Port Authority and partners ready to stabilize Irishtown bend this year, but can’t

CLEVELAND, Ohio — Irishtown Bend, the unstable hillside in Ohio City on Cleveland’s West Side that has threatened for decades to slide into the Cuyahoga River, received a haircut last week.

Contractors with chainsaws were out on the slope cutting down trees in one of the first visible steps of a $45 million to $50 million project to stabilize the hillside undertaken by the Cleveland-Cuyahoga County Port Authority and other public and nonprofit agencies.

The stabilization project, which is needed to safeguard navigation on the river, is all but ready to go ahead, along with a related project to build a park on top of the reconfigured hillside that would include links to regional trails, plus sweeping views of the city’s skyline.

Yet despite having the money needed to move ahead as soon as this summer, the Irishtown effort is hanging in the balance pending the outcome of several legal actions in Cuyahoga County’s Probate and Common Pleas courts.

At issue is the Port’s effort to gain control of a small but critically important property at the top of the hillside on the southeast corner of West 25th Street and Detroit Avenue, near the west end of the Detroit Superior Bridge. All other parcels on the 23-acre hillside are under the control of the Port or partnering agencies.

The legal battle over the holdout property threatens to throw the stabilization project off schedule, risking a landslide that could happen at any time, said Will Friedman, president and CEO of the Port.

“It’s absolutely a concern,’’ Friedman said Friday in an interview.

The last piece

The 0.4-acre property in question includes a long-vacant building topped with a billboard. Real estate developer and restaurateur Bobby George and his father, developer Tony George, bought it in 2018 for $248,200. They call the building the Royal Castle Building, after a hamburger restaurant once housed there.

The Port initiated the taking of the property through eminent domain last year and has offered $360,000 for it.

The Georges have rejected the offer and have sued the Port, alleging that the agency falsely claimed it needs to remove the building in order to complete the slope stabilization.

The Port, meanwhile, has rejected the idea of installing a mid-slope retaining wall to safeguard the Georges’ property because, Friedman said, it would cost upwards of $6 million, far more than the property is worth.

The Plain Dealer and cleveland.com reached out to Leo Spellacy, Jr., the lawyer representing the Georges.

Apart from the legal issue, virtually all other facets of the project are falling into place.

On Thursday, the Port’s board of trustees voted to accept a total of $24.4 million in local, state, and federal funds needed to sign up a contractor and start the stabilization work later this year, along with the construction of a new bulkhead along the river’s edge.

The remainder of the funding needed for the project is available and could be unleashed through additional votes by the Port’s board, Friedman said.

The stabilization would remove some 250,000 cubic yards of unstable soil, he said. That work could be completed in two years, making it then possible to create the 23-acre park atop the reconfigured slope.

The park, for its part, could cost an additional $40 million to $45 million, according to the latest estimates, said Tom McNair, executive director of the nonprofit Ohio City Inc.

The community development corporation is ready to help start private fundraising for the project. And it is prepared later this year to remove the only other remaining building atop the unstable part of the slope.

That building formerly housed a shelter for homeless women operated by FRONT Steps, which has moved. The building now hosts a homeless shelter operated by the YWCA, under a lease that ends April 15.

Ohio City Inc., along with the nonprofit LAND Studio, is working on refinements to the design of the future Irishtown Bend park that will be presented later this year to the city’s planning commission.

Roadblock

But for the issue over the Georges’ property, the stabilization of the Irishtown hillside could begin as soon as June or July. Yet there’s no way to start the project without it, Friedman said.

The agency’s consulting engineers have told it that the removal of unstable soil from the hillside cannot begin from the southern portion of the property, he said. Instead, the work needs to begin at the northwest corner, because it’s the high point of the hillside.

Contractors can’t start removing the loose soil from lower sections further south because the higher ground could collapse on top of them. The soil must be removed from the highest areas first, Friedman said.

“They need to start from the top and move down to remove the material; they don’t want to put workers downslope and then have a slide come down from above them,” Friedman said.

The most recent studies show that a landslide could destabilize as much as 600,000 cubic yards of earth, enough to fill 50,000 dump trucks in a line extending 190 miles, he said.

The stabilization could be accomplished by removing less than half of the unstable soil because the installation of a new bulkhead at the river’s edge would firm up the slope.

Engineers predict that if a landslide were to occur, it would start at the “toe” of the hillside by the river’s edge and claw its way uphill to the rim of an escarpment that crests a few hundred feet east of West 25th Street.

Friedman said the forces tugging the slope downhill are essentially in balance with those holding it up. A slide could be triggered at any time by an earthquake, heavy rains, or a combination of the two.

Ore boats serving the upriver steel mill operated by Cleveland Cliffs could also start a slide if their bow thrusters scoured away too much of the riverside, or if one struck a vintage coal crib embedded along the river’s edge, Friedman said.

“There’s really essentially nothing holding it back,’’ Friedman said of the hillside. “It’s a teeter-totter at the balance point.’’

For now, however, the fate of Irishtown Bend, and the project to stabilize it, is in the hands of the courts, he said.

“We can’t do anything more at this point,’’ he said. “We are doing absolutely everything we can in our power to start this project as soon as possible.”