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 works on restoring Doan Brook to its natural beauty, it wants to hear your vision about what the park should look like after restoration takes place."
From the Shaker Heights government's page on the project: "Over the next several years, the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District... will undertake two major projects in our community: (1) remove the dam at the former Horseshoe Lake and restore the Doan Brook to its natural state..."
From the Cleveland Heights government's FAQ page for the project: "NEORSD’s restoration of the Doan Brook to its natural state will result in a new and more natural greenspace for the community."
From an August 31, 2022 article in the Heights-Observer that echoes the Sewer District's and cities' descriptions of the project: "This project will remove Horseshoe Lake Dam... restore Doan Brook to its natural state, and the free-flowing stream corridors will be planted with trees and native vegetation."
From the Shaker Historical Society's page about Horseshoe Lake: "The Shaker Historical Society supports the recommendations... to restore the natural, free-flowing stream channels of the North and Middle Branches of Doan Brook... While it is true we will lose a lake, we will gain an opportunity to return Doan Brook to the pre-colonial path it followed for over 14,000 years."
From an August 24, 2025 (after NEORSD's recommendation had shifted from removing one lake to removing both lakes) opinion piece in the Heights-Observer: "Despite the pleasure I’ve gained from the Shaker Lakes, I’ve longed since childhood to see how the landscape appeared before the first Europeans arrived."
I've seen people who advocate for the lakes' preservation be chastised for allegedly being against nature and against science. It's bad to prefer a "man-made lake" to a "natural," "free-flowing brook," we're told.
There's an appealing simplicity to this idea that restoring the natural state of something is good, so we should restore the natural state. Everyone likes nature. Especially in progressive communities like Cleveland Heights and Shaker Heights, saying that a plan restores the natural state is bound to win some support for that plan.
What if the reality is more complex? What if "man-made lakes" aren't inherently good or bad, a "free-flowing brook" isn't natural, and restoration of the "natural state" isn't possible?
That's what I've argued. What might someone from the Sewer District say about this argument?
After my previous post on this blog started to circulate, someone at the Sewer District contacted me hoping to discuss it, to hear more about my concerns and provide additional context. As a result, I recently met with two members of the NEORSD team working on the Horseshoe project at the Horseshoe Lake dam and we had a good conversation.
They were very nice and gave thoughtful responses to my concerns. I could tell from talking to them that they do genuinely care about nature and care about Doan Brook. There are a lot of aspects of the planned project that, because of the lack of transparency and very poor communication by the higher ups at the Sewer District, look like wanton destruction of nature when the plans are examined, and I was able to see that thought had gone into those plans, and it wasn't wanton destruction of nature.
That's not to say that the plans don't require destroying a lot of nature, because they do.
The two Sewer District representatives were clearly not excited about having to cut down so many trees. They felt bad about the trees, but saw cutting down the trees as the least bad option to achieve the project's goals.
And it is, as they acknowledged to me, a lot of mature native trees that are slated for removal. The 1,070+ total trees to be removed are nearly a third of all the trees in the park. According to an NEORSD presentation to the Cleveland Heights Planning Commission, close to half those trees are invasive (this can't be verified with publicly available information, but I'd guess it's roughly accurate), but the rest - a whopping 500+ (at minimum) - are perfectly good trees that have the misfortune of being "in the way" of the plans.
They admitted that communication about the project hadn't been forthcoming about the extent of tree removal. They also acknowledged some of my other criticisms as very valid, especially when I pointed out that when the park design open house asked attendees to pick, from a list, amenities we'd like added to the park, this had "primed" us to tell them to add amenities. They never asked us whether we would prefer to add artificial amenities or keep the park in a more natural state.
There were a lot of interesting points in the nearly hour long conversation that we had while looking out over the snow-covered park, and I really appreciated that they took the time to meet and talk with me. As I thought back on things later, though, I realized that one point stood out as by far the most interesting.
I expressed my dislike for how the project was being presented as a restoration of the brook's natural state, when to me it would be more accurate to say that it was going from one artificial state to a different artificial state. "I don't think it's possible to restore the natural state with a construction project," I said.
The reply from one of the NEORSD reps? "I don't think it's possible to restore the natural state, period."
"I don't think it's possible to restore the natural state, period." A remarkable statement, isn't it, when you consider that the central theme of how this plan has been presented to the public is that it's a restoration of the brook's natural state.
Two of the people working on the project, in a candid conversation, agreed with me that the project wasn't really restoring the natural state, and expressed sympathy with my frustration at it being presented that way, and said that maybe it would have been better if it hadn't been.
But thinking about it, I think no, it couldn't have been presented differently. It had to be presented as a restoration of the natural state.
How can people in two nature-loving cities be convinced to go along with removing their most treasured community assets, two historic lakes in historic nature parks? They can be convinced to do that if they're convinced that by doing so, they're restoring nature.
This is a picture of a pond, about 15 acres in area (in between the sizes of Horseshoe and Lower Lakes), near Merrimac, Massachusetts, formed by beavers that dammed a brook in the forest:
As I've written previously, before the fur trade, something that was more recent when the Shaker dams were built than the dams being built is to now, beavers were very abundant in Ohio. Anywhere that beavers live, they build dams. It's just what they do. It's quite likely that at some point in the past, when Doan Brook was in its "original, natural state," "before the first Europeans arrived" in this region, somewhere in the vicinity of where the Shaker Lakes currently are, a sight like this could have been seen.
I'm absolutely not saying that the Shaker Lakes are the same as a natural brook with beaver ponds. But a constructed, damless, free-flowing brook is no more similar.
In addition to the beaver issue, which is my favorite and which more people should know about because beavers are so freaking cool, there are other concrete ways that the plans for the "brook restoration" are unequivocally not a "restoration of the natural state." In fact, one of the Sewer District reps, unprompted, offered up one such example, one I had already been thinking about myself.
This is a picture of a section of Doan Brook in between the two lakes, in what was described in a 2013 Doan Brook Watershed Partnership report as "the largest area of relatively undisturbed upland forest in the upper watershed":
This brook section is also not in the "original, natural state." That's due to many factors, ranging from a lack of beavers to the fact that all this land is in the middle of a city with buildings and roads and cars. But this is the closest we can currently get to a modern natural state of the brook where Horseshoe Lake was.
Here's a rendering from the NEORSD 90% design public presentation:
Notice anything?
Well, in addition to how sickening I find it that currently the location in this rendering is a beautiful wooded area, and a wide, paved path will be built where trees currently are, there's a big difference between the planned "brook restoration" and the natural brook. In the rendering, the brook has a bunch of large boulders in it and on its banks. The natural brook doesn't.
As the NEORSD rep explained to me, the boulders will be put there to stabilize the stream channels and reduce erosion.
In a more natural brook setting, tree roots in the banks would help stabilize the channels; humans can plant trees but they won't immediately be as effective as a mature forest. Interestingly, in a more natural brook setting, beavers would also reduce erosion; their dams accomplish this by slowing the flow of water!
Anyway, the boulders in the plan would be put there for a reason. The plan doesn't just arbitrarily put a bunch of boulders in the brook. Nevertheless, the boulders are a glaring deviation from the natural state of the brook. And most of the boulders, if placed there, will still be there after all of us are gone. They'll be an enduring, wholly unnatural feature of the brook, entirely inconsistent with what the brook would look like in its "natural beauty," introduced in what is being marketed as a "restoration of the brook to its natural state."
When I really think about it, I think there's something actually offensive to me about a clearly unnatural brook design being described in this way. The Shaker Lakes aren't natural lakes, but no one is trying to claim that the original, natural state of the Doan Brook included earthenware dams.
Let's review.
NEORSD, in publicity for the project: "In other words, this will help the team restore Doan Brook to its original, natural state."
An NEORSD employee who's actually working on the project: "I don't think it's possible to restore the natural state."
Imagine how differently the conversations around these plans might have gone if everyone knew this from the start. If rather than being told, inaccurately, that the plan would "restore the original, natural state," we had instead been told, accurately, that the proposal would change the brook from one artificial state to a different artificial state with the goal of improving the health of the watershed.
Oh, and one of those artificial states has existed and served our communities pretty well for longer than the cities of Cleveland Heights and Shaker Heights have existed, whereas the other would be a destructive, radical remaking of a federally recognized historic landscape.
I imagine that if people didn't have this concept of ✨restoring the natural state✨ to fixate on, a lot more people might have asked the very reasonable question, "Are there other things that could be done to improve the health of the watershed while preserving our historic lakes in some form?"
It's easy to imagine that there would have been a much stronger push to explore all reasonable alternatives, including plans made by someone other than the Sewer District, instead of just going ahead with dam removal.
And look, I'm not attacking anyone for buying into the "restoration of the natural state" story. I bought into it myself back in 2022. It's a very believable story if you don't look into it too closely. There were people back then saying similar things to what I'm saying now, and I should have paid attention to them, but I didn't. I didn't start to examine the situation more carefully until after the 2025 announcement that Lower Lake was also on the chopping block.
If decisions about a project are made in an environment in which everyone has been led to believe a massive falsehood about the fundamental nature of the project, are those decisions valid?
It was an effective marketing campaign to say that this project was restoring the brook to its original, natural state. I'm hoping that now, more people will start to see that that was never true, in large part because restoring the brook to its natural state is something that simply cannot be accomplished by human actions. Leading me to say, once more, that we shouldn't fixate on the impossible goal of trying to restore a natural state and should instead focus on what's best for the people who live in the community.
The lakes are the most important reason the area around them is a nice and desirable place to live. Removing them would make the area a less nice and less desirable place to live. Period.
Unfortunately, the story about restoring the natural state held sway over the public until after the Horseshoe plans were complete and funding was approved. But the cutting of trees and bulldozing of land hasn't started yet. It's not too late.
Sign the petition if you haven't: www.change.org/p/stop-the-destruction-save-the-lakes
About the author: I (Jeff McManus) have spent countless hours of my
life around the lakes and all other parts of Doan Brook going back to my
days as a CWRU cross country runner starting in 2001. I have a PhD in
Biology from CWRU and work in research at my alma mater. I've lived in
Cleveland Heights since 2012 and the brook and lakes are a large part of
what attracted me to living here.
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