The Connecting Cleveland 2020 Citywide Plan is dedicated
to Richard A. Shatten, whose "civic vision" inspired a generation
of planners and leaders in Cleveland.
Richard Shatten:
A genius, and much more
02/14/02
The tributes
to Richard Shatten that rolled in last night sounded like a broken record. "He
was an absolutely brilliant guy," said Sen. George Voinovich.
"He had
luminescent brilliance of thought, a crystalline mind," said former
Cleveland Planning Director Hunter Morrison.
"He clearly had one of the finest minds of any human being I have ever met," added
former County Commissioner Timothy Hagan.
On and on it went.
Cleveland State University Professor Ned Hill said Shatten possessed "an
intuitive genius." Joe Roman, head of the Cleveland Tomorrow business
group, said Shatten was probably the smartest person he ever met.
There were others, but the point is made. And, indeed, no one who knew him
would doubt for a second that Shatten, who died of a brain tumor yesterday
at the age of 46, was a genius.
But Richard Shatten was more than that. Much more.
He was - in order of importance - a spectacular human being and the unsung
hero of all the good things that happened in Greater Cleveland during the 1980s
and into the first part of the 1990s. First in his position at McKinsey & Co.,
then as the head of Cleveland Tomorrow, and more recently at Case Western Reserve
University, Shatten made contributions to this community that are incalculable.
"If you were to ask me to identify five persons who were the most important
to this community in the last 20 years, he would be in my top five," said
Squire Sanders & Dempsey lawyer John Lewis. "And he'd probably be close
to the top of the list of five."
With much justification, most of the credit for the Gateway project invariably
falls to former Mayor Michael R. White and Hagan. But behind the scenes, the
heavy lifting was done by Shatten.
"Richard knew as much about baseball as my 1-year-old son," recalled
Roman. "But that project wouldn't be there without Richard. I used to scream
at him for not taking credit for things. But with Richard, it was never about
him. It was always about trying to get things done."
But Shatten
was also about more than shiny new downtown buildings. Voinovich credited
him with convincing the private sector of the need to invest in inner-city
housing as the city was emerging from default.
"Although he was working for the private sector, he had a public heart," said
Voinovich. "They don't know it, but he touched the lives of thousands of
Clevelanders. This was a sweet man who got up every morning and wanted to touch
people's lives."
Shatten was a man with virtually no ego. He had no personal agendas, other than
love and devotion to his wife, Jeanne, and three daughters.
For him, it was never about power and always about ideas - ideas that might make
Greater Cleveland a better place to live and work.
"One reason this is such a profound loss is because Richard was one of the
very few people who had a broad grasp of the region," said Morrison. "In
many ways, Richard got it much more than the politicians did. He was profoundly
important."
In the 1980s, before coming to Cleveland, Gund Foundation Executive Director
David Bergholz was working in Pittsburgh and heard rave reviews about "this
spectacular, very young guy from Cleveland" he would be meeting during a
seminar held not far from Pittsburgh. "So I went to this retreat and was
dazzled by him," Bergholz recalled last night. "He was such a natural.
He had enormous skills. And he was not one of these guys who was just brilliant
and kept his own counsel. He was always willing to share everything."
Last week, when he knew he was dying, Shatten took time to meet with County Commissioner
Tim McCormack about an economic development plan the commissioners hope to implement.
"I can only imagine how difficult that was for him," said McCormack. "But
he did it because he was among our very best."
They didn't come any better.
Brent Larkin
Cleveland Plain Dealer
February 2002
Cleveland Plain
Dealer Editorial ~ February 2001
No community
can ever have enough bright, innovative minds. And Cleve land, which needs
fresh thinking more than most places, lost one of its most provocative
intellects on Wednesday when cancer claimed Richard A. Shatten.
More than that, it lost one of its best, most caring people: a native son who
came home to help restore our region's luster, a husband and father who never
faltered in his determination to make this a better place for his family and
those of others.
Richard Shatten described himself as "a projects guy." He was only
46 when he died, but for two decades, he had a hand in almost every major economic
development initiative in Northeast Ohio.
As the first executive director of Cleveland Tomorrow, he helped convince a
once-insular business community that it had an obligation to get involved in
the city's reinvigoration. Whether the issue was Gateway or venture capital,
lakefront development or education, Shatten was there, maybe not visible to
the public, but diligently working behind the scenes.
He used his final post as head of Case Western Reserve University's Center
for Regional Economic Issues to fuel the critical debate over Greater Cleveland's
future. He fretted that the state of Ohio was investing too little in research
and higher education, feared that it would shortchange the future for his three
daughters and for the daughters and sons of others in this region he loved.
Richard Shatten will not get a chance to see that future, at least not from
this world. But Greater Clevelanders can honor his memory by striving to make
this the dynamic center of opportunity and equity that he knew it could be
- and believed it had to be.
