New signage designed to make downtown Cleveland more user-friendly

CLEVELAND - The new Horseshoe Casino Cleveland has the built-in advantage of sitting in the shadow of one of the city’s most recognizable landmarks, Terminal Tower. A 709-foot-tall beacon visible for miles day or night.

But while that may help guide you in the direction of downtown it does little to help you once you’re there.

“The casino team came to the community and said 'Hey, we’re going to be opening a casino and we need to invest in wayfinding,” said Downtown Cleveland Alliance President & CEO Joe Marinucci. “In other words, signs that help people once they get off the freeway navigate to their facility. ”

The result of those early conversations can now be found popping up along the main routes into downtown as visitors exit Interstate 90 or Route 2. The wayfinding signs feature multiple locations with arrows in white on a blue background under a downtown Cleveland heading separated by the city’s seal.

They will help guide people to the casino, the sports venues, the aquarium, the Warehouse District even the Medical Mart to name a few.

“As we were kind of thinking this thing through we had a couple of additional venues and said hey we’d like to participate. ”

“The reality is that we hadn’t done that type of signage investment in downtown Cleveland since the opening of Gateway and to be frank that was back in 1994,” said Marinucci, pointing out that many of those signs were no match for Cleveland’s weather.

The city’s sign shop made the roughly 50 signs, installed them and will maintain them. The venues featured on the signs though came together to help fund the production costs, which Marinucci said runs around $55,000.