Revered former Cleveland planning director Hunter Morrison is dead at age 78
by Steven Litt, Ideastream, Dec 16, 2025
Hunter Morrison, Cleveland’s highly respected city planning director from 1980 to 2000, died early Tuesday in his sleep at his home in Silver Spring, Maryland, according to members of his family. He was 78.
Morrison was successfully managing a heart condition, his daughter, Catherine Campbell-Morrison said Tuesday, speaking from her home in Washington, D.C. No cause of death is known, she said. The family will announce arrangements when possible, she said.
Serving under former mayors George Voinovich and later, Michael White, Morrison insisted on design excellence from architects and developers and pioneered early efforts to connect downtown to Lake Erie with the construction of North Coast Harbor.
Morrison oversaw planning for the nationally acclaimed Gateway sports complex, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Key Tower, the East Wing of the Cleveland Public Library’s Main Branch, the revival of Playhouse Square and other pivotal projects of the 1980s and ‘90s.
He left his position in Cleveland when his then-wife, Jane Campbell, a Cuyahoga County Commissioner, launched her successful campaign to become the city’s first and only female mayor in 2001.
Morrison went on to hold influential planning jobs in Youngstown and to lead the 12-county Northeast Ohio Sustainable Communities Consortium, which in 2014 completed Vibrant NEO 2040, the most comprehensive regional plan in a half century.
“He was definitely a legend,’’ Grace Gallucci, the director of the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency, said Tuesday in a text.
“His passion for what Cleveland could be, and the physical structure of Cleveland, drove his life,’’ Campbell said, speaking from her home in Cleveland.
Morrison and Campbell divorced in 2008.
“He was imaginative, he was determined we were going to connect to the lakefront, that we were going to have places for people to live at all different economic levels, and that it was going to be the city on the hill, the city on the lake,’’ Campbell said.
During his tenure at Cleveland City Hall, Morrison insisted that architects and developers should bring their A-game to the city.
“That was the message we sent out to everybody,” he told The Plain Dealer in 2020. “You’re building Cleveland. Don’t pimp us, don’t rip us off, and don’t give us junk.”
Cuyahoga County Executive Chris Ronayne, who succeeded Morrison as the city’s planning director, said Tuesday that Morrison “never stopped caring about Cleveland.’’
In addition to Campbell and Campbell-Morrison, survivors include Barbara Orton of Silver Spring, Morrison’s longtime partner; daughter Jessica Merrill (Tyler) and their three children, all of Little Rock, Arkansas; brothers Edward Morrison, (Bei) of Simpsonville, South Carolina; and Thompson Morrison, (Mary Beth) of Anderson Island, Washington; and a brother-in-law, Nat Balch, of New Hampshire.
Morrison grew up in Shaker Heights and Pepper Pike before studying city planning and political science at Yale University and earning a master’s degree in urban planning at Harvard University.
He joined the Peace Corps and worked in Nairobi, Kenya and in eastern Nigeria as a town planner in the early 1970s.
After returning to Cleveland in the late 1970s he led Homes for Hough, a subsidiary of the Hough Area Development Corp.
His work in building the first new housing in the East Side neighborhood torn by a riot in 1966 caught the attention of then-mayor Voinovich, who appointed the 32-year-old Morrison as the city’s planning director.
Early in his tenure, Morrison found out that the architecture firm designing the BP Sohio building, now 200 Public Square, had positioned the building so that when viewed from the north on the nearby downtown Mall, it would have been off the centerline axis of one of Cleveland’s major outdoor spaces — a potentially embarrassing mistake on skyline scale.
Morrison convinced Voinovich to have the city buy the property needed to shift the construction site for the tower to the east so that it would align with the central axis of the Mall. Had he not done so, it would have been a huge embarrassment to Cleveland, Ronayne said Tuesday.
“He was a special guy, a big thinker who cared about the details,’’ Ronayne said. “He knew history, and he respected it.’’
