Shaker Lakes Blog

In the 1960s, residents of Shaker Heights and Cleveland Heights famously stood up to fight against and ultimately stop a plan that would have destroyed the Shaker Lakes and surrounding parklands. Today, the leadership and some other prominent voices in the same communities are content to go along with, or in some cases enthusiastic proponents of, plans to remove one or even both of our historic lakes. How did this happen? It's an interesting question, and I think it has an interesting answer. If you look at official descriptions of the lake removal plan and at things that members of the public who support the plan have said, a prominent theme consistently emerges. From the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District (NEORSD) page describing the project , in an update on July 26, 2022: "In other words, this will help the team restore Doan Brook to its original, natural state  [emphasis mine]." In an update on August 25, 2022: "As the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District ...

Alternate title: Save Doan Brook from the "Doan Brook Restoration" 3/2/26 edit: After reading this post, be sure to see the followup from after I talked to some people from the Sewer District, which answered some of my questions but raised others: shakerlakes.blogspot.com/2026/02/a-response-from-sewer-district-i-dont.html 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...

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 ...