CLEVELAND, Ohio — Ask Demetrius Lawrence about improvements he’d like to see at the southern portion of Gordon Park on Cleveland’s East Side and he has plenty of ideas.

Lawrence, who operates a tow motor for Goodwill Industries and who lives in the adjacent St. Clair Superior neighborhood, said during a recent visit to the park that he’d like to see better lighting and more activities for children.

He thinks the park’s five, rarely used baseball diamonds, enclosed by chain link and clustered around a central service building, might be reduced in number to make space for other pastimes, including flag football.

He’d like to see improvements made to the narrow pedestrian bridge that spans the Interstate 90 Shoreway to connect the north and south halves of the park.

“It could look more vibrant, you know,’’ he said. “It could be more catchy for people who want to walk across the bridge. The area down there is not really kept up and maintained.”

Lawrence’s views are exactly the kind of comments that a team of landscape architects and community planners want to hear, starting Tuesday 6 to 7:30 p.m. at the Edward J. Kovacic Recreation Center, 6250 St. Clair Ave. Cleveland Metroparks, LAND Studio and the St. Clair Superior Development Corp. will hold the first large-scale public meeting focusing on how Metroparks and its partners should spend $8 million donated in 2023 by the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Foundation.

The money from Mandel is intended to bring near-term improvements to the southern portion of Gordon Park, which was severed from the northern half of the park, and Lake Erie, by construction of the Shoreway between the 1930s and the 1950s.

The era was notorious for the cavalier way in which highway engineers slammed concrete arteries through low-income and minority neighborhoods ill-equipped to fight back.

Wealthier and better-connected communities including the inner ring Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights, which blocked construction of the Clark Freeway in the 1960s, were more successful in resisting the onslaught.

The I-90 Shoreway cut Gordon Park in half, leaving the triangular southern portion, with its 47.7 acres, landlocked between East 72nd Street and Shoreway ramps to the west, and CSX railroad lines to the south. Connections to Rockefeller Park and Martin Luther King Jr. Drive to the east are not well established or often used.

“It’s trapped and disconnected from everything around it, making it so people can’t use it,” Greg Peckham, LAND Studio’s executive director, said during a recent interview at the park. “This process is about reconnecting it, exposing people to it, bringing it back. It’s not going to be what it was, but it’s going to have a new life.”

Metroparks expects to use information gathered from surrounding communities to shape new investments in the park starting next year. But the parks agency, which is leasing the space from the city, isn’t imposing top-down solutions.

Big questions facing the southern portion of Gordon Park include whether its five baseball diamonds should remain in their entirety. They occupy nearly a third of the park. The open green areas around them can feel like leftover spaces squeezed between the ballfields and surrounding parking lots and roads.

Over the past year, Metroparks has made improvements that include installing new park benches, picnic tables and trash receptacles. They tore down the crumbling, half-collapsed city aquarium that once occupied part of the site. They’ve also trimmed trees.Clair Superior, Hough and Glenville neighborhoods, he said.

LAND Studio received $725,000 from the Mandel Foundation to coordinate the current park planning effort and to facilitate near-term upgrades to streetscapes in St. Clair Superior including public art. The community development corporation is also planning to plant more than 200 trees along St. Clair Avenue, with funding from the Western Reserve Land Conservancy, Brown said.

LAND Studio’s Peckham said he’s especially aware that the park is now most heavily used on Saturday and Sunday afternoons in the summer when residents parade their cars around the parking lot and play music on loudspeakers in a series of regular, informal gatherings.

“Those are things that are the existing heartbeat of a place, and they’re positive, they should be supported,” he said. “We need to understand those things and figure out how to accommodate them as part of the planning process.”

Lawrence, who visited the park after his shift at Goodwill, was picnicking with his girlfriend, Shanica Norman, who brought her two grandchildren along. They reveled in the cool, dry breeze on a bright afternoon after a summer cold front pushed hot, humid air further south.

The aroma of hotdogs cooking on a tabletop hibachi filled the air, as they watched the children play on playground equipment.

“They love the park,” Norman said. “They call it the swing park.”

Lawrence said he and Norman came that day because they knew the park would be quieter and more tranquil than it is when cars parade through the parking lot.

But as he noted the empty ballfields nearby, he said: “It’s not vibrant. It’s dead. You need things that attract families.”