay here.”
Stigalt suggests West Hill and Highland Square split where Merriman Road empties into Market Street.
But Kyle Julien, who lives in West Hill, thinks the boundary starts one block farther west, pushing it to Rhode Avenue so that Rockne’s, the Marathon gas station and a convenience store would fall out of Highland Square.
Why?
“The huge billboard in front of the convenience store is the marker,” Julien said. “You can’t have billboards in Highland Square. So the billboard announces ‘Welcome to West Hill.’ ”
Neighborhoold identity
Defining neighborhoods is more art than science, city planner Segedy said.
When Segedy — an Akron native — came to City Hall as part of the new administration in January, there were internal talks about freshening up the neighborhood names and boundaries and he immediately suggested seeking input from residents online.
Rather than coming up with its own website for this, the city is piggybacking on an existing site set up by one of Segedy’s friends in Cleveland.
If you go to MyAkronNeighborhood.com, you’ll first see Cleveland. But slide the map south and Akron appears, along with a bunch of red blotches.
Zoom in, and you’ll see how other site visitors used the red lines to draw their versions of the city’s neighborhoods, often leaving comments about why they chose those borders or about what neighborhoods mean to them.
“My outline is broader than many define as North Hill, but consistent with what I hear from both longtime and newer residents about how they identify.”
“This is what we called when in school since Goodyear Heights seemed [too] big to us. Anything east of Brittain Road was referred to as Upper Goodyear Heights.”
“[Sand Run is] a broad mix of ages with many original homeowners still in the neighborhood and a large number of young families now, too.”
The Knight Foundation recently took a group of Akron’s emerging leaders to Columbus and discovered there are lots of people in that city doing lots of little things every day to define their neighborhoods, from public art to cafe seating.
“In Akron, every one of our neighborhoods is sort of quirky,” Kyle Kutuchief, Akron program director for the Knight Foundation, said, ticking off a few.
• Downtown Kenmore is home to the Old 97 Cafe, a hip place to see live music, and over the hill is the Towpath Trail.
• Goodyear Heights is full of pedestrian trails that factory workers made so they could get to work quicker.
• Firestone Park, shaped like the original Firestone shield emblem, has Firestone Park with Little Turtle Pond and hiking trails.
Branding neighborhoods provides a way to promote them.
Highland Square, for example, can be a smaller, but equivalent version of Columbus’s bustling Short North district, Kutuchief said.
“It’s a place you can take your grandparents to dinner or your children,” he said. “There’s something for everyone.”
Ideally, each Akron neighborhood should be about 2.5 to 3 miles with about the same-sized population, Segedy said.
Akron’s rough draft on the city’s revised neighborhood carves out a handful of new neighborhoods that would be tracked, including: Merriman Hills in Northwest Akron; Coventry Crossing south of state Route 224 and across from Firestone Country Club; and West Hill, broken out of Highland Square.
The city is also considering renaming some neighborhoods, too, hoping to offer them a fresh start.
So is Luigi’s downtown?
Not the way Akron officials have defined downtown in recent years.
“But we have options,” Segedy said.
The new Courtyard Marriott that overlooks Luigi’s bills itself as “downtown.”
But Segedy said he has talked to people who think otherwise.
Northside could end up in a potential new neighborhood called Cascade Valley, which includes a swath of the nearby Towpath Trail and Cascade Village.
Or Luigi’s — and all of Northside — could be downtown.
Amanda Garrett can be reached at 330-996-3725 or agarrett@thebeaconjournal.com.