At the River's Mouth

During our week of spring-like weather in early November I visited a couple more parks in the Cleveland area.  One of them, Wendy Park, is a place that I had never visited before.

 

Wendy Park is located at the mouth of the Cuyahoga River on Whiskey Island (which is actually a peninsula).  The "island" was one of the early areas of Cleveland to be settled, and it got its name from a distillery that was built here in the 1830s.  The public park was opened in 2005, and in 2014 it was purchased by the Cleveland Metroparks.

The park offers excellent views of downtown Cleveland which is located on the opposite side of the river.

One of the lift bridges which cross the river

The park is a good place for watching boats ply the river, both pleasure craft and commercial traffic.

Unfortunately while I was there I didn't see any of the big freighters maneuver its way up the crooked river.

Looking out across Lake Erie at the river's mouth...

I zoom in on one of the lighthouses which stand at the ends of the break walls at the entrance to the shipping channel.

What you see to the right is not a boat on the lake, but the Cleveland Water Crib which is one of the major intake sources of the city's water supply.

At the end of a long pier is the Historic Coast Guard Station which is now on the National Register of Historic Places.

It was built in 1940 and is an example of Art Deco "Streamline Moderne" style.  In 1976 the Coast Guard moved their facilities to new location east of here.  The building was used for a while by the Cleveland Division of Water as a water quality laboratory, and it was used as a nightclub for a very brief period.  But for most of the intervening years it has been unoccupied and neglected.  Today the Cleveland Metroparks is slowing restoring the building.

The sixty foot high tower was used by the Coast Guard as an observation tower.

Wendy Park is an interesting little corner of Cleveland that I had never seen before.