When Bethany Friedlander joined husband Brad Friedlander at his home in Pepper Pike, the move was such a change for the urban advocate who had lived near Shaker Square for eight years that friends gave her a tape of the sound of a rapid transit train to help her adapt to suburban quiet.

Mrs. Friedlander continues to support urban life as chief operating officer of Graystone Properties, which owns four major properties in the St. Clair-Superior neighborhood near downtown Cleveland. The best known is Tyler Village, the redevelopment of the former W.S. Tyler complex.

Mrs. Friedlander supervises a staff of 13 that operates properties housing 185 tenants. Her major task is overseeing Tyler's transformation to office and charter-school use from its traditional industrial use.

“When I first toured the property with Tony Asher (Graystone's owner),” the Case Western Reserve University art history graduate said, she saw the complex as a “medieval village” and wanted to become a part of it.

The name stuck.

The story reflects what Jamie Baker, executive director of the nonprofit St. Clair-Superior Development Corp., said is Mrs. Friedlander's ability to “spark a vision and get others to buy into it.”

“Without her and Tony Asher, I don't think this thing would have gotten rolling,” said Ken Fleming, a longtime Northeast Ohio industrial broker who works at Tyler Village. “She's one of the most creative breaths of fresh air in the downtown real estate market.”

Her road to Tyler Village was circuitous. Trying the path of her Cleveland lawyer-parents, she made it halfway through Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles before deciding she did not want a legal career. She decided to focus on something directly improving conditions in the city.

Mrs. Friedlander got a teaching certification, but, unable to land a teaching job, she worked for a contractor in welfare-to-work training until she broke into real estate with a job at Forest City Enterprises Inc. She then dove directly into rebuilding city neighborhoods as chief operating officer of Rysar Properties of Cleveland, a specialist in building homes in the city.

Mrs. Friedlander subsequently moved to St. Clair-Superior Development Corp. as a real estate development specialist. She changed course for a nonprofit because she fell in love with the neighborhood.

“It's Slovak, Slovenian, African-American, truly multicultural,” she said. “It's one of the few neighborhoods in the city that has maintained all the services it takes to function as a neighborhood.” That job took her to Tyler Village.

Surprisingly, she does not talk about undertaking another real estate project after Tyler Village is finished, but instead might try something else.

“There's only one Tyler Village,” she said.

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