The Turneytown Shopping Center in the Cleveland suburb of Garfield Heights is a typical product of city planning from the 1950s and ‘60s, when many American communities, including those across Northeast Ohio, were designed for cars, not people.

Turneytown frames a vast parking lot with a U-shaped arrangement of boxy, bland, one-level retail storefronts that reaches far back from Turney Road.


The shopping center includes a Dave’s supermarket, a Huntington Bank branch, an H&R Block, a Subway, an auto parts store, nail salons and a laundromat. Important as the businesses may be to their customers, the shopping center looked lifeless on a recent weekday morning. The nearly empty parking lot appeared to be a huge waste of potentially valuable urban land.