CLEVELAND, Ohio – The sound of rock 'n' roll is coming to East Ninth Street.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum and Destination Cleveland are planning to create a seven-piece, rock-themed sculpture and sound installation along the downtown business spine in time for the Republican National Convention in 2016.

Designed by Mark Reigelman II, a 2006 graduate of the Cleveland Institute of Art, the installation will be called "Rock Box," and will consist of stacks of 2-foot-square loudspeakers set in seven locations along the street from Progressive Field to Willard Park, a mile north.

The speaker cubes will be made of black steel, but the central speaker portions, resembling the horn of a gramophone, will be rendered in aluminum painted in bright, shiny colors, including "lime greens and pinks, Jimi Hendrix purple," Reigelman said.

At intervals during the day, the speaker towers will project snippets of music by Rock Hall inductees, curated by the Rock Hall and controlled from the museum, located at the north end of East Ninth Street at Erieside Avenue, overlooking North Coast Harbor and Lake Erie.

The idea behind the $500,000 project, funded by Destination Cleveland and to be maintained and operated by the Rock Hall, is to create a stronger link between the hall of fame and downtown, and vice versa.

The city's Downtown/Flats Design Review Committee enthusiastically approved the "schematic" or early-stage design for the project at its Thursday meeting. The city's Planning Commission, which has the final say, is scheduled to vote on the design Friday.

Reigelman and Greg Harris, president and CEO of the Rock Hall, said the project is inspired by church bells that ring at regular intervals or sirens or whistles sounded by municipalities to mark times of day. "I lived for a long time in a town that had a noon whistle and a 5 o'clock whistle," Harris said. "I thought, 'Wouldn't it be great if for 30 seconds at noon and 30 seconds at 5 you heard some unbelievable, exciting instrumental that was coming out of these boxes through the city?' "

Harris also said the beauty of Reigelman's concept is that it's not so overly literal that it would refer to only one type of rock music. "It's not a flaming guitar," he said. "It's something the artist created that speaks to all eras of music. It's universal." David Gilbert, president and CEO of Destination Cleveland and the Cleveland 2016 Host Committee for the Republican convention, said the goal of the project is to create a stronger connection between downtown proper and the Rock Hall, which is separated from the business core by a quarter-mile-wide band of lakefront railroads, highways and ramps, plus a 70-foot drop in elevation. Gilbert said focus groups have shown that visitors to the city often said Cleveland has "wonderful dots, but you don't do a great job of connecting the dots."
  The Rock Box installations, he said, "are visible, they're fun, they're absolutely unique and different." LAND Studio, which is managing other important public art and landscaping projects downtown, including the renovation of Public Square, is coordinating the Rock Box project.

Reigelman's concept calls for roughly 50 speaker boxes, to be installed in stacks and/or towers of varying sizes.

From south to north, the installations would be located along East Ninth Street at Progressive Field, Euclid Avenue, Vincent Avenue (or Short Vincent), Rockwell Avenue, St. Clair Avenue and the Galleria, Willard Park and the Rock Hall itself.

Harris said the concept for the Rock Box installation grew out of an earlier attempt to extend the museum's presence into downtown with its "Walk of Fame," planned as a series of brass sidewalk markers celebrating Rock Hall inductees. But he said the initial installation of 14 brass markers, embedded in sidewalks on Lakeside Avenue near Public Auditorium, where Rock Hall inductions have taken place, did not fare well in Cleveland winters.

"They got scraped up by snow plows," Harris said. "Water infiltrates. Ultimately, it becomes a very long-term maintenance nightmare. And as a fitting tribute to an inductee, they're not as strong as this new concept will be and not as sustainable."

Harris and Graham said that Reigelman was chosen for the project in a process that considered proposals from more than a dozen artists nationwide.

Since graduating from the Cleveland Institute of Art, Reigelman, a native of Sheffield Lake, moved to New York and has created a practice specializing in functional street art.

His other local creations include the concrete planters installed on lower Euclid Avenue in 2008, designed to resemble swaths of florist paper wrapped around bouquets.

Destination Cleveland's contribution to the project is to pay for the initial construction, but the Rock Hall will own and maintain the speaker towers, Harris said.

Each stack of the Rock Box speakers would be powered by direct wiring to underground utilities. The Rock Hall intends to program the speakers through wireless connections controlled from the museum itself, Harris said.

The speaker boxes would recognize inductees with etched plates listing their names, Harris said. The concept hasn't been fully fleshed out, but he said the idea is that the plates would resemble the back of an album cover.

"It's a way to extend the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum into downtown and downtown to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame," Harris said. "It underscores Cleveland as the rock 'n' roll capital of the world."

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