Wade Lagoon at the Cleveland Museum of Art is an iconic and beloved landmark in Cleveland's University Circle neighborhood.
It also happens to be a man-made body of water along Doan Brook, downstream of the Shaker Lakes. (The lagoon used to be connected to the brook but no longer is; part of a nearly mile-long underground culverted section of brook runs past the lagoon.)
That humans, generally speaking, are more drawn to lakes than to brooks seems like an obvious fact of human nature, and one that's important to consider when deciding on plans for the future of the Shaker Lakes. I've been frustrated, then, by how some people continue to be in denial about this fact. (Example: in response to statements about the health benefits of access to blue space, or of how proximity to water features makes homes more desirable, I've seen lake removal advocates state that there will still be water where the lakes were, as if this is some amazingly clever point.) Unfortunately, the people responsible for the decision making thus far seem to be included among those who are in denial.
I realized that Wade Lagoon provides a great opportunity to test the hypothesis that people would like reconstructed streams in the Shaker Parklands just as much as they like the lakes!
Little more than a tenth of a mile from the lagoon there is, in fact, a segment of Doan Brook on which the Northeast Ohio Sewer District did a stream restoration project about seven years ago.
This section of brook has many features in common with what the reconstructed brook would look like in the Shaker Parklands under the NEORSD plan.
There's a lot of new vegetation on the banks. There are also paved paths running along the brook - although some distance away, so there's little direct access to the brook for visitors.
There's a sign with some interesting history about what used to be at this location. This is similar to what's proposed as "mitigation" for the planned destruction of historical features in the Shaker Parklands. In the brook restoration by the art museum, the historical feature was already long gone, so there's nothing to complain about with this sign.
I'm going to say something that might be surprising. I like this stream restoration by the art museum! The Sewer District deserves kudos for it!
I don't reflexively dislike everything the Sewer District does. If they do something good, I'll give them credit for it.
The stream restoration by the art museum is good because it makes the space much nicer than it was before the project happened.
Imagine, though, how people would react if there was a proposal to get rid of Wade Lagoon and replace it with a continuation of the stream restoration.
The brook there is in an underground culvert. It's basically a storm sewer. Replacing the man-made water feature of Wade Lagoon with a restoration of the brook would almost certainly provide some "ecological uplift," a term the Sewer District likes to use to describe their Horseshoe plans. It would also be an absolutely terrible idea and no one would ever propose doing such a thing.
My bike commute takes me past both Wade Lagoon and the nearby restored brook. In what I'm sure is a surprise to absolutely no one, the lagoon consistently has far more people walking, jogging, and sitting next to it than the restored brook does. The difference is so dramatic that I don't think it's a good use of time and energy to bother quantifying it, but someone could if they wanted.
This is about the closest thing we have to a controlled experiment. A historic man-made water feature and a Sewer District stream restoration project, both located on Doan Brook, right next to each other. Both have walking paths and benches next to them. Both have spots where people can stand and look down at the water. Everyone who visits the area has equal ability to spend time by one, the other, or both. Where do most people choose to spend time?
By the lagoon. Of course. Because humans, generally speaking, are more drawn to bodies of water than to streams.
The idea that people, in general, would like the parks just as much as they do now is utterly preposterous.
I'm sure some are thinking, "But the new parks will have other new amenities to make them nicer!"
Yes. The proposed new amenities are an attempt to make up for the fact that replacing the lakes with brook sections would make the parks much less attractive, so this actually bolsters the argument that removing the lakes is a negative to the community.
It's also debatable whether the new amenities would even improve the space. Here's a side-by-side comparison of a location in the park by Horseshoe Lake as it currently looks and a rendering of the same location in the proposed new park.
I'm sure not everyone agrees with me, but I'm also sure that a lot of people do. It's a big problem that the Sewer District never tried to determine whether people would prefer adding artificial amenities or keeping the space more natural. Instead, they asked people to pick amenities from a list, priming people to tell them to add amenities. Sewer District representatives admitted to me that this was a flaw in the public engagement process when I discussed it with them, but they say it's too late to change the plans.
It's ironic that, thanks to the addition of a bunch of pavement and other artificial amenities, it looks like the "natural state" restoration will feel less like nature than the currently existing park. In their own public engagement survey, the Sewer District found that the top two concerns the public had about the project were (1) "losing Horseshoe Lake" and (2) "the project not being natural enough." And then they went and designed a new park that both doesn't have a lake and feels less natural than the current park.
And yes, the Sewer District also proposes constructing some small wetland complexes in addition to constructing new stream channels. Wetlands are great! But there are already wetlands in the park. There already were wetlands in the park before the lake was drained and dam breached. Now, without the lake, there are more wetlands in the park today than there would be after the restoration project.
Anyway, the bottom line is that there's simply no reason to believe the claim that parks with restored brook sections will have the same value to the community as our historic, beautiful lakes. The question isn't whether they'll have less value, it's how much less value they'll have. And depending on the answer to that question, the long-term consequences could be catastrophic for the cities that share the parks.
It feels like the people who planned this project were working from a prompt that said, "Imagine that these lakes and dams are located in the middle of nowhere, so their value to human beings can be ignored. What would be the best solution to the problem of the out-of-compliance dams?"
(Even in that imagined scenario, the Sewer District's plan likely still wouldn't make sense. A beaver-driven restoration, using either beaver reintroduction, human-built beaver dam analogs, or a combination of the two, would be cheaper and more natural and might even do a better job of achieving the stormwater management goals. But that's, perhaps, a topic for another post.)
These lakes are located in city parks. City parks exist, primarily, for the benefit of the humans who live in the cities. City parks can and should make space for nature, and the Shaker Parklands already do that better than almost any other city parks I've seen. But if you redesign an important city park in a way that makes it much less attractive to human beings, you have failed in your assignment.
No one would suggest "restoring" Central Park (which contains several man-made water features) to its "natural state." The Shaker Parklands are to the cities around them as Central Park is to Manhattan.
Sure, you can run a big PR campaign (funded by our utility fees) and convince a segment of the population that they'll like the parks more with streams instead of lakes. But 10, 20, 30 years from now, people aren't going to be seeing that PR campaign. They'll either see historic parks with beautiful lakes in them, which will be a huge draw for people to both spend time in the parks and to live in the cities that share the parks, or they'll see parks with reconstructed stream channels, which will be a vastly smaller draw.
(How do I know that a PR campaign was an important influence on lake removal advocates' opinions? I didn't see anyone saying the Sewer District needed to remove the Green Lake dam when that project was happening. That was another out-of-compliance dam on Doan Brook that needed to be either restored or removed. The Sewer District restored it and proudly touted the project as both helping their stormwater management goals and preserving a treasured community asset. All the arguments about dams being bad for the environment apply just as much to that dam as to the Shaker dams. The arguments for lake preservation being important to the community, on the other hand, are much weaker for Green Lake, which isn't in a public park and is instead in the backyards of mansion dwellers. I don't think Green Lake should have been removed, to be clear, but I'm just saying...)
So in the end, in their quest to help the environment by getting rid of man-made lakes, the Sewer District could create a much less attractive parklands that will encourage people to drive to farther away lakes instead of walking to lakes in their neighborhood, and that will make our walkable inner ring suburbs less attractive places to live, encouraging people to live in more car dependent cities. Increasing society's car dependence is one of the worst things you can do for both the environment and public health, and getting rid of the lakes is a step in the wrong direction on that issue.
It's not at all clear that the Sewer District's plan for the lakes is best for the environment on the whole. But it's absolutely clear that if we get rid of the lakes, the lives of all the human beings who benefit so much from having access to that precious blue space will be made poorer. The cities, too, will be made poorer, due to decreased tax revenues (see a previous post I made for a data-driven analysis on that issue).
These are things that we should consider when making plans for the future of our parks!
Or we could bury our heads in the sand and pretend that people will like man-made streams just as much as they like beautiful, historic lakes. I sure hope we don't do that.
First off, Horseshoe Lake WAS a manmade lake. This is masterful job by the county engineer to eliminate water features. He waited until it became a costly crisis, asked the state to step in and he stepped back. 2 Questions. How many people were fired as a result of not monitoring the dam properly? How much will the County Engineer reduce his budget because of reduced expense of monitoring? He made it an emotional money problem by waiting until it reached crisis levels.
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