About the Lakefront Nature Preserve
An 88-acre nature preserve built on a former dredge-spoil containment cell — "Dike 14" — that became, across four decades of benign neglect, one of the most important migratory bird stopover points on the southern Lake Erie shoreline. More than 280 bird species have been recorded here, along with deer, coyote, fox, mink, and an unusually complete early-succession plant community.
Its existence is its own argument. The site was engineered in the 1970s as industrial waste storage. It was meant to be sealed, paved, and forgotten. Instead, it was colonized by lake winds and migrating birds and slowly became wilderness. When the preserve was formally established in 2012, the question was not what to build but what to leave alone.
Origin
Dike 14
The Cuyahoga River carries an enormous sediment load to Lake Erie. For the Port of Cleveland's shipping channels to remain navigable, hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of river-bottom silt must be dredged each year and disposed of somewhere. For most of the twentieth century, dredge spoils were dumped directly into open water — a practice that became legally prohibited after the Clean Water Act amendments of 1972.
The US Army Corps of Engineers responded by constructing a series of diked "confined disposal facilities" (CDFs) in the Cleveland harbor. Dike 14, completed in 1979, was an 88-acre rectangular cell at the eastern end of the harbor, enclosed by stone breakwater and filled with sediment from the Cuyahoga dredging operations. The cell was filled to capacity by 1999 and formally closed.
Succession
Twenty-Four Years of Disuse
What made Dike 14 remarkable was what was not done to it. Between closure in 1999 and designation as a nature preserve in 2012, the site was simply left alone. Cottonwood, willow, and black locust seeded themselves into the dredge spoil. Grasses and sedges moved in. Warblers stopped to rest there during spring and fall migrations; raptors hunted over the grassland; coyotes and deer swam across the industrial harbor and established resident populations.
The site became, without design or intention, one of the richest examples of ecological succession on an artificial substrate in the Great Lakes region. By the mid-2000s, local birding groups had documented over 280 species there. Advocacy by the Cleveland Audubon Society and other groups led to the 2012 formal dedication of the site as the Cleveland Lakefront Nature Preserve, jointly managed by the Port of Cleveland and the Cleveland Metroparks.
Today
Access and Stewardship
Public access is open daily, with a small gravel parking lot off East 55th Street and a network of packed-earth trails totaling roughly two miles. The trails are deliberately informal — there is no boardwalk, no signage beyond the entrance kiosk — and visitors are asked to stay on marked paths to limit disturbance to nesting birds. Dogs and bicycles are prohibited.
The preserve is a favored site for spring and fall birding migration counts, and an occasional partner for Cleveland State University and Case Western Reserve researchers studying ecological succession in post-industrial landscapes. Its continued quiet — the absence of development pressure in a city that has learned, painfully, the value of its lakefront — remains its most important feature.
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