Downtown Toledo place to sit outside and drink

Well there are definitely a few with "outside" options. Outside being in quotes, because the areas are more open air than actually outside.
Table Forty 4: Great place with an upscale feel, they have a patio with big garage door windows that they open up in the warm season. My experience there has always been an A for the food, C- for the service. Just don't plan on it being a quick bite to eat and you'll be fine. (if you're a Rueben fan, I highly recommend it)
Pizzapapalis: I haven't been there, but I've heard great things about the deep dish they serve up. They also do the garage door patio thing, but theirs is on two floors.
Bronze Boar: This one is just a bar, no food, but they do have a patio out back. You used to be able to buy cigars there, but I think they've discontinued that practice.
Tony Packo's: I don't think this one needs explaining.
Jed's: They have a patio area under a tent sorta thing.
Those are all the ones I can think of in the ballpark area.

And if you include Uptown (mostly Adams Street) there is the back patio of Wesleys, the patio at Manhattan's, Manos and the Attic have a large enclosed patio and also a second floor balcony, and the Ottawa Tavern has a small patio out front.

Wesleys, Attic on Adams, Ottawa Tavern

haha

Bronze Boar has a good beer selection and decent patio. Woodchucks is alright, big patio, but with no real view. Tony Packo's has a sliver of a patio, but had a great band when I was there about a month ago. The Attic is comparable to the Bronze Boar in beer selection, crowd, and patio. Oliver House as well, though their patio is more like a quad, I have heard their food's good though.

The ahi tuna appetizer and blt sandwich at Table Forty 4 is great. And as peviously mentioned, just go with some time on your hands and enjoy yourself. I prefer the patio as opposed to the dreadful din created by the tin ceiling, but thats probably just me.

Most of the bars downtown and uptown adams street have outside options.

Pizzapapalis is excellent.

Whenever I travel, I search out pizza joints. On my visit to Chicago, I tried a few of their "best" deep-dish pizza joints. They were garbage compared to pizzapapalusojftvjktcbjggvsxkkj, or whatever it is called.

Pizzapsphvfdxjijfbfvhhdbjhdfkhf, or whatever it is called, also had good sized mugs of beer.

Check it out.

This is irrelevant to this discussion, but you should still go check out San Marcos when you get time.

I would love to see them open up one next to 5th/3rd or the Huntington Center. That would definitely add some excitement. That food is incredible.

i just had somebody tell me they
dye their meat?????

They could put asbestos on it for all I care. :)

BusterBluth, San Marcos is EASY walking distance from the park AND arena! :)
in most big cities, if you want to walk anywhere you'll walk double or triple the distance of what toledo residents have to deal with. We have it spoiled and are WAY too addicted to cars here in NW ohio.

Museum, Ballpark, Arena, riverfront, tons of restaurants, the docks... all within walking distance if we're talking a larger city.

And Ryan.. as for they dye issue you've heard about... I seriously doubt it. They go through SO MUCH meat, of which they source out of their own grocery for the restaurant... there is no rhyme or reason for dyeing meat that is literally flying out the door. I'd question your sources.

I have to respectfully disagree with you. While it's ~.5 mile from the Mud Hens field to San Marcos, and that is the edge of what is considered an easy walk, it's still not an attractive walk. It is ~.8 mile from the Huntington Center, that is not an easy walk. An excellent walkable neihborhood has a .5 mile diameter, any more than that and it becomes exponentially more unattractive to walk. Plus the incredible amounts of surface parking and vacancies don't make it fun. Toledo needs some serious coordination to tackle that program (which takes years and years, but I still don't see a block-by-block effort).

I completely agree that Toledoans do not walk as much as they should, but an easy walk is not necessarily an inviting walk. Summit Street in that neighborhood and the traffic from the bridge, plus it's just plain dirty. Meh, I'd pass and most people do. That said, I live outside Toledo and I still drive there it's so damn good. :)

I would have liked to have seen it in a walkable distance for the downtown lunch crews. On St. Clair St., or Summit near the SeaGate Center would have been nice.

program = problem*

While it might be a "easy" walk, it's is not a pretty one. Where are the mom/pop shops to stop at along the way? Where are the street vendors? Just because you can walk it, doesn't mean it's a tourist destination.

When I talk to all my friends who come in from out of town, it just doesn't look "safe" or "pretty", so why bother.

Toledo (like EVERY city) will never be wall to wall beautiful from location/destination to the next. Its just the way it is. I think upsos point was that it was a stones throw from downtown, never did he try to make it sound like Disneyland.

I understand we are not picturesque like Portland or San Diego but make the "walk" part of walking fun.

You have to remember not all tourist are urbanites who have accepted or are are used to walking past dilapidated buildings on a daily basis.

My point was that if you want someone to walk from point A to B in your city at least make it "fun" to do. Not everyone thinks it's fun to "just to be in the city".

I don't think you'll see more pedestrian development until we see more pedestrians. It's a "which came first, the chicken or the egg?" situation. I would think... if more people took a gamble and started strolling around the warehouse district & downtown, that you'd see more businesses willing to take the risk.

Look at S. St. Clair... enough people have been walking around during the day, art walks in the evening etc that in addition to Home Slice Pizza & Downtown Latte, we now have Swig Gifts and a new art supply store opening next week. All on the same block no less! :)

I think the city would do wonders for downtown participation if they installed some more (or any) bike racks. A lot of my friends come downtown on their bikes, and zip around from gallery to bar to restaurant with no effort. I think you'd see more of that with some bike racks and ... i know i may sound crazy but bike lanes too!

Either way, I get what you're saying dbw8906. I just don't think it's an easy fix to make things "fun"
it takes effort on both sides. :)

S. St. Clair has been a moderate success, great work by those involved. It takes both sides of the marketplace to make that sort of thing work.

As urbanites we get stuck in that kind of mentality, where as a lot of the people who tour the mid-west are 50 plus type of people. Young people goto Miami, Cali, NYC during the summer, not Toledo. Walking from open lot, to vacant lot, to broken down mfg site in NOT attractive to residents from BFE Indiana/Rich Suburb of wherever and come here for 5/3 Field or COSI. While we may think of our own urban blight as battle scares or beautiful in a survivors guilt mentality, ALOT of America just doesn't have that view.

Snow Birds or Mom and Dad with a camper full of kids is probley not making that walk. Whatever the reason is, we have to cure that. We must secure the tourist population we get now before we try to become hip and trendy. I know their is alot of energy of youth and new ideas here in Toledo, but so many times as a city do we get tripped up finding "the new hotness" and chasing tomorrow's dollar that we fail at the simple. If the simple can't be supported we can not go further.

Do you have any ideas for how to make the area more pedestrian friendly? I'd love to know what people think would help! There are a lot of people downtown looking for ways to make things more user friendly, and i'm sure some of them read this message board! :)

Building continuity and people make a place fun to be in and walk around. It's pretty simple.

Toledo needs a block-by-block approach, to realize where the success is happening (and it is, contrary to some naysayers) and decide how to facilitate growth around that area specifically.

I think a goal would be to have S St. Clair St. filled up with buildings completely from Lafayette to Monroe. Now of course people will laugh at the idea of actually building a few three-story buildings in Toledo when there are a thousand sitting empty around town.

I would not be in favor of bike lanes down Monroe, but instead some legitimate, large bike lanes up Madison St. (connecting downtown to Collingwood and the OWE), Washington St., Summit St. and 11th St. Everywhere else (except Erie and Michigan) can have a "share the road" mentality like we have here in Columbus, simply because the traffic is never intense. Then we need a sizable amount of bike racks around downtown. Then you'd have a downtown that is indeed easily traveled in minutes. Commuting for half of the year would be fun via bike.

Buster hit it on the head as the block-by-block approach. City wide incentives or vast changes are really not possible. The people of neighborhoods who want to do something with their communities should be the ones rewarded with growth. Outside entrepreneurship can and must be targeted block by block. What works downtown will work on on the East side. If not we end up with the flower planting and fire hydrant painting of the Carty area.

We are Americana as a city and we must embrace that, we are as mid-west as anywhere else. Why do we not have a "First Fridays" program like so many other cities. We have wonderful waterfront park property, are there not weekly events going on? I think we have to give up this world class nightlight and entertainment district and really be who are are, Middle Class America. The Toledo Farmer's market is almost always full and small budget "Americana" stuff does really well Toledo. We could get many more of our Monroe/Wood county neighbors if we stopped trying to be trendy with our events. I love the arts movement but I'm guessing we could still do really well with a downtown 4H type event, more of those people around then you think. Stop aiming at the hipster crowd and embrace who we are, support the markets we have until they are healthy enough to take more risky chances. We are blue collar, beer drinking, sports loving, busted knuckles kind of town, when we will stop trying to pin our success on 25 dollar a plate menu items with sides of pate.

Milwaukee figured it out, they are cheese and beer till the cows come home. They stopped trying to be sushi and bean sprouts and decided to love who they really are. So what if the rest of the world thinks they are backwoods hicks, every summer the city reeks of sharp cheddar and hops but it's full! They are not trying to be hip and trendy, they know what sells there and ride off into the sunset with it.

Less budget busting measures trying to be "Wold Class" and just be sucessful at what we are, Middle America.

We do have a Third Thursdays event: http://acgt.org/index.php?option=com_morfeoshow&task=view&gallery=37&Itemid=92

The WH district needs some kind of "anchor" attraction that encourages people to walk over from 5/3 Field and the Huntington Center. Erie Street Market is that attraction, however, it is sadly underused. I'm thinking maybe a large restaurant/bar setting up shop with a patio overlooking Swan Creek on the south side of the creek. That could really tie in the WH district to the Oliver House/San Marcos.

I think a large part of the reason that people don't wander down to the Erie Street Market is two fold: A, there's very little there on a regular basis. B, you walk past two blocks of nothing on the way there. I've long made the argument that sprawling surface lots kill business. I compare it to a shopping mall: You're walking through a mall, and you come to a wing. All the way down that wing is a store, but every other shop along the way in that wing is closed. Are you going to walk all the way down there to check it out, or move onto the next wing? It's the same thing with downtown businesses. If you have to walk across two parking lots to get to a shop, you probably aren't going to do it. However, if you have rows of shops/restaurants/etc along the way, I'm betting your chances of walking down there just skyrocketed.

^^Bingo.

Take a map of Toledo's downtown circa 1950, put it up on your wall, and then pull out your shotgun and shoot it. hahah Everywhere that spread shot hit is a surface parking lot today. They are everywhere, and they destroy downtowns.

The problem is that we have to meet in the middle. We need building continuity, but we need parking too. We want a walkable/biking downtown, but we want to remain easily accessible for the money from the suburbs and visitors.

Toledo needs from 3-4 story development in strategic spots in the Warehouse District (herein referred to as WHD lol) that start to eliminate the tiny surface parking lots and put in buildings--BRICK buildings of 3-5 stories. But the place needs anchors, no question. Stuff that people till flock to, and stuff to keep people interested.

Our attractions are indeed too spread out. If the Oliver House could magically be moved from it's almost-secret location to a cattywampus location from the Spaghetti Warehouse, it would be incredible. Obviously that cannot happen.

I guess Toledo needs to realize that a true neighborhood is greater than the sum of all of its parts. If we magically moved every building together downtown, and uptown was just the remaining surface parking lots, the place would be hopping! But it isn't, everything seems to be isolated in a sea of surface parking and abandoned ugly buildings. That's why we must prioritize a few blocks, invest and facilitate, and get the snowball rolling. We already have the stadiums, and they will get people visiting. We want to give them a reason to stay in the WHD for another couple of hours.

My wish would be to see more biking and pedestrian lanes. As it is right now, it's flat-out dangerous to ride a bike downtown (unless it's at 8pm on a non-game night). I was walking to the game last week and saw some poor guy on a bike nearly get killed by a car that was not paying ANY attention to the WALK/DON'T WALK sign. Plus, my husband walks to work every day on St. Clair street and has told me many times about his near misses with drivers not paying attention.

I think this is just one more reason people don't walk more downtown. It's another Catch 22 - more pedestrians = more drivers alert to this kind of thing.

I love the arts movement but I'm guessing we could still do really well with a downtown 4H type event, more of those people around then you think. Stop aiming at the hipster crowd and embrace who we are, support the markets we have until they are healthy enough to take more risky chances. We are blue collar, beer drinking, sports loving, busted knuckles kind of town, when we will stop trying to pin our success on 25 dollar a plate menu items with sides of pate.

i think the "problem" here is that it's the arts institutions that are stepping up to provide entertainment for the public. while obviously that's not actually a problem, i wonder what we can / could do to get other sorts of organizations involved to plan things to do downtown?

per your example... 4h? why not?! are they thinking about toledo, and if not, what would draw them?

i love the idea of LOTS of DIFFERENT things going on downtown, not just arts related stuff. For whatever reason, it just seems like it's the arts groups that are really motivated to bring things to downtown Toledo.

as a related side note, today I had two women come into the restaurant who were on the road from Minneapolis to Boston. They found us on Yelp/google, and jumped off the highway for a quick bite to eat. After lunch they asked me if there was anything they should check out before they hit the road so I took them outside and pointed to the ballpark. Then I suggested they hit the Tony Packo's giftshop and check out the river. They didn't bat an eyelash on walking a few blocks and skipped on off to the stadium.

I think a lot of the reason that the arts movement seems to coincide with the downtown scene is that they're often the same people. In other words, a large portion of the people who go for the downtown lifestyle are the arts people. You don't get a lot of 4H people looking for lofts and big warehouse spaces.

And also, part of the blue collar vs $25 dollar a plate issue is the cost of having a place in downtown. It can be a pretty pricey endeavor when you decide to renovate a building, which leads to higher rents, which leads to higher prices to the customer. This isn't the case all around obviously, but some of the buildings worth saving do require quite a bit of $$ to be pumped into them. The Berdan Building, for example, will probably require a good amount of work to get it up and running, so it's going to require some high end housing to make it work out right on the balance sheet. Again, definitely not the case for everything, but the older buildings don't usually come cheap.

upso - back to your question about what could be done to improve the neighborhood - somebody mentioned the number of buildings that came down since 1950 - and that is the key to reviving any urban neighborhood. density, in-fill, diversity in use, density in socio-economics.

involvement in politics is the main thing to acheive this.

our county commissions tore down about 12 buildings for the arena and closed off a street; it made walking from the CBD to the warehouse district nearly impossible and very un-inviting; it created another superblock and all of those facades that are dark most of the time

our county commissioners tore down 16 buildings (most of which were occupied at the time, maybe not their best use but still paying taxes and safe from the elements) for the baseball stadium and closed off superior street right at the location of the historic farmers market; it created another superblock and hurt the walkability due to being closed during all but a few day games and 70 night games.

our county commissioners tore down another 12 or so buildings and among our most historic for the convention center shutting off and destroying the most beautiful street existing in toledo at that time - perfect urban neighborhood stock. this move refocused the city away from the water front and along with one way roads ensured that downtown and its urban neighborhoods would fail as traffic engineered made getting cars out of downtown more important than the pedestrians trying to walk around.

upso - look just up the street from grumpy's - the apartments that are in the old department warehouse at lafayette and huron - they tore down the original schindler elevator office building and original foundry to put up fenced in carport - perhaps the least pedestrian/urban friendly thing done downtown. look at the "townhouses" at swann creek between summit and st clair - fenced in with no doorways/stoops on the actual street but rather internal courtyards.

the pols and their financial contributors will always cry "anti-development" if you try to implement standards - they should be focused on property preservation and protecting property values.

good downtowns don't happen on accident - you have standards - whether you are talking robert moses in nyc, or l'enfants' plan for washington (placed on top of jefferson's grid and designation of public spaces). but you do get a bad downtown in the name of free enterprise and political manipulation. pay a little extra out front and reap huge dividends in the long run.

it all depends on residential and corruption free politics and police departments. make streets frequent with mixed uses. read jane jacobs... it is all there.

our county commissioners

I think the arenas have been great improvements to downtown. I also think the SeaGate Center has had pretty week success. So in my opinion, the city was two for three on that front. The Swan Creek townhouses are indeed a joke too.

I don't have a problem with "superblocks" per se. To put in the stadiums, buildings had to be torn down--what did you expect? They wanted them to be the catalysts for growth, and you can’t say that more people aren’t coming downtown.

However I do see your point. I used to frequent the Chinese restaurant downtown that was torn down, I was a bit sad to see it go. However, there is no shortage of places to put any business operation in downtown Toledo. We have plenty of room should they choose to continue, no?

It is, however, fair to say that the three have essentially created a wall between the WHD and the...central business district? But they do both have different feels. The WHD is brick-based mid-level buildings that makes you feel like you're in a warmer environment. The other section of Toledo makes you feel like your in Chicago--an empty Chicago, but Chicago nonetheless. Going forward, embracing the two separately is a good idea.

So Toledoans are afraid to walk past a couple "empty" blocks from destination to destination Downtown? Give me a break. No wonder! http://www.toledoonthemove.com/news/story.aspx?id=637299

Anyone that claims Manhattan, S.F., Miami, etc. doesn't have a few "boring" blocks during their walk either never stepped foot off their tour bus or has only visited the cesspool of Times Square. This incessant demand by Americans to be entertained at all times makes me think the only thing we can do to lure the suburbs into Downtown is to put a speaker inside rocks on every corner playing Lady Gaga--or whatever it is the masses are listening to these days--ala Disney World.

that's the point i was trying to previously make... in most major cities you actually have to walk a bit to see stuff! :)

i've been to nyc, la, chicago & miami many many times, and other than "boardwalk" or "times square" type scenarios it always took several blocks of walking to find what i was looking for. GRANTED there was always WAY more eyecandy along the way than you'd find here! :) and I think that's part of the problem in what toledo is lacking!

Oh please, that is complete horsecrap--not to be a dick. Manhattan, San Fransisco, Los Angeles, Miami, etc are do not have seas of surface parking!

I'm not saying people should walk, I'm all for it. I want to create a downtown that doesn't require a car, again. But you are both completely off here.

large institutional buildings are edge buildings - you do not plop them down in the middle of urban neighborhoods or CBD - you put them along a river or highway or railway lines - you most certainly do not put them adjacent to each other. we have 5 superblocks all together blocking people from the river and the warehous district.

we picked locations that took down the maximum number of prime buildings - the stadium could have gone right at the bottom of clayton on the other side of swann creek or just below the oliver house on the river front and shared the parking with ocf. the arena could have gone between fort industry and the old trustcorp world headquarter, been part of our skyline and help to enliven promenade park, the convention center should have been out near CUT or north of summit or even out in uptown. These moves would have left the best victorian buildings we had and prime urban fabric remaining and allowed growth to spread out to them.

especially the arena and ballpark were going to be successful almost no matter where they were placed - it is a matter of what they did to the neighborhoods around them. because of the locations chosen, they shut down many businesses, removed historic stock, and created a barrier between the CBD and the WHD. placed at edges (swann creek, an already open space uptown, along the river) they would have fostered development between them and acted as an anchor for several areas - instead, unfortunately but predictably, they drag everything but themselves down. supporting a few bars, by the way, is not the definition of success.

there are parts of major cities that do not work - and that is where they violate good planning as well. these often have to do with residential housing, often low-income housing, built in the tower form - its is a difficult model except for those who can afford doormen, security, and other amentities. and there are seedy people who due to economics get squeezed into the same areas - in toledo, this seediness is spread out rather than concentrated.

well, based on that, what can we do to make the most of what we have? :)

I hate to say it, but I think we need to have some big retail or (gag) restaurant chain open up within the CBD. The big anchor type of business will help to spawn more locally-owned offshoots. This was tried at whatever COSI is now and failed, but I don't think the execution of that idea was well thought out. Who knows? Maybe the timing with the Marina District could be right to develop the downtown area.

It drives me crazy to see Levis Commons and Fallen Timbers pop up and emulate an urban environment, when they could have spent less money and done those concepts in an ACTUAL urban environment in downtown, using existing buildings. What kills me the most is the stream they have running through Fallen Timbers, and knowing that we have Swan Creek being 100% neglected in downtown.

what can we do?

step 1 (of many) - reconnect streets and strengthen the grid. take madison through to summit street. make erie and superior two way all the way through - this will be very easy considering the current lack of traffic and this will make them less "throughways" and more in service to the businesses that line them - thereby calming traffic and making them more pedestrian friendly.

i would take the AWT and I-75 exit ramp and align it with michigan (michigan two way to at least monroe street) AND ontario with the ability to turn onto lafayette as well - fix the intersection at erie and lafayette so traffic can move in all directions - lafayette back to two way. this would make the freeway begin outside the warehouse district as opposed to speeding traffic at erie and washington and michigan and monroe.

imagine what dispersing traffic among these many streets and slowing them down earlier would do for the warehouse district. the new willis day warehouse, the sunflower building, the seyfang bakery would all be brought safely back into the neighborhood, not to mention the berdan bldg and others on washington.

make the part of promenade park between summit and water street available for a major project - the arena would have been ideal but... new development there would help reconnect the city with the waterfront. despite its location, don't allow summit to become a short cut through the city - use lots of traffic calming (islands, full fledge center lane trees where able, bike path).

great ideas!

Toledo absolutely needs to turn their one-way streets back to two-way streets. That should have been done a decade ago. The move to make streets that go through downtown mere escape routes disgusts me. What the hell were people thinking in the 1960's?

Toledo absolutely needs to turn their one-way streets back to two-way streets. That should have been done a decade ago. The move to make streets that go through downtown mere escape routes disgusts me. What the hell were people thinking in the 1960's?