CLEVELAND, Ohio — If you’re looking for peace and tranquility on the Cleveland lakefront, don’t try walking on the concrete path that connects Gordon Park at East 72nd Street to the fishing area at the East 55th Street Marina.
The 12-foot-wide path squeezes for a third of a mile between roaring traffic on the Interstate-90 Memorial Shoreway and sharp rocks piled at the water’s edge to hold back Lake Erie.
It’s one of the hardest, meanest and noisiest places on the lakefront, and it leaves people unnerved.
“What if somebody veers off the highway?‘' Cleveland resident Colletra Ridgeway said during a recent walk on the path with her 16-year-old son, Zhatez, and 10-year-old daughter, Zyaire. “They’re going to hit us. It’s really close.”
Apart from giving pedestrians the jitters, the I-90 curve at East 72nd Street puts the highway at risk during heavy weather. Twenty-foot waves battered the Shoreway there during Superstorm Sandy in 2012, forcing the Ohio Department of Transportation to close all eight lanes.
Now, after more than a century in which Cleveland has hardened its shoreline with concrete, steel and boulders to defend against storms, the city and four other agencies are looking at a softer, greener and more natural solution to climate change and rising lake levels.
A map shows the study area for the CHEERS project, examining the potential for reshaping the Cleveland shoreline to make it greener, more resilient and more beautiful.Cleveland Metroparks
Cleveland Metroparks, which has leased and managed the 455 acres of city-owned lakefront reservations in Cleveland since 2013, is leading the Cleveland Harbor Eastern Embayment Resilience Study, known by the happy-sounding acronym, CHEERS.
The study will look at how sediment dredged from the Cuyahoga River could be used to create additional parkland at the narrow spot where I-90 curves close to the water, plus a manmade marsh or estuary to dampen waves and provide habitat for birds and fish.
Metroparks will kick off the public portion of the yearlong study with an online meeting on its Zoom platform on June 30 starting at 6 p.m. Information will be available on its website at Clevelandmetroparks.com/cheers. The Philadelphia-based planning and landscape architecture firm of WRT will lead the design team.
Among other things, planners want to hear about how the lakefront could be made more accessible to residents of the nearby St. Clair Superior, Hough and Glenville neighborhoods, largely cut off from the water by I-90.
Planners expect they’ll hear suggestions that I-90 should be moved farther south from the lake at East 72nd Street to reunite the two sections of Gordon Park severed by the highway in the early 1940s.
That idea surfaced in a series of 2017 proposals for reusing the site of the former coal-fired FirstEnergy power plant that occupied 54 acres south of the Shoreway and west of East 72nd Street. But an ODOT spokesman said that moving the highway is not part of the current study.
Funded by a $125,000 grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, the CHEERS project is a collaboration among Metroparks, the City of Cleveland, ODOT, the Ohio Department of Natural Resources and the Port of Cleveland.
The five agencies contributed $25,200 apiece in matching funds, bringing the project budget to $251,000.
Opening up the lakefront
CHEERS represents a follow-up to the city’s 2004 Waterfront District Plan, completed under former Cleveland mayor Jane Campbell, which suggested using landfill to create a series of islands with new parks and marinas to buffer and beautify a battered shoreline that faces north into prevailing winds.
CHEERS also follows recent proposals designed to open up portions of the Lake Erie shoreline long dominated by industry or held by private owners. Euclid, for example, is building an innovative lakefront trail on easements obtained from private property owners in exchange for publicly funded measures to prevent erosion.
Trees are growing on crumbling revetments along the old water intake inlets built for the former FirstEnergy power plant next to Lake Erie south of the I-90 Shoreway at East 72nd Street.Steven Litt, Cleveland.com
Inspired by Euclid, Cuyahoga County Executive Armond Budish said last fall he’d like to see a 30-mile lakefront trail created across the county from Euclid in the east to Bay Village in the west. The Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency upped the ante in March by awarding $250,000 for a lakefront trail study encompassing Cuyahoga, Lake and Lorain counties.
The Ohio Department of Natural Resources opposes using landfill to create more developable land in Lake Erie. But the agency is open to using dredged sediment to create a more natural shoreline along the East Shoreway, said Scudder Mackey, chief of the agency’s Office of Coastal Management.
“We’re not going to pop a Kmart or a Walmart out there,‘' he said. “This is a case where we’re looking for some sort of environmental restoration or benefit.‘'
A federal judge ruled last year against a proposal by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to dump contaminated sediment dredged from the bottom of the river into Lake Erie.
Recycling sediment
But the Port of Cleveland has developed techniques to separate polluted layers of clay from clean layers of sand and gravel that can be used safely for landfill, said Will Friedman, president and CEO of the Cleveland Cuyahoga Port Authority.
Using such material to create an artificial wetland or estuary would be a “thoughtful or intentional use, rather than just dumping it in the lake,‘' Friedman said.
The Port runs its recycling operation at the eastern end of Burke Lakefront Airport at two “confined disposal” facilities — flat areas flanked with rocky dikes where dredged sediment can be deposited. Recycling the sediment preserves space in the facilities so expensive new ones don’t have to be built in the lake, Friedman said.
Mackey said that clean fill could be held back from the lakefront shipping channel by an underwater sill, a ridge of boulders.
“The idea is to try to design this thing so it performs like a natural wetland,‘' he said.
Such thinking parallels efforts by other coastal cities in the U.S. and around the world that are looking for green alternatives to armoring shorelines with costly, heavily engineered barriers.
ODOT sees a benefit in adding a new kind of shoreline protection for I-90, which travels over two bridges just west of East 72nd Street. The bridges surmount two inlets leading to the old intake channel for cooling water used by the former FirstEnergy plant, demolished in 2017.
ODOT would like to see the inlets filled so the bridges could be removed, but Sean McDermott, chief planning and design officer for Metroparks, would like to explore saving at least one inlet for use by paddle craft.
The FirstEnergy site, which the company had wanted to sell to a developer, is now owned by Energy Harbor, the company that emerged from FirstEnergy’s bankruptcy earlier this year. Energy Harbor did not return calls about the property earlier this week.
The CHEERS planners said they hope their project leads to small-scale improvements within a few years. Full implementation could take five to 15 years. The pace depends on availability of funding from state, federal and local sources, they said.
Russ Wilson of Euclid, who was out for a stroll on the lakefront last week with his wife, Vigermina Wilson, said anything would be an improvement over the narrow lakefront path next to I-90.
Asked about the idea of thickening up the shoreline with more park space, Russ was enthusiastic.
“It seems like an excellent idea,” he said.
Russ Wilson of Euclid took stroll on the lakefront path between Lake Erie and I-90 recently with his wife, Vigermina Wilson. Wilson said anything would be an improvement over the noisy connection squeezed close to the highway.Steven Litt, Cleveland.com
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