CLEVELAND, Ohio - Like bold pioneers, volunteers under the leadership of the Rotary Club of Cleveland continue to nurture a stretch of abandoned railroad right-of-way that parallels the RTA's Red Line rapid tracks.
Their goal is creation of the Red Line Greenway, an ambitious linear park like New York City's 1.4-mile High Line Park.
The one here will be twice that length. Both projects have a common parent, as it were, because they are on former New York Central right of way.
The Rotary Club's Leonard Stover said in an earlier in an earlier story that 2019 is the soonest construction could begin.
The first phase will run from the Cuyahoga Viaduct, also known as the RTA Viaduct, to West 41st Street, Stover said. Next comes a stretch from West 41st to West 53rd, and the final leg will extend east from the viaduct across the river, ending in the vicinity of the Carl Stokes Federal Courthouse.
It grows out of an effort the Rotarians undertook in the 1970s called Rapid Recovery, in which volunteers did just what they did on Saturday: clean, rake, mow and collect garbage.
The effort received some criticism last summer from people who saw it as a cosmetic one-time effort in the run-up to the Republican National Convention.
But Stover said the work is done about 17 times a year, and is actually decades old. It started with an effort to tend 500 feet of trackside, which has since grown to two miles.
Originally, there were four sets of parallel track, but two were removed for the portion that will become parkland.
Stover said the track yielded a hundred tons of steel whose recycling brought in more than $50,000 -- money that went for a tractor and other equipment to help maintain the land.
But to suggest that the volunteers are only doing clean-up grossly understates their work.
The area is peppered with cut stone that was abandoned after of years of serving as curbstones, garden walls and other uses. The volunteers have stacked the pieces into a neatly executed retaining wall that is about four feet high and dozens of feet in length running along Franklin before the street intersects with Columbus Road.
There is a much larger stone retaining wall that climbs a steep hill above the volunteers' wall, but Stover said he has no idea who built it.
Saturday's efforts were at different points east and west of the West 25th Street rapid station.
For more information, call the Rotary Club at 216-556-8637 or go to the Red Line Greenway Facebook Page.