19 Action News|Cleveland, OH|Breaking News, Weather, ExclusivesPlanners consider museum honoring steel in Cleveland

Planners consider museum honoring steel in Cleveland

CLEVELAND - The home of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum could some day also have a shrine to making steel.

Cleveland and Cuyahoga County planners, International Steel Group executives and representatives of the Western Reserve Historical Society met for the first time Thursday to pursue the idea of a museum celebrating the steel industry.

"We have an exciting opportunity to tell the tale of steel," said Cleveland Planning Director Christopher Ronayne, who led the meeting.

ISG's continuing demolition of potentially historic structures, including the last blast furnace on the west side of the Cuyahoga River, sparked talk of a museum.

Cuyahoga County Planning Director Paul Alsenas believes that razing a blast furnace soon would mean losing a potential monument to steel.

But city and ISG officials said access to the blast furnace is limited in usefulness.

And few efforts worldwide have been successful at gathering the millions of dollars needed to preserve and maintain blast furnaces or other steel-mill icons as regional attractions, officials said.

The city's Landmarks Commission asked Ronayne to convene a task force to look at building a steel museum and to study remnants of land and structures.

At Thursday's meeting, multiple opportunities emerged, including existing designs for an 8,000-square-foot exhibit on the history of steel and steel making. The historical society put the plans together as part of a lakefront museum, a project that never panned out.

The historical society also has a $250,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to archive one of the country's largest collections of steel history, including more than 4,000 boxes of material from the former LTV Steel.

A possible site is Cleveland's Steelyard Commons, the proposed retail shopping center west of ISG's operations. Developer First Interstate Inc., which has an option to buy 130 acres from ISG for the retail center, is open to the idea of steel-related exhibits and has preserved several small buildings for possible use.

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