Getting there is half the sales pitch.
When a trade association or a corporate meeting planner picks a host city, "how far is the convention floor from the airport" is a real line item — and in most major markets, the honest answer is "not close, and not simple." Cleveland can answer that question differently.
Cleveland Hopkins Airport, the IX Center, and the new stadium district already sit about a mile apart. Nobody built this on purpose yet — it's just how the geography fell. The opportunity is deciding to connect it deliberately, instead of leaving it as three separate buildings that happen to be near each other.
The airport is inside the footprint — and rail already reaches it
Most convention cities bus attendees in from a distant regional airport. Here, Hopkins sits inside the same one-mile radius as the venue, and RTA's Red Line already runs straight into the terminal — it has since 1968, one of the first airport rail links in the country.
The IX Center is already the "everything else" building
Trade shows, sponsor space, overflow exhibits — most mega-events need a second building beyond the main venue, and most cities don't have one sitting empty and one mile away. Cleveland does.
Two venues running at once fills more rooms, not fewer
A trade show at the IX Center and an event at the stadium, happening the same week, don't split one hotel market between them — they fill it twice. That's the math that turns a modest hotel inventory into a genuinely competitive one.
Nobody has to go out in the snow
A rail-connected corridor means fans, exhibitors, and press move between the airport, the expo hall, and the stadium without ever standing outside in a Cleveland February. That single feature does more to offset a cold-weather bid than almost anything else on the checklist.
This isn't a metaphor. It's a mile.
Here's the actual layout — the airport sits almost dead center, with the IX Center just south and the new stadium just east, all inside the same one-mile radius and the same freeway interchange.
Call it the Orange & Brown Line.
This isn't a proposal to invent new infrastructure from a blank page. RTA's Red Line has run straight into Hopkins Airport since 1968 — Cleveland was the first city in North America with direct rail service to its own airport. The smarter alignment doesn't branch off the airport itself. It branches off Brookpark Station — the stop just before the airport, already RTA's second-busiest station system-wide — and runs south: to the stadium first, then the IX Center, then on toward Berea, where the Browns' own CrossCountry Mortgage Campus training facility sits. One line, the team's own colors, connecting the team's own two homes.
Brookpark Station is already there — and already RTA's next priority
It's the Red Line's second-busiest station after Tower City, sits right on the Cleveland–Brook Park line, and RTA has publicly said it wants to develop the site around transit-oriented development. This isn't an obscure stop — it's a hub RTA is already trying to build around.
The stadium is barely a spur at all
Brookpark Station sits roughly six-tenths of a mile from the new stadium site — almost a straight line south. That's about as short as a rail extension gets.
The same line reaches the IX Center — and the team's own training facility
From the stadium, continuing roughly another mile and three-quarters southwest reaches the IX Center. Keep going, and the line lands in Berea — home to the Browns' CrossCountry Mortgage Campus, currently in the middle of its own 16-acre expansion. This wouldn't just move fans and conventioneers. It's a line the team's own players and staff would use.
This is what "no weather problem" actually means
Not a covered walkway. Not a shuttle idling in the snow. A single rail spur off an existing, high-ridership station — so a visitor can ride, not walk, between the airport, the game, and the expo floor.
Worth being precise about the ask: RTA doesn't currently have a line by this name, and this alignment is a citizen's proposal, not an engineered route. But the direction holds up — a single southbound branch off Brookpark reaches the stadium, the IX Center, and the team's own facility without the line needing to run two different ways at once. And a rail line named for the team's own colors is the kind of detail that makes a funding pitch memorable instead of generic.
What Javits and McCormick Place don't have
The two biggest convention centers in the country — the Javits Center in New York and McCormick Place in Chicago — both share the same structural weakness: getting from the airport to the convention floor is its own ordeal.
Javits Center, New York
A 25–40 minute drive from JFK or LaGuardia through some of the worst traffic in the country, with no direct rail connection from either airport to the convention floor.
McCormick Place, Chicago
About 25 minutes from O'Hare in good traffic, with attendees typically relying on shuttles, rideshare, or a rail connection that still requires a transfer.
Cleveland, Ohio
A one-mile radius covering the airport, the expo hall, and the stadium. No convention city its size can say that. Cleveland doesn't need to out-build Chicago or New York — it needs to out-connect them.
And it costs a fraction of the price
Exhibit space, hotel rooms, catering, staff — all of it runs dramatically cheaper in Cleveland than in New York, Chicago, or Las Vegas. Cleveland won't out-weather Miami or Vegas in February. It doesn't need to. Between the airport, the expo hall, and the stadium district, there's real tourist-and-entertainment value to sell for the days before and after a show — at a fraction of what exhibitors pay everywhere else.
A force multiplier, not a competitor.
It would be easy to read this as a pitch to compete with the new stadium for visitors. It's the opposite. The stadium's own economics depend on exactly this kind of neighbor.
Worth being direct about: the current arrangement is explicitly temporary. The stated plan is for shows to migrate into the dome itself by 2030, once HSG's three-year IX Center lease ends. That's not a reason to wait — it's the opposite. It means the case for locking in a coordinated corridor, rather than letting the IX Center's role quietly end in a few years, has to be made now, while both buildings are still active and the connection still matters to more than one landlord.
The same math also clears the bar for a Super Bowl
Everything above works for ordinary trade shows and conventions on its own. It happens to also solve a much bigger, much more specific problem: Cleveland cannot currently bid to host a Super Bowl, and the reason is fixable.
Hotel rooms equal to 35% of stadium capacity
Within an hour's drive of the stadium — call it roughly 25,000 rooms for a 70,000-seat venue. That's the single biggest reason Cleveland can't bid today, and it's the same room-count math the convention case already relies on.
A separate building for the "NFL Experience"
Fan zones, sponsor pavilions, and interactive exhibits that run the entire week leading up to the game — the same kind of overflow space any major trade show needs. The IX Center's 2.2 million square feet already fits the bill.
A media center for thousands of credentialed press
Dedicated space with power, connectivity, and proximity to both the stadium and team hotels — not a converted ballroom twenty minutes downtown.
Worth saying plainly: none of this requires chasing a Super Bowl to be worthwhile. It's just proof of how far the same infrastructure stretches.
One more thing worth naming, even though it isn't the point: a visitor flying in for an ordinary Browns game gets the same benefit as a convention-goer. Land at Hopkins, ride the Red Line to the district, ride it to the game, fly home — no rental car. It's not the argument. It's just what happens automatically once the rail extension gets built.
Rosemont, Illinois did this with less.
Never heard of Rosemont? Most people haven't — and that's exactly the point. It's a tiny village outside Chicago that quietly built one of the busiest visitor economies in the Midwest by doing one thing: putting everything a visitor needs within walking distance of O'Hare Airport.
It has no NFL team. It built its own convention center from nothing. And it still turned a town smaller than a Browns home crowd into a machine that pulls in tens of thousands of visitors a day, every day, all year.
Where the comparison strains: Rosemont is a village of roughly 4,200 people with an unusually concentrated, single-minded government — that's part of how it moved so decisively for so long. Cleveland and Brook Park are real cities with real residents, real politics, and real competing priorities. Nobody should expect Rosemont-speed decision-making here. The proof isn't that Cleveland can replicate Rosemont's governance — it's that the underlying economics (airport plus expo hall plus anchor venue) work even without it, if anyone chooses to coordinate at all.
Three asks. No fabricated numbers.
This isn't a request for a blank check — it's a request for coordination. Rosemont had one village government making every decision with one goal in mind. This corridor spans two cities and a handful of organizations that have never been asked to plan together on purpose.
One table, one plan
Brook Park, Cleveland, the county, the Browns, the transit authority, and the airport — sitting down together, once, with a shared map instead of three separate ones.
Study the Orange & Brown Line now
A rail branch off Brookpark Station — reaching the stadium first, then the IX Center, then Berea — needs to be in the traffic and infrastructure studies already underway, alongside the stadium station RTA is already designing. Before the roads are finalized and it's too late to add it.
Decide the IX Center's future in daylight
Manufacturing tenant, event space, or both — whatever the city chooses, it should be a public, deliberate decision, not something that happens by default while nobody's watching.