Shaker Lakes Blog

Alternate title: Save Doan Brook from the "Doan Brook Restoration" In December 2022, I attended a public open house at the Shaker Heights library about the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District's plan for a new park at the site of Horseshoe Lake. I was very disappointed about the news that the beautiful, historic lake would be going away, but I was also relieved by the since broken promise that the Sewer District would preserve Lower Shaker Lake, the other historic lake in the Shaker Parklands. I had also heard a lot about how "brook restoration" was "more natural," and I didn't know at the time that this was misleading, so I thought maybe it made sense to return one of the two Shaker Lakes to a more natural state, as long as we kept the other as a treasured community asset. I went to the open house hoping to try to make the best of an unfortunate situation, hoping that I could contribute my voice to help keep the park as a really nice place where...

Introduction: "That's stupid" This past summer I went to a Cleveland Guardians baseball game with some college friends. We had all been students at Case Western Reserve University 20-odd years ago; some, like me, still live in the area, others now live elsewhere. While chatting with one of my old friends, he mentioned memories of going jogging around Horseshoe Lake (located a little more than a mile from where I now live in Cleveland Heights). Horseshoe Lake, October 2016 "It's not a lake anymore," I told him. He was surprised, and I explained how the (very old) dam that created the lake had had problems, and it had been decided to remove the dam and restore the brook through where the lake had sat. (Note: I didn't know at the time that the "restore the brook" concept was misleading. We'll get to that later. Anyway...) "That's stupid," he said. I think this moment was instructive when we consider the ongoing debate ...