Cleveland River Tours

The Cuyahoga River caught fire at least thirteen times before 1969, and the last blaze helped push the Clean Water Act through Congress three years later. That river is now the working spine of the city's visitor waterfront. The river's shape explains the city. Cuyahoga is an Iroquoian word usually rendered as "crooked water," and the lower five miles bend so tightly that they force a specific kind of engineering. Cleveland answered with a concentration of movable bridges found almost nowhere else: vertical-lift spans, jackknife bascules, and the Center Street swing bridge, which pivots on a central pier rather than rising. Freighters up to 600 feet long still navigate the turns with the help of tugs, and the choreography of a bridge lift remains the defining moment of most cleveland river tours. Steel mills line the upper reaches. The ArcelorMittal works, descended from Otis Steel and later LTV, still throws heat and light against the valley walls. What the river carried, the city built. Rockefeller's first refinery stood on these banks in 1863; the fortune it produced funded the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Cleveland Orchestra. The Terminal Tower, completed in 1928 at 216 metres, was the tallest building outside New York for a quarter-century and still anchors the skyline seen from the water. Beyond it stand the Key Tower, the lakefront stadium, and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, I. M. Pei's glass pyramid finished in 1995. Together they form the Cleveland landmarks that narrated commentary maps for passengers as the vessel turns. The Flats, the low ground where river meets lake, tells the more recent story. Warehouses and ore docks gave way to nightclubs in the 1980s, then to a long vacancy, then to the current mixed redevelopment on the east bank. Kayakers now share the channel with lake freighters under a formal right-of-way agreement. Peregrine falcons nest on the Terminal Tower and hunt above the shipping lane. The river that burned is now monitored for water quality by the Ohio EPA and hosts an annual return of steelhead trout. Sightseeing on this water is not new. Excursion steamers ran from Cleveland's docks in the nineteenth century, and the Goodtime name has carried passengers here across three successive vessels since the 1950s. A cleveland river tours tour today follows the same route those steamers used: out past the breakwall, back into the crooked water, under the bridges. The valley beyond the last bend still works for a living.