A Six-Acre Lot Has Sat Vacant for Years in Lakewood. Some Residents Want to 'Save The Pit'

When an aborted condo development project in the fictional land of Pawnee left a crater in the ground, a small group of residents and government employees campaigned to fill what would become known as The Pit.

A similar series of events led Jason Bilak to an opposite, albeit tongue-in-cheek, grassroots effort in Lakewood -- one to Save the Pit.

Bilak's concerns, like those of many Lakewood residents, have for years been centered on the former Cleveland Clinic local campus, situated on six acres of land downtown, in between Belle and Marlowe Roads. The Clinic was intent on shutting down its location; residents felt the institution was purposefully letting staff go to exit their lease with the city. "Save The Hospital" was the resulting movement.

By 2019, the Cleveland Clinic vacated to focus on other locations, including at Fairview. The next year, all that was left of its facility was a flatland of dirt and weeds, an area the size of three football fields.

The grassroots call to corporate shifted, and amplified online as the pandemic loomed. The land—a  deserted crater in the supposed heart of Lakewood—was chief concern. It garnered the pithy title of "The Pit."

"Yeah, it was satire in the beginning," Jason Bilak, a 50-year-old resident who's been living on Belle since 2002, told Scene at a tea shop across from the site on Detroit Avenue.

During the pandemic, Bilak became the de facto leader of the Pit's own Facebook group , today an online bin for locals' rants and gossip about Lakewood's scar that evolved after the Clinic's departure: "They were so hostile and angry about wanting the hospital to stay," Bilak said. "We said, 'Okay, we're gonna defend The Pit.' Just like people wanted the hospital to."

"It's kind of in this era of, like, angry community groups," Bailey Vankirk, an artist and Bilak's wife, said. "But more satirical."

And a serious digital town hall, it turns out. Bilak's Facebook group, which currently has 1,700 members, is a regular host to campy digs at the city's development struggles alongside actual ideas of what to develop on the site.

And those ideas truly run the gamut as far as how to fill the Pit's six acres: urban garden, public square, senior housing, pollinator garden, movie theater, giant bounce house, hotel, wellness center, Trader Joe’s, soccer field, big park, town center. (“We don’t have one,” a resident said.)

Behind the mock album covers and calls for guerilla wildflower planting lies a deep yearning for Lakewood to come through with something. Anything . “Frustrated every time I go by it,” resident Ed Favre wrote . “The greatest government, political, and financial blunder in Lakewood's history.”

Although Lakewood's fifty thousand residents pride themselves for the small business dotting Detroit and Madison and the photogenic draw of Lakewood Park's Solstice Steps, the city's long lacked a focal point like Cleveland's Public Square, or the oft-celebrated one in Medina. Many interviewed for this article pointed, with irony and distaste, to City Center Square a block west of The Pit—the parking lot of the Marc's grocery store. ("It's terrible ," one resident told Scene.)

Such itching for that town center, in the historic sense, comes as residents of cities grow more interested in petitioning their governments for more walkable streets and a stronger, more natural public realm. Since Public Square's makeover in 2016, and its phase-two update this year, more questions as how to continue the flavor of this momentum across Cuyahoga County are often met with financial realities—that is, the sheer costs of doing so.

Which are very much apparent at Lakewood City Hall.

In late 2020, after a botched relationship with a developer, the city entered an agreement with CASTO and North Pointe Realty to devise a conceptual drawing of what could go on The Pit. The focus would come to be mixed-use: an office building, apartments, condos, seven townhomes, a plaza and a parking garage. All of it would cost roughly $90 million.

Misfortune seemed to follow. In August of 2021, leftover pollution from the hospital's dry cleaning facility meant involvement from the EPA; remediation had to happen. Two years later, in midst of coasting through design review, one of the project's planned tenants, Roundstone, backed out of a deal that would give them a building to rent on Detroit. There were then "challenges related to inflation," Mayor Meghan George wrote , "rising interest rates and tightening debt and equity markets." The Pit would stay the Pit.

And just on July 24 of this year, after three months of teasing, an unnamed grocer pulled out of a deal to occupy the site's main retail space. (CASTO responded by adding more parking and plaza space to plans.) But designs since 2019 suggest that a multi-faceted build, of homes and parking, is most likely.

"It's just not a very good use of a giant pile of land right in the middle of a super densely populated city that doesn't have a ton of available land laying around," resident Jim DeVito, 40, who lives down the street from Bilak, said. A certain two-decade-old suburban town square comes to mind. "It's just the fact that I'm not a super fan of the cookie cutter Crocker Park kind of vibe."

The city still says it's focused on public engagement, which is to take place "over the next few months." "Our goal remains to have shovels in the ground as soon as possible," Lakewood Mayor Meghan George wrote last February.

In Bilak's mind, the city's been wasting time. He and Vankirk feel that six acres of green space is better than, as the city has now, six acres of grass wrapped by a seven-foot-tall chainlink fence. Especially when Lakewood Park and Madison Park aren't too close to home on Belle.

"It's not meant to be a park. It's a construction zone," Lakewood Councilwoman Cindy Strebig, whose Ward 3 harbors The Pit, told Scene. "And I don't think that that would be a good use of that property. You know, I'd hate to see anybody get hurt on a piece of rebar, something that came up out of the ground."

Bilak doesn't really believe the politics. The Pit's failure to launch as Lakewood's true city center has only made him, and many of the 1,700 others, even more skeptical and unswayed by the promise of developers and politicians.

But he's still the joke's number one backer. Since 2022, Bilak has marched in Lakewood's Fourth of July parade sporting both a "Save The Pit" T-shirt and matching flag. (The latter made by Vankirk.) Everytime Bilak recalls the stint, he can't help but think about the conversations on the street from those who revel in the joke.

At least when they're in on it.

"Half of people know what it is," Bilak said. "And then when someone goes, I'm sorry, what's the Pit? I say, it's the old Lakewood Hospital. And then it's, like, giant laughter, like that's right !"

He laughed. "They're so used to seeing it," Bilak added, "they don't even think about it." [content-1]

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