The Ohio and Erie Canal Reservation of the Cleveland Metropolitan Park System follows the Canal north from the boundary of the CVNRA at Rockside Road in Valley View, about five miles into the industrial valley. The Reservation is bounded on north, east, and west by factories, and overhead by massive power lines that bring electricity into the industrial valley from the Perry Nuclear Plant sixty miles away. The north end of the Reservation is the Settlers' Bluff Picnic Area on East 49th Street, a completely unexpected patch of untracked woodland in the midst of the City. This looks west down the Bluff into the maples and oaks covered with wild grapevines:
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The Reservation was officially opened the weekend of August 27, 1999. Among the opening festivities was a concert by Alex Bevan, whose thirty years' service writing and performing music about Northern Ohio's rivers, lake, and people have raised his classification from "minstrel" to "troubadour". Alex performed mostly unplugged against the backdrop of First Energy's power station at the Morgan's Hollow stage. An unidentified skinny little boy in the foreground attempted to steal the show with a display of his soccer prowess. Alex's Sunday afternoon concert capped the weekend's festivities, after which performers and spectators moved up the street to the Slavic Village Harvest Festival for kielbasa, politicians, and polkas. |
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An example of one of the lesser-known engineering devices necessary to the operation of the Canal is maintained in working order near East 71st Street - the aqueduct which carries the Canal over Mill Creek. Aqueducts were constructed along the length of the Canal, wherever the Canal crossed a natural watercourse, but it often surprises the first-time Canal visitor to see the waterway carried on a bridge over a stream. Metroparks provides parking and a picnic area across from the Mill Creek Aqueduct, next to Cuyahoga Heights's municipal Louis Bacci Park.
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The Reservation extends from East 49th Street along Canal Road to the Cuyahoga Valley National Recreation Area at Rockside Road, past restaurants and taverns that have fed and watered the transportation and manufacturing industries for a century and a half. This looks north along the Canal toward the Interstate 480 Cuyahoga Valley Bridge, from the Floodwater Cafe.
