Alternative Browns stadium plans emerge

Image: Vocon Architects and Destination Cleveland

Renderings have been revealed of what a domed football stadium for the NFL’s Cleveland Browns would look like on the western portion of Burke Lakefront Airport in downtown Cleveland, Ohio.

Cleveland.com said renderings of the stadium, created by Cleveland-based Vocon architects and commissioned by Destination Cleveland which promotes tourism to the region, show a 70,000-seat stadium surrounded by hotels, residential development, retail and parking.

The airport, which opened in 1947, encompasses approximately 450 acres of lakefront land on the east side of downtown.

Last month the Browns announced they are planning a move away from their current city home to a new domed stadium 16 miles away in Brook Park, Ohio.

The Cleveland Browns plan to leave their current open-air Huntington Bank Field stadium in the city of Cleveland for the yet-to-be-built domed stadium.

The lease for the Browns’ current stadium expires after the 2028 NFL season, so the plan is to kick off the 2029 season at the Brook Park dome, a spokesperson for the Cleveland Browns said.

The Cleveland Browns are a professional American football team based in Cleveland (US). Named after original coach and Co-Founder Paul Brown, they compete in the National Football League (NFL) as a member club of the American Football Conference North division.

Destination Cleveland spokeswoman Emily Lauer confirmed that the agency paid for the Burke Lakefront Airport study in September. Authorities are keen to keep the Browns in the city.

She said, “Given the unanswered questions about the viability of Burke Lakefront Airport as a development site, Destination Cleveland engaged relevant partners to specifically determine if the airport land could accommodate the program the Browns had proposed in Brook Park.”

She said the agency supplied the study and renderings to both Cleveland and Cuyahoga County – but not to the Haslam Sports Group, which owns the Cleveland Browns.

Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb recently announced that the Browns planned to move to Brook Park, to a new $2.4-billion domed stadium, after negotiations failed to come up with an agreement to renovate the current downtown facility.

Bibb also revealed that the city offered the team the possibility of building a stadium at Burke but that the Haslams were “not interested in pursuing this option.”

Cuyahoga County Executive Chris Ronayne said, “You can have everything you would have in Brook Park, but you have it downtown. It synergizes with downtown rather than takes away from it. This isn’t Cleveland vs. Brook Park. It’s about downtown. It’s everybody’s downtown.”

Cleveland.com further stated that the city, in recent years, has been exploring the possibility of closing the small city-owned airport, which has seen operations decline in recent decades.

The Destination Cleveland renderings show stadium-related development could take up approximately 158 acres on the west side of the airport property and would include: a 70,000-seat domed stadium, two hotels with 250 rooms each, 3,000 residential units, extensive retail space, 11,000 parking spaces and a marina.

The rest of the shuttered airport could be developed as a park, according to the renderings.

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