Wednesday, January 14, 2015

Dike 14: Cleveland Lakefront Nature Preserve

Well, this one gets interesting. 
 

What began with a search for a thought-to-be-only-rumored State Park lead to the uncovering of much, much more, including some very bizarre history.

The Cleveland Lakefront Nature Preserve, previously named Dike 14, is a peninsula of land residing at the north end of Martin Luther King Junior Drive, in Cleveland, Ohio. The piece of land has quite an extensive history which I will not try to elaborate on, but that I highly suggest you read about here.

In a brief summary, the property (which neighbors an ex-missle-launching site from the Cold War era) is entirely man-made and rests upon decades of trash, river-dredge, thousands of scrapped cars, and even two purposely-sunken barges. The last disposal on the premises occurred in 1999 and since then, nature has completely taken over.

Think of it as: dilapidated city park, turned landfill, turned dike, turned nature preserve.

My friend Tani and I ending up stumbling across an old pier or dock of some sort, and of course my lens was enchanted with it's abandoned, urban feel, but the entire entity of the park is absolutely gorgeous. I am definitely looking forward to returning, and hopefully catching some more daylight.








- Jason Unoriginal

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